Category archive: 7 things

1. Google has a gay Easter egg hidden in the English interface: if you search for gay (or lesbian) the thin blue vertical line that separates results from sponsored links turns into a rainbow. Via Brugo].
2. 'Tapas' means 'lids, covers' in Spanish, probably because the snacks were originally used to protect your drink from flies or sand by placing them on the glass.
3. The word 'wop' (derogatory term for an Italian) is derived from the Neapolitan 'guappo' meaning 'cocky, swaggering person'.
4. The actor playing captain Lee 'Apollo' Adama in Battlestar Galactica (Jamie Bamber) is British.
5. The 'wheelies' in 'Chorton and the Wheelies' came about because movement on wheels is easier to animate in stop-motion.
6. The 's' key toggle stars on and off when you select an item in Gmail or Google Reader
7. The 'Dublin' in Dublin Core (metadata element set) is in Ohio, not in Ireland.

1. The reason why the Scala cinema went bankrupt and closed in 1993 was because it screened A Clockwork Orange without permission, was sued and lost. It is now a nightclub. [via overyourhead]
2. Sleeping too long (over eight hours a night) is bad for your health, and might even be riskier than sleeping too little (under 6.5 hours a night).
3. Because they were used so rarely, automated public lavatories in Richmond cost the council eight pounds per pee.
4. Pashto (sometimes called Afghani) is the official language in Afghanistan. Sadly learnt when the Pashto service reporter for the BBC was shot dead last weekend).
5. The Xbox 360 might finally turn a profit for the first time at the end of this fiscal year.
6. Oxfam has an online charity shop.
7. Dannii Minogue (singer, X-Factor judge, sister of pop princess) and Julian McMahon (Nip-Tuck actor, son of former Australian Prime Minister) were married for two years.

1. According to McAfee, Hong Kong (.hk) is the most dangerous domain to surf and search on the web. Finland (.fi) is the safest.
2. Andy Warhol died of water intoxication.
3. In Japan you wash and rinse yourself outside the bathtub, which is only for soaking so that you leave the water clean for the next person using it.
4. In Spanish, the word 'sándwich' is only used for a sandwich made with bread baked in a square mould, otherwise it is called 'bocadillo'.
5. Life magazine shut down three times, the last in 2007 (but survives as an online brand).
6. The name of the French band Air is a backronym for ' Amour, Imagination, Rêve' (French for 'Love, Imagination, Dream')
7. Nucleated glassware have the inside base sandblasted to increase and retains bubbles in carbonated drinks.

1. Mediawatch-UK (organisation that monitors broadcasts for violence, sex and bad language) is the current (since 2001) name of Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers' and Listeners' Association.
2. One-fifth of Americans have never used email.
3. Border agents in the US can search your laptop or any other electronic device when you enter the country. UK customs agents search laptops too.
4. Chaka Khan has a sister named Taka Boom (real names: Yvette and Yvonne Stevens).
5. Oxytocin (the 'hormone of love' and trust) is destroyed in the stomach and must therefore be injected or inhaled.
6. Kelly Watch the Stars (1998 track by French duo Air) is inspired by Jaclyn Smith's character Kelly Garrett in 70s TV series Charlie's Angels.
7. In 2006 the UK environment minister urged shoppers to leave excess wrapping and packaging at the tills. Can anyone explain to me why most cucumbers are shrink-wrapped?

1. Written Thai does not separate words with spaces except in certain cases.
2. Streetcar (the company I hire cars by the half-hour) also has a fleet of WV Transporter vans
3. Madonna bites the top off Cadbury's Creme Eggs and 'sucks the good stuff out'.
4. People on blood-thinners should avoid broccoli, as it is high in vitamin K which helps blood clotting.
5. Reduction ad Hitlerum is a fallacy in logic of the type 'Hitler supported X, therefore X is bad'.
6. Dick Tracy wears a zoot suit (high-waisted, wide-legged, with pegged trousers and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders).
7. Gmail advanced search (and filters) offers three ways to find messages containing x or y or z in a given field:
   • x OR y OR z ('OR' has to be upper case)
   • x|y|z (handy for long lists)
   • {x y z} (useful when writing more complex search syntax)

1. If you let iTunes manage your music library, adding 'Disc Number' information will add the disc number at the beginning of the file names, so that they can be ordered sequentially by disc in the directory.
2. The Hawaiian alphabet only has twelve letters and a glottal stop.
3. Georgian has got its own alphabet called Mkhedruli
4. Each Cremosa ChupaChups lollipop has 28 kilocalories – but according to the manufacturer's website, 33 calories in Australia or New Zealand. Mistake or different recipe?
5. Giorgio Moroder produced a 70s disco version of the Battlestar Galactica theme from the original series.
6. Not only there are two semifinals at this year's Eurovision Song Contest, but the countries were split for the draw into groups based on voting history and geographical location.
7. Danny deVito is married to Rhea Perlman (Carla in Cheers).

