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Wheelchair to ride
"How times change. Beatles' fans, once a byword for love, freedom and youthful abandon, are now in the market for wheelchairs, according to European judges," reports The Daily Telegraph. "The somewhat disheartening verdict on the rock 'n' roll generation was made as a wheelchair company lost a battle to name one of its electric models the Beatle. The European Court of Justice ordered You-Q, a Dutch company, to stop using the name to promote its mobility aid after a legal challenge by Apple Corps, The Beatles' company. … The judges accepted that there was a distinct contrast between the 'freedom and youth' represented by The Beatles' music and the reduced mobility of You-Q's customers. However, they said many baby boomers might now be in the market for a wheelchair and might therefore be susceptible to such advertising."
A year without mirrors
"Kjerstin Gruys, a San Francisco graduate student … just went a year without mirrors," says USA Today. "And it wasn't just any year. It was the year she got married. Ms. Gruys, who recovered from anorexia more than a decade ago, got the idea after one too many stressful encounters with bridal shop mirrors. 'For me, looking in the mirror was attached to a lot of negative thought,' she told Time several months into the experiment. One goal was to 'become less obsessive and insecure about my looks,' she wrote at her blog, Mirror, Mirror … OFF the Wall (soon to be a book). Ms. Gruys ended her mirror-free year – including an October wedding day in which the bride did not see her reflection – on Sunday [March 25] She told her readers: 'I liked what I saw.' "
European sex strikes
– "Members of the trade association for high-class escorts in Spain have stopped having sex with bank employees," reports The Huffington Post, "until they start providing credit to Spanish families and small businesses, according to RT.com. The union got the idea for the protest after one escort was able to convince a bank employee to grant a loan simply by saying she would stop her services until he 'fulfills his responsibility to society.' "
– "Hospital pharmacists are threatening to cut Italians off from their Viagra unless the government amends its plans to reform professions that have high entry barriers," says Associated Press. "Union official Loredana Vasselli said pharmacists decided to focus the protest on Viagra because it is a sought-after drug whose absence 'does not put patients' health at risk.' Pharmacists will stage a series of labour actions during April, culminating with the so-called 'Viagra strike' if their complaints are not redressed."
When ears make music
"What is musical ear syndrome?" asks BBC Focus magazine. "This happens when people with impaired hearing experience talking, singing, or other noises such as traffic or birdsong, inside their heads. This is because the sensory areas of the brain need meaningful input, and without it they try to make sense of random noise by fabricating these once-familiar sounds. These aren't true hallucinations because the person knows they're unreal but they can be very irritating."
Brats on a plane
"The crew of a Skywest-operated Alaska Airlines plane asked Port of Portland police to meet their incoming flight from Long Beach, Calif., after two unruly children refused to stay in their seats and buckle their seat belts on Tuesday (March 27)," reports Associated Press. "Airline spokeswoman Marianne Lindsey told Northwest Cable News that the flight crew tried repeatedly to get the children – aged 3 and 8 and travelling with their parents – to stay in their seats … when the plane pulled up to the gate, the family was first off the plane and met by Port of Portland authorities. They were not charged with any crime." Police talked to the family who were then allowed to make their connecting Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. That trip was uneventful.
When we're conservative?
"A research team led by University of Arkansas psychologist Scott Eidelman argues that conservatism – which the researchers identify as 'an emphasis on personal responsibility, acceptance of hierarchy and a preference for the status quo' – may be our default ideology," says Miller-McCune.com. "If we don't have the time or energy to give a matter sufficient thought, we tend to accept the conservative argument. 'When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient,' the researchers write in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 'These conditions promote conservative ideology.' Prof. Eidelman and his colleagues' paper will surely outrage many on the left (who will resist the notion of conservatism as somehow natural) and the right (who will take offence at the idea that their ideology is linked to low brainpower). The researchers do their best to pre-emptively answer such criticism. 'We do not assert that conservatives fail to engage in effortful, deliberate thought,' they insist. 'We find that when effortful thought is disengaged, the first step people take tends to be in a conservative direction.' "
Thought du jour
"The worst evil of being in prison is that one can never bar one's door."
- Stendhal (1783-18420), French writer