KEY POINTS:
Seventies Flashback: Anna Killgour-Wilson snapped this sign in St Stephens Ave, Parnell. "I for one, like many other women, do in fact have a life outside the kitchen," she declares.
* * *
Behavioural scientist Brett Pelham claims there is a tendency to favour things that we associate
with our names, and these decisions have a subtle but powerful influence on major life decisions. According to a story in the Times Online, there's a reason Peter Piper went for a profession picking pecks of pickled peppers.
To test this idea, Pelham came up with a list of names that sounded like the word dentist, such as Dennis. According to census data, the name Dennis was the 40th most frequent male first name in the US population at the time, with the names Jerry and Walter ranking 39th and 41st respectively. Armed with this information, Pelham searched the national directory of the American Dental Association, examining the number of dentists with one of those three first names.
If people's names have no effect whatsoever on the career path they follow, you'd expect there to be roughly equal numbers of people with these three names going into the field of dentistry. But that's not what Pelham and his colleagues found. The nationwide search revealed that 257 dentists were named Walter, 270 were named Jerry - and 482 were named Dennis.
Similarly, people whose names begin with Geo (eg, George, Geoffrey) are disproportionately likely to do research in the geosciences.
(Extracted from YES! Fifty Secrets from the Science of Persuasion, published by Profile Books).
* * *
Strange business names: John Christiansen of Mt Albert has always wondered what the firm of Stiffe Hooker Ltd, of Newmarket, Auckland, actually do (they're architects and engineers).
A reader remembers the line an ad agency friend came up with for Auckland's W. H. Tongue Funeral Directors in the 80s: W. H. Tongue - we've got Death licked! "Naturally, they never heard about it," she says.
* * *
Eugene Rees was reading Sideswipe on Saturday when he saw a familiar face. "OMG, that's my cat!" he exclaimed. "His name is Kipling and he is actually 12 years old (he hides his years well). Just before I moved down to Welliwood, he disappeared. I was pretty down about it and ran a fairly extensive mail drop, but couldn't find him. After seeing him in Sideswipe, there was a flurry of phone calls and a quick trip out to the SPCA followed by positive ID. I'm totally stoked and am in the process of working out how to get said wandering cat to WGTN asap. Many thanks to Dave for rescuing him."
* * *
Today's Video Webpick: Classic Bob Newhart and his revolutionary new therapy technique. Watch it here. Scroll down.
These are the very best online videos from Ana's online magazine Spare Room.