1. You no longer need to fill in any paperwork to pay a cheque into your account. Just hand in the cheque in your name and your debit card over the counter, and it's done. At least with Nationwide.
2. Styrofoam cups will be around forever, whereas banana peels biodegrade in just three weeks, newspaper in one month, cotton in three months and wool in one year. Via Life After Humans video preview.
3. Firefox doesn't break lines at hyphens, whereas IE does.
4. Nick Kamen's I Promised Myself was covered by Dead Or Alive, by A-Teens and more recently by Operación Triunfo's José Galisteo.
5. Robbie Nevil (who had a few hits in 1986, among which C'est La Vie) co-wrote three songs on the High School Musical soundtrack.
6. Travellers who 'smuggle' poppy seeds face Dubai jail. And that's the ordinary poppy seeds found on bread or pastries.
7. Peaches and Feist were roommates.

1. Another expression for buttock cleavage is 'Dagenham smile'. Via kottke.org.
2. Before the 19th century picnics were held indoors.
3. Sundays between Ash Wednesday and Easter are not part of Lent.
4. 'In the past, children in deaf schools did not have personal name signs, but were given numbers'. Via The Linguistics of British Sign Language, page 235.
5. 'If you own a PC running Vista or a Mac with OS/X installed then you could already be using IPv6.' Via BBC News.
6. Google Docs lets you easily email a form to people who fill it in and the entries are automatically saved into a master spreadsheet.
7. I can use my mobile phone (a TYTN II) as a wi-fi access point: I installed WMWifiRouter and then went online with an iPod Touch using my mobile's wi-fi signal.

7 things I did not know last week

1. BBC TV programmes end credits have to be center justified.
2. Simon Amstell co-wrote an episode of Skins.
3. 70 is 21 in celsius, as written on the card I got Dr B.'s dad for his 70th birthday.
4. Almost all the title sequences in Woody Allen's films are white Windsor font on black background. Via kottke.org.
5. The original Google hard disks were encased in Lego bricks.
6. The Complete Plain Words, a plain English style manual for civil servants, has never been out of print since publication in 1954.
7. Glycemic load is a better indication of the impact of carbs than Glycemic Index (GI).

1. Firefox offers no option to temporarily disable Flash, but you can do that with add-ons (Adblock or Flashblock).
2. The BBC's definition of 'licence fee payer' includes not only licence holders, but also 'any other person in the UK who watches, listens to or uses any BBC service, or may do so or wish to do so in the future' (via ia play).
3. Twitter tips may be contextual after all. Just too many coincidences between the content of the updates and the tips added by Twitter, like 'bitful is waiting for the tube home but wishing to be beamed there instead' – Twitter suggests 'Go for a long walk'.
4. 'Unlike paper and plastic, steel can be melted down and recast indefinitely; it has no structural memory' (via kottke.org).
5. Irish has no words for "yes" and "no". The answer to a question contains a repetition of the verb, either with or without a negative particle.
6. The widespread practice to wrap a website's logo in a h1 tag may not improve accessibility as much as expected. Some advocate a better use of h1 to mark the main topic of the page, rather than wasting it on an element that is obvious and consistent throughout a website. Some suggest wrapping logo/name and tagline as td and tt in a dl instead.
7. 'The coffee you grab on the way to work may contain up to a fifth of your daily recommended calories'.

