Tagged by blue_condition (I've finally finished reading back to -740) and I was going to do the meme anyway:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your LJ along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to.

I Can't Decide by Scissor Sisters. I loved this when it was used in Doctor Who last year - within the story, not just as background - and seeing them play it live at T in the Park was great. It'd dropped off my radar a bit but then I saw this fanvid again, which incorporates the Master singing and dancing along, and is just stunning. (I've just had to watch it all the way through again. Twice.) It's on my WMP playlist and my last.fm playlist and my mp3 player playlist, and I never skip it.

La Vie Boheme from the Rent soundtrack is also permanently on my playlist. This is the movie version; there's a stage version I've got too, but this is the one I've memorised and can sing along to happily. It's an ensemble piece done brilliantly in the movie and on stage.

Miss Otis Regrets by Cole Porter. Another musicals one, though I don't actually know which musical it's from. I've been listening to a few different versions of this, including an old crackly recording of a singer I don't know, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Barrowman. It's just one of those tragic songs, in a stiff-upper-lip '30s Britain sort of way.

Behind Blue Eyes by The Who. This is probably my favourite Who song, and I started listening to them again after seeing a bit of a documentary a couple of weeks ago. Guitar work and vocals are just perfect.

(I Am A) Logical Man by How To Swim. I've no idea how to describe this lot. There are about a dozen of them, doing sort of...jazz indie orchestral rock, I dunno. I'm going to see them tomorrow night at Stereo, supporting ballboy and Popup - Glasgow types should come along.

Chasing Fireflies by The Icicles - one of my first discoveries from last.fm, and pure indiepop twee. Lovely. Very chirpy.

For contrast, Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine, which reminds me simultaneously of being 15 and playing it loudly to annoy my parents ("F*ck you I won't do what you tell me" - every teenager's mantra), and of dancing to it every week in the Cathouse for several years. I learned how to stompy metal dance to this. And of course it's in Guitar Hero.

And I've also rediscovered Saturday Night by Suede - it's not one of their most famous singles, I guess, but it was always my favourite. Very melancholy, and Brett's vocals are haunting.

(Erk, I miscounted - that's eight. I can't decide (HA) what to take out, so call it a bonus.)

I don't tag, but I would love to hear what you're all listening to, so I can add it to my last.fm playlists...

My plan for today:

0930 Tube from Clapham to Euston
1029 Train from Euston to Glasgow
1500ish Tube from Glasgow Central home

Then this happened.

My actual journey today:
0930 Tube from Clapham to Euston. Had to pay an extra pound to get OUT of the tube station, because apparently "Single Journey" doesn't mean single journey.
1015 Station employees informing everyone that there's a major signals problem at Bletchley so there are no trains out of Euston. However, there are also no trains to Scotland from King's Cross due to a fatality, so advised to stay where we are in case they find the signal problem soon and fix it.
1115 Advice changes - should now head to St Pancras, get the train to Sheffield, and change there for Glasgow. Tickets will be valid on all routes and for all companies.
1130 Get to St Pancras, discover the trains are 25 past every hour.
1225 Vastly overcrowded train to Sheffield. Get seat beside harassed mother and two small children. No fistfights in my carriage because of people sitting in reserved seats, but it's close.
1445ish Get to Sheffield. There don't seem to be any trains to Glasgow, but timetable indicates I should change at Darlington.
1454 Train to Newcastle via Darlington. Check with ticket collector, who looks slightly baffled, and suggests I change at York to an Edinburgh train, since there aren't actually any trains to Glasgow from Darlington.
1545 Get to York and recaffeinate.
1555 Train to Edinburgh, mostly populated by what appeared to be an Orthodox Jewish Boys' School outing.
1820 Arrive in Edinburgh.
1830 Train to Glasgow. Hurray!
1930 Get to Glasgow tube. Discover I've somehow managed to wipe all the information off my multi-journey ticket. Nice man gives me a replacement one and advises me not to keep magnets in my bag. I suddenly remember new magnetic bracelet I had in my bag for two days. Ah.
2000 Home. *falls over*

Luckily I appear to have been in a fairly phlegmatic and sanguine mood today (if these mean what I think they do, which they might not) and it didn't bother me much. And the weather was lovely all over Britain. I was actually slightly disappointed not to have, like, an hour's wait at York, because I haven't been to York since I was about 13, and I really liked it.

I always over-provide for my own entertainment, anyway, so I had plenty to do. I have: read the second half of James Blish's A Case Of Conscience, the first half of Jeremy Clarkson's And Another Thing, and the Guardian. Done the Guardian crossword, failed to do the sudoku, and had a better go at the kabuki than I ever have before. Played three games of Scrabble on my DS, and won two. Played Bust-A-Move for an hour or so on my DS. Listened to music. Twittered. Etc.

Now to catch up on six days of LJ.

I keep missing birthdays - belated happy birthday to dibsy, nhw, rwrylsin and burkesworks!

