Last Friday, I sent out some unsolicited spam to try to recruit some other people to join the Industry!© team. I've received no responses as yet. Maybe, I should have signed it "Candy."

Whenever I get a website through e-mail, I figure it's old news by the time I visit it. Even so, some sites bear as much web coverage as any and all of us can supply. Today's site is the Waterman Elementary List of Lunches. The complex nuances and dry wit suggest more than a little satire, while the URL suggests complete ingenuousness. For instance, compare the various "sticks" on the menu. What does "CF" stand for? Which are better, "Stuffed Shells" or "Cheese Stuffed Shells?"

My first prize gives separate link status to Italian Dunkers (ID) - those seasonal miracles on Mediterranean cuisine only available the last week of October. Tied for "most appetizing" are Taco Patty (TP) (where does the rest of the "patty" go?) and Meatball Sub (MS) (it looks like a scallop with an eye infection).

Two quickies before I have to go off to class today:

• On Monday I opened my e-mail to a slew of messages from the weekend, regarding an ongoing discussion of the meaning of "wanker." My late input offered "tosser" and "anorak" into the mix, which raised more questions, and somehow lead me to Mancunian English, a list of colloquialisms common to Merseyside villages. I especially like "anorak" because I have had the good fortune of seeing trainspotters on the Arsenal viaduct - a rare occurance in the automotive United States - and wondered whether they were immigrant trainspotters or natives who had taken up the hobby in a misguided attempt to be more European.
  
• In this week's Nature there is a report from a group in Switzerland that was doing a pre-surgical assessment on an epileptic patient, and happened to stimulate a specific region in the right, angular gyrus, resulting in the patient having an "out-of body experience" They stimulated the region a few more times, and each stimulation resulted in the same experience. The angular gyrus is responsible for combining visual and muscle-sensory (proprioceptive) cues to create an "image" of the body in space. This means that all of "near-death experiences" and "astral projections" and such can be summed up as hyperactivity of the angular gyrus.
  

Busy, busy, busy. Too busy to blog?! Apparently. To make up for lost time, here are a couple of tidbits I found amusing. To start with, why do American advertisers pay billions to merge the Coca-Cola® swish with the word "vanilla" resulting in artless boredom while their Japanese counterparts pay far less to successfully beautify their milk cartons and coffee cans. The Americans should take a cue from their needlepointing mothers. Even better, they could take a course in art history and try modelling off of some famous artists (I think Roy Lichtenstein was the inspiration for "Dough" shown here).