1. The British Sign Language sign for the Wal-Mart-owned supermarket chain ASDA is a double pat on the buttock (or on the hip, as the bum officially lies outside the designated area for signing), from the series of ads where at ASDA you 'pocket the difference'.
2. 'Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006'.
3. Googlegangers are people who share your name, often the result of self-googling.
4. Whole coffee beans keep as long as they do because they are filled with carbon dioxide, which helps exclude oxygen. Once ground, they only keep a few days at room temperature.
5. Arpanet launched in October 1969. That makes The Internets way older than I thought (but still younger than myself, dammit!
6. A stealth startup is a startup that avoids public attention, either to hide information from competitors or a way to manipulate its image.
7. iTunes will play only a portion of a song if you specify start and stop times within the song (Get Info > Options > Stop time).

1. Supermarkets pay farmers as little as 3 pence per chicken. And all male chicks, unsuitable for the egg industry, are killed and turned into pet food. These are just a couple of the facts Jamie Oliver talked about in the first ten minutes of Jamie's Foul Dinners. We recorded the rest but could not bear to watch it yet.
2. Eugène Ionesco wrote children's stories for his daughter.
3. Dykes On Bikes applied for a trademark.
4. HD TV only display 40% of the colour spectrum the eye can see. A proposed new TV technology that uses laser illumination offers double that.
5. Artist Raymond Briggs (The Snowman, of Walking in the Air fame) also wrote When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel about a nuclear attack on Britain. If you were a child in the early Eighties in the UK, chances are you were traumatized by it too.
6. Once or twice a year the BBC tests its emergency rebroadcast system and you might get to see the old test cards for an hour or so.
7. You can let friends who are not on Flickr view your private photos with a Flickr Guest Pass – basically just a URL that is not displayed anywhere on your Flickr pages, and that you can give to friends and switch off after a while if you wish so.

1. 'Granola' is not American English for 'muesli'. Granola is crispy baked oats with nuts and honey, muesli is uncooked oats with dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
2. Online gambling is banned in Australia.
3. It costs an average of six months' salary to rent an apartment in Japan (including the equivalent of two months' rent as 'reikin', a non-refundable gift to the landlord). That leaves you 'hikoshi-bimbo' (moving poor).
4. Katie Price a.k.a. Jordan has a series of several pony books out, and more to come in 2008. Get them while they're young, I guess.
5. There's a sizeable market in extremely realistic (some breathe, some are even made to look premature) state-of-the-art designer newborn baby dolls called 'reborns'. I missed the Channel 4 documentary 'My Fake Baby', you can still catch it on 4oD (requires Windows XP or Vista and Internet Explorer 5.5 or over).
6. Low-energy bulbs pose health and environment risks if they are not disposed of properly.
7. You can turn a Nintendo DS into an organiser.

1. The original advocaat (creamy egg and brandy liqueur) is thick and often eaten with a spoon, and the liquid version in a bottle is sold as an export. It used to be made with avocados by the Dutch in Suriname and Recife, then with egg yolk in the Netherlands where avocados were not availiable.
2. Windows Mobile IE supports CSS and insists on loading the main stylesheet and ignoring media="handheld". Workaround: link to the main stylesheet as media="Screen" (upper-case S) and Windows Mobile will ignore it.
3. The pretzel pictured on the arms of Staffordshire is called a Stafford knot.
4. Faraday cages (enclosures that block out electrical fields) are everywhere: in microwave ovens, coaxial cables, some passport and credit card protecting sleeves and elevators.
5. Five-year-olds today can still believe in Santa (a friend of mine is taking her daughter to Lapland to meet him). I wished that when I was that age I had not found the presents mum and dad had hidden away weeks before Christmas. Of course, I pretended not to have seen them and acted all surprised on Christmas day, believing that if I had given my parents' game away I would have stopped receiving presents. Which incidentally is what happened when I did challenge them about the fact that a) we did not have a fireplace, b) there's no way a fat man can travel down a chimney anyway (let alone each and every good child's chimney around the world in a single night), and c) I never bought into that Catholic nonsense, and you want me to believe that reindeer can fly? Bah!
6. The awards handed out by the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences are nicknamed 'the Mackies'. Red vs Blue (machinima produced with footage from Halo and Halo 2) won three in 2004 and one in 2005.
7. Eating a whole 195g box of liqueur-filled chocolates in one very quick go on an empty stomach while opening presents early on Christmas morning gives you a bit of a buzz. However, since the chocolates in question contained only 2.3% liqueur (a very sober total of 4.5 grams) I must have been jittery on chocolate and the fact that Santa! He left them for ME!

