I was driving home tonight and was attempting to change the CD. It was one in those fiddly double CD cases, which managed to explode sending CDs, cover art and plastic casing all over the car. Trying to grab hold of the CDs I hit the radio by mistake (I was honestly in full control of the vehicle at this time) and managed to switch accidentally to Radio 4, which appeared to be having some kind of radio phone in about plastic surgery. It sounded interesting so I started to listen.

I’m ashamed to say it took me a good five minutes till it clicked that it was a spoof phone in. I think it was the guy who phoned in to say that he wanted plastic surgery to make himself look slightly less handsome that did it. He pointed out that he’d deliberately found a relatively ugly wife to ensure his children didn’t look too handsome and have the same problems he’d been inflicted with.

Anyway, probably best if you do think it’s a real phone in, but still funny. You can listen online.

If I was ever going to write one of those novelty books that sell really well at Christmas, it would probably be about bathrooms. We spend so much time in them, it’s really just an opportunity waiting to be exploited.

Over a cup of tea this afternoon we discussed the various merits of different urinal designs. Here’s the summary, as best as I can remember it.

The Trough - Definitely the lowest form of toilet equipment used in the civilised world. Usually made of stainless steel and wall mounted. There’s no individual stations, it’s just one long corridor of urinal. I really don’t like these as there are no set positions where you are meant to use them. It does mean in crowded situations you can cram lots of men in, but that just seems outrageously unhygienic. Mainly used where there’s a high likelyhood of vandalism and where budget is important. Often seen in downmarket pubs, clubs and football grounds.

The Upmarket Trough - Similar to the more basic Trough, but a more classy version. They’re made of pot and are floor to shoulder height. As with the basic model, it’s still not clear exactly where to stand.

Standard Wall Mounted - This is probably the most common variety. The standard white dented egg shaped ones mounted in office blocks, service stations, and schools everywhere. It’s very sensible, reliable and a little bit boring. If it’s a slightly nicer bathroom, you may get a little divider thing between the next one, but more often than not, they’re just crammed in.

The Flamboyant - Occasionally, you get somewhere that’s really pushed the boat out and gone for something completely customised. This is disputed, but I’m sure I remember going to an establishment in Portsmouth that had a urinal in the form of the Grand Canyon. I think it may have be Santa Fe, but their website doesn’t make a feature out of it, so maybe it wasn’t there. I’m not sure how practical these can be. How do you clean something that’s made to resemble a canyon?

The Victorian - These are my favourite. Made from the finest China, ornate with lots of detail, they stand floor to head height and curve round to properly divide you from the next man. They tend to be used in public toilets built on a grand scale, in old public buildings, train stations and parks. You never get just one or two together, there’s always 30 or 40 stations. They’re ready to cope with big crowds. There’s one under Southport Pier.

Did I miss any?

All the best quotes at work belong to Dave Braines. Today on the start of a conference call:

“BEE-DEEEPP”
“Hello, who just joined please?”
“Hi, It’s Dave Braines here. I mean, I think it’s me.”

Thanks to Peter Kay, everyone knows that the HobNob* is the marine of the biscuit dunking world.

What people may not realise, is that Tesco’s Finest Rustic Multigrain Sliced Bread, is the armour plated tank of the toast world. No matter how long you leave it in the toaster, it will not turn into toast. It doesn’t so much as go a darker shade of brown. It just sits there resolutely, until you give in and accept that it’ll stay in bread form forever. It doesn’t go crispy or even taste like toast, it just gets really hard and solid.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when the toaster pops and the none toast springs up, it fires off some of its little seed things into the toaster element, which causes your toaster to spark and crackle. This is a bread not to be messed with.

* note HobNob’s use of camel case before any programmer or web geeks got hold of it.

If I were to write a list of my ten favourite things, LastFM would probably be in it (the others being: lentil soup, Summer Roberts, Autumnal colours, Saturday night pizza night, Alan Shearer, Flickr, a milky cup of tea, the smell on hot days after it’s rained and in-ear headphones).

Having said that, its main premise, of suggesting music I’d like, really doesn’t work for me. I know it works for other people, so it must just be me. I think the problem may be that my music taste is too mainstream. I do like some stuff that would be considered cool with the indie kids, but I also like a bit of pop.

The typical LastFM user is going to be pretty tech savvy, which for some reason tends to coincide with people who like to listen to as new and as obscure music as possible. Why nerds don’t listen to old or mainstream music in itself would be an interesting sociological experiment.

Just look at a few total plays stats to prove my point. Britney Spears, played: 6,318,579 times. Modest Mouse, played: 23,671,229 times. I’m a big fan of both, but I know if you took a sample of the whole world’s music listening population, Modest Mouse would not be four times more popular than Britney. Death Cab for Cutie, played: 34,656,728, which is three times more than Madonna (12,293,959).

I could spend the next 50 years of my life happily analysing the stats from LastFM. One more interesting thing I think I’ve found. If you go to the top tracks page they show the week’s most popular tracks. They display a normalised bar chart showing the number of listeners against the number of plays for each song (they have to normalise it as you’re always going to get more plays than listeners). Anyway, as a consequence of the normalisation, if the number of plays line is longer than the number of listeners line it tends to be a new track, where as an older track will have the number of listeners as the longest line. It makes sense, people tend to listen to a new track on repeat, so you get many plays per user. Just seems kind of neat that you can work out a track’s age by the proportion of unique listeners to total plays.

That would be the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Well, almost. Kind of. They used one of my pictures anyway… in an advert for Roo.