I went to the Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square for lunch today. They closed the shop down for a few days for a redesign. The old way wasn't the fanciest of stores, but was pretty self-explanatory, you walked in, got on line to place an order at a bank of cash registers along the back, and various minions prepared your sandwich or croissant or whatever. You could grab a pre-made salad or a piece of fruit from coolers and racks while you waited on line, but otherwise pretty basic.

The new design is a disaster. You walk in and the cash registers are right in front of you, but the sandwich makers are along the back, the soup over here, the salads over there, and it's all very cramped, so there's no way to say, go serve yourself some soup without people thinking you're cutting into the sandwich line. People were milling around, totally confused, and they had three or four people whose job it was just to explain to people where you're supposed to go to place your order and pay for your food.

This is supposed to be fast food. It seems to me that if you have to tell the customers how your new design works, then your new design doesn't work.

"Everywhere I go, everybody is saying, 'booty-this' and 'booty-that' and it's really irritating." - Beyonce Knowles.

Gee, you don't say.

This story fascinates me. Researchers trained monkeys to "pay" for treats using pebbles, and then monitored what happened when they treated one monkey better than another - giving a grape instead of a cucumber, or giving a monkey a treat for free.

" If one monkey got a grape in return for her pebble but the other only a less desired piece of cucumber, the shortchanged monkey would often refuse to hand over the pebble in exchange or might decline to eat the cucumber — both very unusual behaviors.

These refusals were often accompanied by emphatic body language, like dashing the pebble or the cucumber on the floor, Dr. Brosnan said. The expressions of exasperation were twice as common if the monkey offered a cucumber saw her companion being given a grape without even having to hand over a pebble."

I just got this picture in my head of a pissed off monkey hurling the cucumber to the ground, like "Screw you researcher! You know where you can put your cucumber!"

Theres a story in the New York Times today about the Bolshoi Ballet firing a ballerina because she is allegedly too fat. It contains this fascinating nugget.

"The charges have flown so fast and furiously that Ms. Volochkova, after much negotiation, agreed to have her height measured today by The New York Times. She is, in fact, 5 feet 6 inches tall."

I'm just trying to picture the official New York Times tape measure being rolled out here.

So everyone's been posting links to this paragraph which claims that according to " rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy" the order of letters doesn't matter; as long as the first and last letters are right, people will be able to understand meaning. Someone even wrote a word scrambler that lets you mix up your own paragraph.

However, I haven't been able to find any links to the actual study, or anything more than that first graf, that proves there was actual research done on this. Maybe I'm too suspicious for my own good.