Make Them Go Away, Dave!

Walt over at Truth, Lies and Common Sense relays a WebMD article about Earworms, those snatches of song that lodge themselves in your brain and play over and over and over and over again.

This happens to me more or less continuously. (Seriously. I have some kind of music running through my head almost literally every waking moment, usually two or three very different tracks running in and out of each other. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, the current selection is a mix of the chase through the asteroid field from "The Empire Strikes Back" and Sarah Evans' "Suds in the Bucket".) Usually, the only thing I can do to dislodge one tune is to replace it with another. As you might imagine, this is a temporary solution at best.

The vast majority of the ditties mentioned in the article have chewed on my grey cells more than once. But what the article fails to note is the additional level of pain experienced by those who spend any time with small children. It's bad enough to have to put up with "We Will Rock You," for example, but think how much worse it is to have a whole legion of Barney, Elmo and Wiggles songs ready to leap out at you in the blink of an eye. Oh, the humanity!