The Boston Globe asked readers for their favorite work catchphrases in yesterday’s paper, and this one really got me:

“Can’t get nine women to have a baby in a month” is the standard answer to when some exec asks for an unreasonable amount of work to be done in a week and thinks they have the solution by hiring a bunch of consultants.—Liz Clauser, South Boston

Another good one was:

“Do the red one!” in the same tone as the car commercial where the kids are watching the guy wreck cars. It means [Quality Assurance] has to test the software again.”—Jim Fritts, North Reading.

We don’t have any work catchphrases here that I can think of, but maybe I’ll try to implement a few now that I’m feeling inspired.

The Centers for Disease Control now wants airlines, travel agents, and online reservations systems to collect a lot of information—e-mail address, cellphone number, traveling companions’ names, your name, your address, and your emergency contacts name, address, and phone number—to help control the spread of disease during a bird flu pandemic, according to Government Health IT.

Battling a pandemic disease such as avian flu requires the ability to quickly track sick people and anyone they have contacted.

In response, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have proposed new federal regulations to electronically track more than 600 million U.S. airline passengers a year traveling on more than 7 million flights through 67 hub airports.

The new regulations, which are available on the CDC’s Web site and will be posted for a 60-day comment period in the Federal Register starting Nov. 30, would require airlines, travel agents and global reservations systems to collect personal information that exceeds the quantity of information currently collected by the Transportation Security Administration or the Homeland Security Department.

I am totally torn on this one. On one hand, it could help prevent a huge outbreak. On the other, it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. Is this OK in the name of health, but not for security reasons? Or vice versa? I guess, if it came down to it, I could learn to live with it, as long as the information is guarded like Fort Knox, only better.

While I was walking the dogs before work this morning, all kinds of strange things kept popping into my head: My old roommate’s name (wonder what Guy’s doing these days?), the theme song to “Bewitched,” the taste of breadfruit, how scary “Fatal Attraction” was when it first came out—you get the drift. My mind is an endless stream of irrelevant trivia. Which doesn’t bode well for my IQ, according to this article.

Basically, it says that researchers at the University of Oregon did some brain-measuring to figure out what makes people score high on visual working memory tests (those with good visual working memories also tend to score high on cognitive tests, it says). Turns out that they aren’t just stuffing more info into their heads; instead, they have the ability to ignore the irrelevant.

The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person’s memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia…

“People differed systematically, and dramatically, in their ability to keep irrelevant items out of awareness,” Vogel said. “This doesn’t mean people with low capacity are cognitively impaired. There may be advantages to having a lot of seemingly irrelevant information coming to mind. Being a bit scattered tends to be a trait of highly imaginative people.”

So I guess there’s some hope for people like me after all. Now, can someone get the jingle for Foxwoods out of my head?

Update: According to the New Scientist, maybe all I need to improve my memory is more coffee.