From Nick Tahou's in Rochester, NY. This is three sausage patties, a huge heap of fried potatoes, a pile of baked beans, onions, and chili sauce, served with thick white bread and a Pepsi. Mine is a variation on the standard, which is usually cheeseburgers instead of sausage, macaroni salad instead of baked beans and a plop of mustard on top. But, I'm picky. Other options include hot dogs (red or white), hamburgers, fish, fried egg - and the strangest, a deep-fried pork chop. I've tried most of them, but generally stick with sausage or white hots: "sausage plate, beans, no mustard" - I can order it in my sleep. It's a huge amount of super-filling food, and perfect for a late night post-bar snack. My little circle of friends used to eat them before the parties started, after classes, Fridays. I ate two at a time, once. A friend nearly finished three. Ah...

Mixing Memory has a post that summarizes the results of some experiments in which subjects are exposed to words and images that suggest concepts like Polite, Rude and Elderly and then measure the subject's response to various situations. Ex. in one experiment, two groups of subjects arrange words to form sentences; one group has words that relate to politeness, one to rudeness. And then...

While the participant was completing the scrambled sentence test, the experimenter left and began talking to a confederate (an experimenter posing as another participant). When the participant finished, he or she came out of the room to look for the experimenter to receive instructions for the next task (as the experimenter had instructed). However, the participant always found the experimenter talking to the confederate. Bargh et al. then measured the time it took for the participant to interrupt the conversation between the experimenter and the confederate.

Guess what they found. Of the participants who did the RUDE version of the sentence test, more than 60% interrupted in under ten minutes (they cut it off at ten minutes -- can you imagine how frustrated some of those participants were after standing there for ten minutes?), whereas fewer than 20% of the POLITE-primed participants interrupted in that time. The neutral list participants were in between at around 40%. The RUDE participants also interrupted a full 3 minutes sooner than neutral participants, and almost 4 minutes sooner than the POLITE participants.

Apparently, just reading words associated with rudeness causes people to become more impatient and interruptive; and reading words associated with politeness causes people to become more patient and ... polite.

..."But it gets weirder."

(found on the web)

The former lead guitar player for one of my all-time favorite bands, the late Colorblind James Experience, has started a blog about his time with CBJE, called Colorblind James and me.

From the start, Chuck's vision was to have fast, danceable music that embraced lyrics that dealt with pain & suffering. Pain & suffering were the realities of life, the music was hope. The hope was seen in the reckless abandon with which the fans would dance to songs of sadness, loneliness, about common folk who got dealt a bad hand. Reckless abandon was spirit, and spirit, to Chuck, was bigger than pain & suffering.

Now to see if he has any copies of that hard-to-find first CBJE record, on CD...