1. If your album tracks play in the wrong order on your iPod (but in the correct one in iTunes) and no amount of syncing will fix it, it most likely is because the 'Disc Number' info is not the same for all tracks.
2. You can put a knocked out tooth back in. Don't clean it or touch it, keep it in the mouth or in a cup of milk and run to the dentist or hospital.
3. Claret is a purely English, mostly British term that indicates wine from the Bordeaux region. Although the word comes from the French 'clairet', pronouncing the word as if it was French is a type of overcorrection.
4. The maximum number of friends you can have in Facebook is 5000. Not a good thing if you use Facebook in other, more sophisticated ways than a simple social network tool.
5. Dr B. used to sing in the school choir. We went into the village church yesterday (I wanted to have a look), chatted at length to the vicar and ended up being bullied by a devout woman into going to midnight mass ("I'll be looking out for you two guys!").
6. Tony Blair had been planning to convert to Catholicism for a long time. I don't approve, but it's none of my business any longer, and finally I admire his impartiality during his office on issues like abortion and gay rights.
7. I weigh exactly the same at home and on Dr B.'s parents' bathroom scales. I tested them both yesterday three hours apart, so that this year we will not fool ourselves into thinking they are broken. That post-Christmas extra half stone is entirely made of mince(meat) pies.

1. Noise cancelling headphones that use active noise control work by recording outside sounds and creating an exactly opposite wave to the "noise" waves, which effectively cancels out all the ambient noise.
2. The 13th root of a 200-digit number always begins with 2, always has 16 digits, and the last digit number is always the same as the final number of the 200-digit number.
3. Capacitive touchscreens can be touched either with a bare finger or with a conductive device held by a bare hand.
4. Some muscle worshippers spend thousands of pounds a year in expensive gifts and headscissors sessions with their favourite female bodybuilders.
5. Will Baker (Kylie Minogue's artistic director and best friend) is a big Dr Who fan. Baker went to see the writer and producers to let them know that Kylie would be interested to guest-star.
6. My teeth show evidence of grinding and I will have to wear a mouthguard when I sleep. Will it stop me snoring too?
7. We have 80 Christmas cards left over from the past five years. We are sending 79. Send me your address if you want the spare one.

1. String vests provide excellent insulation by trapping air close to the skin.
2. Eleonora Salvatore Dominguin (better known as a model by her nickname Bimba Bosé) is not the daughter of Miguel Bosé's sister Paola, but of his other sister Lucia. Miguel and his niece sing on his latest album, Papito.
3. You can count in binary to 31 on the fingers of one hand and to 100 with two hands.
4. You can store butter out of the fridge in Butter bells that use water to preserve it at room temperature.
5. La Terremoto De Alcorcón is not a man in drag. In my defence, all I had seen of her was the low-quality video of her Hung Up spoof on YouTube. I saw her in the flesh and I can assure you that she is all woman.
6. The Italian national anthem is called 'Il Canto degli Italiani'. Most Italians wrongly believe it is called 'Fratelli d'Italia' (from the opening words) or just call it 'Mameli's anthem' (from the name of its composer).
7. Madonna's new album, due next April, will be called Licorice. Or Give It To Me. Although it appears that Give It To Me was released in 1991. Whatever…

I'm glad nobody noticed an unclosed tag in one of my last posts, which meant there were only six things I did not know last week instead of seven.

See? Not a bad thing to have just a handful of very distracted readers. I'd hate the pressure otherwise.

Anyway. Quite glad that item #4 did not show, as it was rather longer than the others and did not look good. Here it is then:

4. Moscow had its own Vauxhall Gardens. Established by Michael Maddox in 1783, they had pleasure gardens, a small theatre/concert hall, a rotunda for promenades, and apartments for tea or supper. The word вокза́л (vokzal) became a synonym for pleasure gardens, one of which was situated at the terminus of the first Russian railway line.

   The one described above is a more credible explanation why the Russian word for large, main station is today вокза́л (vokzal) than the popular yet never documented belief that a Russian delegation came to London, arrived in Vauxhall, saw the station name and believed it meant 'station'. Which makes sense, as I'd always found it hard to believe Russians could be that thick.

