Last night I finally confessed that whenever I hear announcements for Northern Line trains terminating at Morden, I imagine that it’s actually saying, “This is a Northern Line Service Northbound. This train terminates at Moorrrrdoorrrrrr.”

“Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a “brain itch” that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.” (BBC)
Luckily for us, unluckily for advertisers, there’s “no standard for creating an earworm – people could react differently to different tunes.”

I wish I was articulate enough to pick apart arguments for RFID. There seems to have been a change in society, where old ethics don’t apply because new technologies exist. People go ahead with dodgy things because they can.
This BBC article on RFID (radio frequency identification) really bothers me.
Quick summary of RFID first: “It works much like a barcode, but instead of having to be passed in front of a scanner, tiny transponders send out radio signals. Each tag is unique so any one item, be it a pack of razor blades or a shirt, can be tracked individually, all the time and just about anywhere.”
“For people like Glover Ferguson, the chief scientist at consultants Accenture, RFID technology means we need to think again about the norm of what is privacy.
“We will be more willing to surrender privacy if we get something in exchange and are aware of the risks of giving that information””
Are we? I’m not. But do I get a choice? We can re-think the concept of privacy, but that doesn’t mean abandoning it.

It’s obviously animal week…
“A family in Worcestershire were trapped inside their house for two hours after a scary, staring badger left them too frightened to leave.”
“It was finally trapped by an expert, who used jam sandwiches to catch it.” (BBC)

“A hamster so small he could fit into a match box could well find his way into the Guinness Book of Records.” (BBC) Just look at the photo, it’s the cutest thing ever!
It’s Turner Prize time again, cue hysterical ‘modern art is rubbish’ articles.

How can anyone be mean to spiders when they have social recognition?
Spiders ‘remember first date’
“Female wolf spiders – schizocosa uetzi – prefer to mate with males which look similar to those they encountered before they were sexually mature.
This suggests invertebrates have social recognition, which can be maintained and remembered throughout the different phases of their lives.” (BBC)

This made me really mad: “Sex survey causes school uproar” (Age)
The questions included “If you have never slept with a person of the same sex, it it possible that all you need is a good lesbian/gay lover?”, “How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive and exclusive heterosexual behaviour?” and “It is possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?”.
So it’s ok for queer kids (or even adults) to hear the equivalent of these questions or be expected to justify their sexuality to any rude person who feels like hassling them, but there’s uproar if poor widdle straight kids are exposed to the same questions? I think the world would be a better place if every straight person heard those questions at least once.
I have a policy of turning any questions back onto straight people in pretty much the same terms as the survey, but it took me a while to learn that trick.

I’ve been downloading pics from my camera phone.
This is what it would look like if someone punched you while holding a camera phone in their hand (re-enactment):
impressionistic punch
It doesn’t work too well at night, but I’ve finally managed a photo of this scary stuffed animal shop front in Islington, so I don’t care.
scary stuffed animals
The other night I was walking to the Tottenham Court Road night bus and an old Cockney man walked by as I was walking up to the night bus and said, “you’ve got a lovely smile, godbless”. The worst thing was, I was smirking, not smiling.
“Smirking, not smiling” would be a great name for a band though.

Mother Theresa “was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” (Age)