Metro (a daily newspaper available in London) have dispelled their top 5 urban myths. At number 1:

1. You accidentally swallow about eight spiders a year in your sleep

Why it’s not true:
Spiders have a natural instinct to stay alive and crawling into the heavy-breathing hot, wet mouths of animals goes strongly against this.

Who started it:
Back in 1993 a columnist for PC Professional named Lisa Holst decided to prove that you could make up anything on the internet and people would believe it.

She did this by making up a set of facts that were utterly ridiculous, the spider myth among them (which itself was taken from a collection of insect folklore that dates back to the 1950s, and emailing her findings around the world.

I find this very comforting, as I heard that one a while ago and it kinda freaked me out.

Jeffrey Zeldman posted about a personal experience of when budgets are spent just to ensure the same budget is delivered the next year:

The client—the marketing side of a product development group—had a budget of $60,000 to spend. So they spent it, even though the R&D side of the product development group had not been able to deliver the product.

It’s a theme that comes to mind pretty often - whether it’s in the case of the M4 Motorway (runs past Reading on it’s way from London to South Wales) which always seems to have some sort of roadworks going on to erect another set of new informational signs (that usually inform you that there is a delay due to roadworks… endless loop, that) or the fact that new buildings were constantly appearing all over campus at Loughborough while I was there because - and this is just conjecture that was commonly believed around the place - the huge revenue from the sports side of things couldn’t solely be put back in to the sports concerns.

Seems like there are a hundred million places excess money could be going that would make massive differences to people’s lives. But then things just don’t work that way, do they?

Jonny sent over a link to a remarkable bit of graffiti stop-frame animation today - check out the video here.

An ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in baden (fantoche).

I had to share… that’s just amazing, I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to complete.

If you’re a Twitter user, you might be interested in a site I happened across today - Who Should I Follow?

You put in your username (just the username, mind - it doesn’t ask you for your password or any such nonsense) and it has a think, then suggests other twitter users that you might like to follow.

I’ve been on Twitter for a little while now and have enjoyed it, but it’s much better when you are following a fair few people so that the updates come thick and fast. On that note, I’ve been using Spaz.AIR as my desktop twitter client as of this week and I’m impressed so far. It’s built upon the Adobe AIR platform, which you can find out more about here if you’d like.

Oh and of course, if you are a twitterer -  you can always follow me if you’d like, by visiting my profile.

I was a big fan of South Park back in the day, but lost touch with it for a while. It came back to my attention when Jessi insisted I watch an episode from the latest season (12) called “Canada On Strike”. She was right to insist, I was in hysterics the whole way through - absolutely storming stuff.

So I was having a bit of a blog-about today, as I’ve taken to calling the practice of following people’s blogrolls around to find new reading material, and came across a link from Sean Klassen’s blog (awesome design, too) to South Park Studios.

It’s an official site which lets you watch clips from the show but also Full Episodes online. Or at least, it does if you’re in the US (and maybe Canada… I can’t be sure) - due to contractual obligations, at the moment you can’t view the episodes in England. While this was disappointing (as we have no way at all of watching full episodes of South Park online…) one thing that softened the blow was the way I was informed of this fact - check it out:

That’s pretty funny.