1. Raw/dry denim should not be washed often. If it smells, stick it in the freezer to kill bacteria.
2. Uffie (one of the many reasons I am kindly requested to listen to my music with headphones at home) provides the vocals for Justice's The Party.
3. Mayonnaise does not come from Mayonne (France) but from Mahón (Minorca, Spain).
4. See Wednesday's update for item #4 in the list.
5. A mnemonic aid to remember the names of the various champagne bottle sizes is 'My Judy Really Makes Splendid Belching Noises'.
6. Exchanging pecks when going through a kissing gate is a British custom. I thought the people I was walking with were just being extremely friendly.
7. Cronenberg's 1996 movie Crash cannot be shown within the City of Westminster (London).

1. Echinacea products made from the leaves and stems are not known to be clinically effective. I just hope the root is as good as they say, because I've been using it to keep a cold at bay for a week now.
2. Tecknonik (a blend of hip hop and techno dance styles) is a registered trademark, and the first time that a dance is protected that way.
3. There are no trains on Boxing Day on most lines in the UK, which could be a bit of a problem because I have to travel down to London to go to work on the 27th.
4. [Warning: Heroes S01E14 spoilers] Christopher Eccleston was originally offered the role of Sylar in Heroes. He declined, then Zachary Quinto auditioned and blew the casting panel away.
5. A Beddian year is the one in which your age matches the last two digits of the year you were born. Mine will be in 2034. What year was I born in? [via kottke]
6. Although you can strike out text with either the <del> or the <strike> tag, only the latter displays correctly in Google Reader. This is a bit odd, since the <strike> tag was deprecated in HTML 4.01. I noticed while reading Joe.My.God's 'Time Machine' post and not making much sense because the deletion sign did not get through, and then noticing that Kottke's post on Kindle, where deletions marked with <strike> displayed as intended.
7. Mehrabian's well-known 7%-38%-45% rule that says words only account for 7% when used to communicate (while the tone and body language that go with them account for 38% and 45% respectively) only applies to communications of feelings and attitudes (likes and dislikes). It is often wrongly overly interpreted to cover communication as a whole.

1. Your teeth get smaller as you grow old and that makes your face sag. You can have a dental facelift to increase the size of your teeth and fill out your face.
2. Band Aid II did a cover of Do They Know It's Christmas? in 1989. I was at the time living abroad and was therefore mercifully spared the embarassment.
3. Green tea tastes better (read: a bit less like poo) if you make it with not-too-boiling water.
4. I thought my T-Mobile MDA Vario III was 3G but it also uses HSPDA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) , kind of 3.5G.
5. The font used in German car number plates is difficult to forge because usually similar numbers/letters bear no relation.
6. There is a free version of BT Callminder, but because it's called something completely different (BT Answer 1571), the BT helpdesk fails to mention it when you ask for a free version of Callminder. Sure, the free version has less features, but it still takes messages (as if anyone still called landlines these days). We switched this morning, thus saving 2.5 pounds per month. We could bypass BT altogether but we're too happy with Pipex and Pipex (as almost all British ADSL suppliers) requires a BT line.
7. You can charge an iPod with Gatorade and an onion.

1. Jason 'J' Brown from boy band Five (originally spelled 5ive) is taking part in the new I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! I've always hated the show. But ten years ago I use to kiss the ground J walked on. Thanks heavens for PVRs and fast-tracking through hours of footage at 3x speed searching for footage of shirtless J.
2. Death From Above 1979 used to be called Death From Above. They changed their name after a legal wrangle with LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who had been using it as a working name.
3. 2002 was the Year of the Whopper, in Infinite Jest's chronology of subsidised time. David Foster Wallace's novel still puts me off, at over 1000 pages, but the more I read about Infinite Jest the more I want to dig into it.
4. If a cab driver is wearing his seatbelt, he is not for hire. 'As taxi drivers do not have to wear a seat belt when they are working, any driver wearing one is likely to be driving home'.
5. The C7 2-conductor 2.5A appliance connector (which I usually call 'kettle cable') is also known as 'figure of eight cable'.
6. Kirsten Bell has 'energy hands' in real life. And is great pals with Zach Quinto (WARNING: Heroes S02E05 spoilers – these links go to Greg Beeman's fantastic Heroes production blog).
7. Nek's debut single Laura Non C'è (a surprisingly low 10th place at Sanremo 1997, the year Jalisse of Eurovision notoriety won); was not only recorded in Spanish as Laura No Está (a huge success in Latin America) but also in English as Laura Is Away (a, hem, not huge success I believe, not even as Laura Is Away – the Club Mix), and then again in 2005 re-recorded as 'Laura', with Céréna singing some verses in French. He could sing it in Esperanto and just flutter his eyelashes around his lovely lovely blue eyes, for all I care. And Nek gets hotter as he ages. Swoon.

