It's December, which means it's also time for a semi-annual tradition: my infamous Christmas Tunes Acronym Quiz.

This year, there are 350 300 tunes to decode / identify¹ - most of what you'll find on almost any Christmas CD, plus a lot more besides (including some very obscure ones!).

A paranormal organisation who have managed to pick up thousands of online followers (Spiritual Research Foundation) have debuted their own daft theory on the predominant cause of homosexuality - posession by ghosts and "subtle-sorcerers" from hell. They apparently believe most gay men are possessed by female ghosts, and lesbian women possessed by male ghosts (!).

Some interesting nuggets of information have been revealed by the Tavistock Clinic.

The number of young people referred to England's only gender identity clinic for under-18s has doubled in the past year to nearly 1,400, figures show. The data also shows that nearly twice as many biological girls than boys were referred to London's Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust last year.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36010664

So after seeing the "Member for" indicator stuck on 5 years 12 months for the past few weeks, it's finally ticked over to 6 years 22 hours.

Apparently the latest trend sweeping classrooms (schools, colleges, universities) is "Rogeting," named after the famous brand of thesaurus.

Rule 63: "For any given male character, there is a female version of that character."

Harry and Hermione shippers, rejoice! While in the books, Harry ended up with Ginny and Hermione with Ron, Jo Rowling's admitted she now feels differently...

Since I don't know if / when I'll be able to log on tomorrow (hey, it's a busy day!), I would like to wish you all:

Have a Very Happy Christmas.

Eat, drink and be merry (in both senses of the word!) :)

So, as we're well into advent, it's time to roll out my infamous Christmas Tunes Acronym Quiz again. This year, I've bumped it up to 160 songs - most of which are either carols or secular seasonal pop songs (i.e. ones that actually mention winter / snow / Christmas, rather than just those that share nothing in common with the season other than release date), but there's a handful of secular songs considered traditional and the occasional novelty / parody track.

The Daily Fail has scored yet another notch in the "WTF?" category with this article:

'Humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig': Extraordinary claim made by American geneticist

I wasn't previously aware of this, but courtesy of Wikipedia's Main Page, I've discovered that today is (or has been for those in UTC+3 or greater) National Coming Out Day.

It is apparently "an internationally observed civil awareness day celebrating individuals who publicly identify as bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender–coming out regarding one's sexual orientation and/or gender identity being akin to a cultural rite of passage for LGBT people. The day is observed annually by members of the LGBT community and allies on October 11."

So if you weren't already aware of it, consider yourself informed :)

Courtesy of the Book of Face, I have discovered one of our most prolific authors is celebrating a milestone birthday today.

Who'd a thunk it? I've been entertaining you with my random comments (which I've been assured on previous anniversaries are not incomprehensible gibberish, despite the joke in my Twitter bio) and (very) occasional story for just over four years now.

Righteo, tomorrow I'm heading off for Hastings for a week (well, heading to Mum's, then on to Hastings on Friday), so it's likely to be a week Saturday before you start seeing my random comments starting to appear on your stories again :(

Just spotted this:

Uruguay's Congress passed a bill on Wednesday to allow same-sex marriages, making it the second country in predominantly Roman Catholic Latin America to do so.