Careful now, moshers!

Afternoon all. Slow start to the day - we went out to celebrate Dan's PhD and birthday yesterday, in the bright lights of Birmingham, before returning to my place for pointless, involved arguments about inconsequential stuff - all in all, the perfect evening. We gave him big canvas-printed photographs - one of a gull I took in Oslo because that's what his PhD was sort-of about, and another of him holding a map and gazing into the distance. I call it 'To the Dole Queue!'.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing has chanced upon a paper in the prestigious British Medical Journal on the dangers of headbanging. It struck a chord - as a youthful metal fan in the early nineties, I knew that if your neck wasn't stiff and sore the next morning, you'd had a bad night down at The Rigger (so unreconstructed even now that one of their pub quiz prizes is 'porn'), The Sutherland Arms (now demolished) or whichever scummy rock pub you'd patronised. I really, really miss my mass of very long hair - you just can't mosh without it, but incipient thinning persuaded me that Francis Rossi's is not a look to emulate.

An average head banging song has a tempo of about 146 beats per minute, which is predicted to cause mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75°. At higher tempos and greater ranges of motion there is a risk of neck injury.

Conclusion: To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.

Here's an instructive video on how not to headbang. Careful now.