1. William Fortnum ('Fortnum & Mason') started business re-selling Queen Anne's discarded candles (she wanted fresh ones every night).
2. Isla Guy Fawkes is one the Galápagos Islands (Ecuador) named after the Briton who attempted to carry out the Gunpowder Plot.
3. The O2 has a hole to let the Blackwall tunnel ventilation towers through.
4. Belfast City Airport is named after George Best. As my plane approached the landing strip on Wednesday night, my mind was concentrating more on Best's regular displays of public drunkenness than his extraordinary career as a footballer.
5. The X Factor's Andy Williams is a member of my gym (the Newport branch, I suppose).
6. Blackout, Britney's new album is dreadful. I forced myself to listen to it all, cannot stand the over-processed vocals and self-referencing on every single bloody song ('It's Britney, bitch' – uhm yes, it's written on the cover too). I wish it to do well though, it sounds like she needs it.
7. Florence Nightingale was a keen statistician and made extensive use of charts and diagrams to present reports on medical care.

1. You can 'mute' conversations in Gmail so that they do not show in your inbox. Handy for stuff you want to keep for reference but do not need to read straight away.
2. Volcanoes on low-temperature astronomical objects can have criomagma in the form of slushy ice.
3. Apple seeds contain a cyanide compound which is released if the seeds are pulverised or chewed.
4. You can install Leopard on a PC.
5. Stoke-on-Trent has its own musical anthem. It is also planning to get a logo. Shouldn't that be called a coat of arms?
6. You can make crystal clear ice cubes by using water that has been boiled twice.
7. Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner I have been lusting over for a while does not fit under our living room couches. New couches it is then!

1. The iPhone (and many other high-end phones) have a water damage sensor: a small white disc inside the headphone jack that gets coloured when in contact with water. [via garoo]
2. The Sound of Music is based on a true story (with alterations and omissions).
3. TV Genius (the TV listings and reminders website I use regularly) has launched a TV Genius Facebook application. You tell it what you are interested in and TV Genius builds your personal listings schedule on Facebook too. And so all my data tightens up even more.
4. Peer to peer positioning is a faux-GPS hack that determines your location using GPS data linked to telecom towers.
5. The design of the HMS Camden Lock (the main ship in Hyperdrive) was inspired by the Telecom Tower.
6. When you import your bookmarks from Firefox into Delicious, they are automatically tagged with 'imported' and with the folder name they are in.
7. The Englishman in New York in Sting's Englishman in New York is Quentin Crisp.

1. There is no goalkeeper in rugby union. I noticed it thirty minutes into last week's France vs. New Zealand, did not dare ask any of the friends I was watching the match with, but silently Wikipedia'd it on my mobile.
2. In East Germany after the war there were so few men that they had to introduce double women pairs at the national ice skating championships.
3. English, Scottish and Welsh law does not have any concept of "flag desecration". It is however illegal to write on money (the penalty is set to level 1 of the standard scale, i.e. 200 pounds), possibly to do with defacing the Queen's image?
4. If you share your Outlook 2003 calendar, you can tick a box at the lower right corner of an appointment view to mark it as private. What you labelled 'Lunch hour at H&M trying on impossibly tight jeans pretending to be Liza at Studio 54' will mercifully be seen by others as 'Private appointment'.
5. Blocking out lunch in your work Outlook calendar, setting it to 'Private appointment' and marking it as 'Out of office' does not stop your colleagues to send you meeting requests overriding it anyway.
6. Stichelton is Stilton cheese make with raw milk. Only Stilton made with pasteurised milk can be called Stilton.
7. Lily Allen has a third nipple.

