Are you what we doctors call "Quite Well?"

Psychiatrists at the University of Gaberdene have determined that people agreeing with two or more of the following statements may find themselves belabouring under a lucrative clinical condition:

• When I make a pot of tea I do not have the urge to stick the tea cosy on my head, jam my arm up my jumper and start muttering: "Not tonight, Josephine!"
• When trying to be detected by a motion sensor for office lights or automatic doors I do not make jazz hands and shout: "Mammy!"
• When I see a sign saying: "To Let" I say: "Toilet."
• I don't shout: "He's behind you!" during the battlement scene in Hamlet.
• When confronted by an upturned umbrella in the bath I do not have to quell the urge to have a crap in it.

How well did you do, chums?

When Diana Dors ruled the world

My dad was playing on the swings with my small niece.

"Dinosaurs were very, very big," she said.

"Yes they were," he agreed.

"They were HUGE. And very, very fierce. Dinosaurs were very, very big and really fierce."

"Ooh yes."

"I've seen a dinosaur's bones. I saw a dinosaur skeleton. We went to the museum and we saw a dinosaur skeleton. It was huge. And I touched its claw. But it was all right because it was only the skeleton."

"Very good. Did it have big teeth as well?"

"It had very big teeth. But I wasn't scared: there aren't any dinosaurs any more. They died out. They all died out a long, long time ago."

"Well, that's a relief, isn't it?"

"It must have been very scary when you were a little boy, with all those dinosaurs running around."

The perils of manliness

For the past week I've been trying, and failing, to come up with a short and snappy comment on Tazeen's post about hopeless chat-up lines. I won't spoil things by telling you the offending comment but it is a classic of its kind.

Why do we do it? Oh, we all have done, let's be honest (perhaps not so spectacularly!). The answer, as always, is down to evolution.

Men are wired such that when they first approach a woman they find very seriously attractive they are more likely than not to say something utterly stupid. This is deliberate on Mother Nature's part. In the scheme of things the child-bearing partner in the relationship is bodily committed to a lengthy process of gestation and upbringing so she needs to be particular about finding a suitable mate. Now let's the honest, the usual combination of raging testosterone, general manliness and a pair of well-polished shoes would ordinarily be irresistible. So Mother Nature, in her wisdom, has redressed the balance by providing a hurdle for the gentleman to negotiate in the relationship. Just as the peahen is attracted by the peacock that can survive the rigours of the jungle despite the burden of an unfeasibly-long train of feathers so the female of our species stops and thinks to herself: "Bloody hell! Well, if they've not killed him by now he's either got a lot of money or he's very good in bed."

Nature's marvels don't end there. We're told that ladies forget much of the pain of childbirth so as not to put them off having more children.* Men are similar: we can none of us remember that first, calamitous opening line.

Luckily, we have the womenfolk to do that. Often. In company.

---

*I notice it's generally male doctors telling us this, not ladies who've had children.

Apocrypha

In the world of science one of the signal honours is to have a new species of something or other named after you. It's a bit like being mentioned in dispatches.

Coprolites are the petrified faeces of long-extinct animals. As they cannot be ascribed to a particular animal they're given a scientific name of their own for the purposes of description and study.

Back in the dark ages when I was a student there was an urban myth about the young research palaeontologist at one of our newer universities whose life had been made a misery by an overwheening boor of a departmental head. The story was that he got his revenge by describing a newly-discovered coprolite in an august periodical and naming the new species after the head of his department. The idea of this bloke having to accept the honour with all good grace while everyone and his dog knew that his subordinate had called him a fossilised shit in a peer-reviewed article tickled us no end.