Your cheese is a genius

It's been years since we all learned that exposing your baby to Mozart in the crib made it a certifiable genius (the parents were merely certifiable). And while that had all the marks of a major, internationally significant story for the ages, namely:

--anybody could get the same results simply by rushing out to buy Mozart CDs to play for their baby (which eliminates the annoyance of hard work and the uncertainty of genes) and
--other people could conveniently make piles of cash selling those recordings to their very smart customers (not the babies, the parents)

...while that may have been a very big deal, especially for the classical music industry, because it proved once and for all that art is actually useful (please believe us!), there is now a story that may even eclipse that, particularly if you don't have a child (let's face it, it's probably too late for your little doofus anyway) or you are part of the wine and cheese crowd.

Some folks in Switzerland wanted to find out if the flavor of cheese changed based on what music it listened to. This has always been of deep concern, along with questions about chickens and road crossings (why doesn't somebody just ask the chickens?). If you find yourself wondering what sort of geniuses would come up with such a study, it is obviously a group of persons who listened to Mozart all the time as babies. That is why you didn't think of it.

In homage to the first study, researchers tested different cheeses, giving them playlists of different kinds of music. There was ambient, techno, classical, rock, and hip-hop. Apparently, the cheese that listened to hip-hop was sweeter. Which was apparently what the head of the experiment was hoping for (let's hope there are no holes in his methodology). While this may seem like a blow to classical music (they used Mozart again), it isn't over until they do a follow-up experiment and find out what happens to the people who eat the cheese. I'm betting the mozart-eaters will all grow up to win Nobels.

Also, it turns out that the experiment was done in a place called Burgdorf. Remember it? It came up in a blog I wrote last year about web traffic. And the traffic from Burgdorf was right around the time they must have been conceiving the experiment....hmmm.

Well it's too bad they didn't select any of my music. I've played for people eating cheese before, but not for the cheese directly. I could have provided them with my own playlist. For one thing, I'd be extremely curious about the effects of playing Erik Satie on cheese. I guess I'll have to do that experiment myself.