I'm undertaking an unscientific study, unscientific because of my methodology and lax note-taking, of the songs that appear most mornings in my head. Does this happen to you? Not that you undertake a scientific study, but that you wake up from a deep sleep to find that, say, White Christmas is parading around your brain?

I do. Or at least, I did last week. Why White Christmas? The week before that, and the impetus for this study, the song in my head was Generals and Majors, by XTC. I had to think about who sang that one, because I cannot even guess at the last time I heard it or was even conscious of its existence.

This morning, I awoke with Down in the Park, Gary Numan's cheery ode to killer robots, in my head. I can think of no specific reason for it, although it did lend a nice, metallic sheen to an otherwise hectic morning of preparing breakfast for 80 of my closest coworkers. Nothing gets you through the day like imagining you're a servile mechanical being.

So, I have started a log of these wake-up songs. I'm hoping that doing so will not create a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein I consciously program my inner iPod. I kind of like the apparently random nature of the songs that appear in my head, but it does unnerve me a little bit. Obviously, they're coming from my brain, but why?

Star of the day. . .Wolfman Jack