Listen up.

When you’ve been served your coffee by the too-pleasant-for-this-early-but-I’m-sure-glad-they-are-patient clerk, thank the person politely, then move to the accessories table.

There you shall add whatever creams, milks, sugars, and other condiments you require. You shall do this in an expeditious manner. Then you shall get out of the way.

You shall not stand there, at the two-person stand-up, stirring away, trying to find zen in the clouds of milk distributing through the coffee or tea. You shall not stand there and sip at your beverage, gazing wistfully out the window at the coming dawn.

You shall get the fuck out of my way.

This is not a ritual, people, this is about getting caffeine into your system before your head explodes.

Sheesh.

The Skeptics Society, along with many other news organisations, got themselves caught reporting on a story without adequate fact checking.

They, and many other news organisations, had to decide how to deal with the fact that they were duped by a misleading, (probably) intentionally inaccurate press release.

I don’t know how the other news organisations handled their respective errors, but the Skeptics Society has a great article about how they performed their due diligence, albeit a bit late.

You should read Fact Checking 101: How Skeptic magazine was duped by an environmental activist group.

The music playing on the internal soundtrack isn’t, always, going to be fully-formed songs as if you were listening to a radio. Sometimes you only get fragments of music.

This morning, stepping out of the shower, I realized that a piece from the Sesame Sreet soundtrack was popping in my ear.

“One two three four five, six seven eight nine ten, eleven twelve.”

It’s difficult to represent the lyric here, but it’s enough to infect you with the tune that is in my brain.

Pray for release.

From the releases and reports out of the Consumer Electronics Show – which is usually expected to be the time and place for new electronic “toys” to be unveiled – it seems that this year’s edition was less about gadgetry and more about content.

The devices that did capture attention were those designed to stream content from computers to televisions and back again, but most of the big announcements were about Microsoft signing content deals to make their Xbox 360 an IPTV receiver or CBS partnering with YouTube for a cross-content promotion.

Read my round-up of CES and Macworld Expo in this week’s Channel Changer.

One of the more interesting hip-hop groups in America, The Roots crossed over into the pop music field for a brief time with this song, a curious blend of blues, rock, and rap.

There’s a great guitar riff that comes just after the chorus, and once it gets into my head, it keeps repeating in there for a few days.

But I don’t mind.