In the course of my plodding through ancient blog posts, I’ve come across more than a few sites – not just blogs or singular repositories of arcana, but entire, regularly updated news sources which I had all but forgotten. Ananova.com, for example. A rich source of random nonsense, back when I was posting every hour, on the hour. Who could forget the Cocktail Shaker at ?8 Discount, third item on the main news page? That’s right, ?8. Owing to some character-set translation difficulties, the unit in question has become garbled somewhere along the line, and the true magnificence of the discount is now lost to us – less knowable than ancient Mesopotamian accounting practices; we know only that there were eight fewer of them. So, I had to go and have another look, hadn’t I? Does Ananova.com still exist? It does. But more incomprehensible than ever, I fear.

Listening to Robbie Williams songs can increase the brain’s capacity for learning.
LernQuadrat director Konrad Zimmermann said: “Classical music, which has long been considered beneficial to learning, is obviously not fit for the world of young people today. They need to know and like the music in order for it to have a stimulating effect on learning.”

Oo-okay. We’ll let that “obviously” slide for the present, and the extraordinary assumption that “young people” are the undifferentiated (and undiscriminating) mass of air-heads that that last sentence suggests them to be. But isn’t Robbie Williams more of a soccer-mom thing by now? Have young people not moved on, transferred their affections to other, more comprehensively tattoo’d love-boys? (What year is this? Who is the President? No, you’re kidding. Still???) Maybe not, but I’m fairly happy to report that hardly any of the names on the Showbiz Quirkies meant anything to me at all. My long-term avoidance of mainstream media is paying handsome dividends. Any time now, I shall be appointed as a High Court Judge. Then you’ll be sorry.