We had a proper thunderstorm yesterday, long and very loud - it was great! The only disappointing this was that it wasn't dark - I love storms in the dark. It was the biggest thunderstorm I can remember in Glasgow for a few years, though. There are some good photos on flickr, and some videos.

I'm heading down to London tomorrow until Tuesday - I've just realised I'll be there for the mayoral election; how exciting! I haven't really got plans yet for Friday or Monday (except finding that shop with loads of gaming miniatures again, to buy a figure for my Dark Heresy assassin) - is there anything I shouldn't be missing in London right now? Otherwise it's probably the British Library or the Tate Modern, or just wandering about. I'm going to see James Marsters on Friday night, Derren Brown on Saturday night and then the Doctor Who exhibition at Earl's Court on Sunday, though, YAY.

purplesnap informs me that one of my posts was a googlewhack for "quiettwitter spambot", but it doesn't seem to be working any more, for some reason - I'm getting no hits at all. Boo. (I'm not putting the quotes in, of course.)

TTD catched from various people:

1. Reply to this post, and I will choose four of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee! Or something.

If you want to know about my icons but don't want to post the thing yourself, just ask in the comments and I'll do more posts...

( Move slightly to the left and take one step forward )

I should really keep a note of which brands and shades of dye turn my hair colours I approve of. It's a bit...red again. It's not too bad, except sometimes they get more intense after the first wash, so... *crosses Schwartzkopf Live off the list* Ooh, I saw a girl in town with awesome purple and pink manga hair yesterday.

Last word on Boobs - synecdochic has written an essay which tries to look at the whole thing from different angles, in a calm and perceptive way and in great depth, and in doing so manages to produce an assessment with which people from all of the many sides of the argument agree. Most of you are probably fed up of the whole thing by now, but if you have the energy to read one single more thing about it, make it this.

I was reading about the Open Source Boob Project a lot last night, and didn't post about it because I wanted to think more about it. Because I read the entry before I saw the brouhaha it caused, and it didn't bother me at all. I wondered whether I'd participate, decided it would depend on the situation and the people and the atmosphere, opened the comments in a new tab to read later (there weren't thousands at that point), and moved on to the next post on my friends list. I've been reading theferrett (and his wife) for years, and that probably coloured my response, because I know a lot of the things people have been assuming about him from that one post are untrue.

I've thought and read a lot more about the whole thing, and...it still doesn't bother me. I can see that it would be a bad idea to take it out into the wider world, but in controlled conditions, it sounds OK to me, though the name is unfortunate.

A lot of the people I've seen arguing against it have interpreted it very differently from me. There are a few misconceptions I've seen a lot, and if these things had been happening, I'd probably be outraged too. But:

• A lot of people are mis-parsing the name. Open Source Boob Project is a Boob Project which is Open Source, not a Project on Open Source Boobs. So all this "My breasts are not open source" - well, no, nobody said they were.
  
  
• It wasn't all about guys getting to touch some titties. There was manboob touching, ass-groping of both sexes, and also back rubs and snuggles.
  
  
• It wasn't started by a bunch of desperate male geeks. It was a mixed gender group, some of whom were married or in relationships, and it was women who initiated the whole thing by touching each other's boobs. It was also women who asked the first "outsider" to join in. There was m-m, f-m and f-f touching.
  
  
• People weren't wearing buttons saying "Yes you can touch my boobs" or "No you can't touch my boobs". The badges indicated whether you could *ask* to touch a person. Even if you had the green badge, you could still say no, and people did. The red badge was so that people weren't approached twice about the project, and for situations like "Don't ask just now, I have my daughter with me".
  
  
• There were a maximum of 40 people participating out of a con of 1,000 - there wasn't massive social pressure to join in. There were non-participants hanging out with participants, and not being shunned or treated as spoilsports.

The argument I've seen that makes sense is that in the eyes of a lot of women, men staring at them or approaching them is frequently a threat, and society in general is immensely sexualised towards breasts, so being asked about the project makes them feel profoundly uncomfortable, or they could feel pressured to say yes in order to receive social or sexual validation. Which I can sympathise with, but I don't think that's enough reason to label it WRONG and give women special protection against it. I hate being made to feel like a victim purely because of my sex, and not because anything's actually happened to me. I don't like being shoved into a little box that says "Victim Of Societal Sexism: Extra Care Must Be Taken". I don't think it helps achieve actual equity between the sexes, either, to treat women and men so differently.

I pretty much agree with John Scalzi, who was at the con but missed the whole thing, and heard about it in a positive way from a female friend later, that it shouldn't be promoted as a project in the world in general, but that there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

(Play nice in the comments, kids, since this topic seems to bring DRAMA...)

I give up on humanity.

Three things that have pissed me off today: ( (with swearing and possible mild TMI) )

Ahh. And now I'm going to watch the Discovery Channel The World Is Just Awesome trailer again, because you can't watch it without smiling. It's just awesome.