1. With Oyster cards, you do not need a photocard any more
2. If you simply type 'time' into the search box, Google will tell you your local time. Type 'time' and a city, and it will tell you what time it is there. Type 'time' and a country with several time zones like Australia, and it will list them all. Via Gordon.
3. Dr Tanya Byron (the TV parenting psychologist this tiny tearaway here would love to be adopted by) has co-written The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle with Jennifer Saunders. I watched the first episode on Thursday, it's good, it makes you uncomfortable, it's a bit unusual, I wonder if it will last the distance.
4. Poll and research organisations are not bound to respect the Telephone Preference Service. Tom is rightly outraged. Join us and sign the petition to make them observe it.
5. Baby MPS is a service which allows parents who have suffered a miscarriage or bereavement of a baby in the first weeks of life to register their wish not to receive baby related mailings.
6. Even if it lacks Outlook 2007's enhanced categorization and productivity system, in Outlook 2003 you can rename your quick flags, and drag them to the toolbar for even faster message tagging.
7. Outlook reminders only trigger if they are placed within the primary Calendar or Task folders.

1. Stephen Hawking is 65 (I would have thought he was in his early fifties).
2. In Canada, informal hockey games are still called shinny (from shinty, a team sport played with sticks and a ball, now played almost exclusively in the Highlands of Scotland).
3. YouTube videos can now be forwarded without buffering. You used to need to wait, now you can click at any point in the timeline and only the portion starting from that point will be buffered. It wasn't always like that, was it?
4. In 2000 The Russian Orthodox Church bestowed sainthood on the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, shot dead by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
5. My host 34sp. com has a dedicated WordPress hosting package, with a free installer and specialised support. It proved invaluable this week to provide help with the awesome 2.3 upgrade (the brilliant new database interface functionalities needed a couple of tweaks in permissions and configurations).
6. The higher testicle is usually the one the male writes with (Popbitch via bob's yer uncle). Only in my case it is not, but it might be because although I use my right hand with precision work, I perform heavy duty activities with my definitely stronger left arm.
7. Firefox does not understand Colgroup. It seems to be one of the very few instances where Explorer follows the standard, and Mozilla-based browsers don't.

1. The Toblerone logo has a 'hidden' image of a bear (via Gordon).
2. The word seersucker 'originates from the Hindi words "shir shakkar," meaning "milk and sugar", probably from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth surface of milk and bumpy texture of sugar'.
3. Ethiopia not only uses a different calendar (the year 2000 started this week), but unlike the convention in most countries, in Ethiopia the start of the day is dawn, rather than midnight.
4. Mobile data tariffs are expensive in the USA: T-Mobile has just slashed their unlimited mobile data service from 30 to 20 dollars a month, while I only pay 7.50 pounds (around 15 dollars) a month for the same service with T-Mobile UK. Although to be fair, I have a fair use policy that limits my monthly access to 1GB, and I have not checked if the USA tariff is truly unlimited (but I'd be surprised if it was).
5. You can use an analog watch as a compass. I'm surprised at how simple that is.
6. Hitting the forward slash key while in Gmail positions the cursor in the search box. More Gmail shortcuts on a printable cheatsheet.
7. Updating your Facebook status twice within the space of a few seconds only shows in your mini-feed. I can't find any evidence to link to, but just found it out while re-posting to correct a typo.

1. Pale Male (the Fifth Avenue hawk) is known to have sired 26 chicks with four mates. It is not the only hawk in Central Park, and they mostly prefer nesting on buildings (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Trump Park hotel, a residential housing cooperative at 927 Fifth Avenue) rather than on trees.
2. UK workers get the least paid leave in Europe: 28 days per year. We still are better off than Canada and Japan (10 days) or the US (no legal minimum for paid leave.
3. If you share a link with a friend within a message in Facebook, you get to choose which of the images from that webpage will be shown alonside the link. Title and description are auto-populated with the website's data, and editable.
4. You cannot log on to Spokeo from Firefox if the coComment extension is installed. Hats off to Harrison from Spokeo who sorted it out for me in no time.
   
5. Chris Evans often takes out his rubbish naked. I am researching property prices in his neighbourhood then. And no, it's not Chris Evans the UK DJ and TV personality, but Chris Evans the American Fantastic Four star.
6. Amazon's got a better memory than I have – unfortunately. This week I was alerted that 'As someone who has purchased or rated music by Darren Hayes, you might like to know that This Delicate Thing We've Made will be released on 20 August 2007.' I did what? Then it dawned on me, it was a present for my ex. Phew.
7. Lily Allen's brother (the weed-smoking subject of Alright Still's closing track 'Alfie') is an actor like his father Keith. Alfie Allen has landed a role in Casualty's 1900s spin-off.