"I want to have sex," said Zebedee.

It took me far too long to find this one.

I actually saw the article in that paragon of virtue, the Evening Standard, on Friday, and ripped it out of the paper to keep in a secret place - that is to say, I just put it in my bag. Not that I can remember which bag. I've shaken out my rucksack, two Forbidden Planet bags, two Orbital Comics bags, one Sainsbury's bag, and a box of Kellogg's Crunchy Nut. Neither finding the article anywhere nor remembering what it was about, other than it was vaguely connected with sex, I did the honourable thing, and promptly forgot all about it until this afternoon, when I actually bothered to look on the paper's website and type "sex" into the search box, á la the generic search term I entered into AltaVista when I was 14.

Eventually I found it.

Don't be dismayed if people around you can't stop yawning. It may be because they find you sexually attractive. Yawning is not just a symptom of tiredness but it can also be a sign of stress, interest - and wanting to have sex, scientists said.

Well. If scientists said it, then it has to be true.

More seriously, though (and it's not often I say that), I actually believe this one. Not because scientists said it, but because I've experienced the same sort of thing myself.

I don't know if this happens to any of you (because I thought I was some sort of freak, evidently), but at certain points - generally when I'm at work - I yawn so heartily that I feel like I could grow another few inches when I stretch. This isn't a new phenomenon; I've often felt like I can't quite get into my body, and that if I could just stretch enough for my skin to rip open and my muscles to stretch as long as they wanted to, I'd be even more tall and gangling than I already am. But I digress. When I yawn like this, it's not uncommon for me to come out of the yawn feeling turned on.

I'm not sure what turns me on, though. I don't have a yawn fetish (thank God), and I don't recall being turned on and then yawning, which causes an exacerbation of such. It just happens that I yawn and stretch and then I discover that I have an erection. Of course, this may just be the rush of blood and oxygen that happens with a combined yawn/stretch, but why should that turn me on? Shouldn't that just make me heady?

A yawn, as I'm sure you know, is the same as a hiccup - it's your body's attempt to get more air into the lungs, same as a hiccup, due to either an obstruction of your oesophagus, or a lack of oxygen in the circulatory system. This much I know, insofar as my rudimentary knowledge of human biology goes. And it also stands that when yo see somebody you find attractive, or think of a situation you find arousing, you can become a little breathless. So perhaps the two are linked. And then there's post-orgasm sleepiness, which is often brought on following a yawn following an orgasm. OMG CONNEKSHUNZ.

So, yeah, there's a lot of truth in that one. ILB's Real Life Experiences FTW.

Now, if only scientists could explain why I sometimes have a hacking cough when I try to masturbate...