Pheromones

There are lots of things I don’t know or understand.

Conventional wisdom says that the older you are, the wiser you are. And I have come to the conclusion this is  false. 

It’s a white lie to temper the pain of getting older and realising you are no longer able to go out on the ran-dan for two nights consecutively.

What seems to be happening is the older I get the more stuff I look into and the more I look into the more I don’t understand. If I was less inquisitive I might be able to master the topics I have already struggled with but just when I seem to get to grips with something like, say, quantum physics. Another comes along, like Pheromones.

Now before you jump up and say you understand Pheromones, please read the following:

It is believed that mammals detect pheromones through an organ in the nose called the VNO (Vomeronasal Organ), and connects to the hypothalamus in the brain. The VNO in humans consists of just pits that probably do not do anything. If humans do respond to hormones, most likely they use their normal olfactory system.

Do you really understand Pheromones?

If you do please explain to me what a hypothalamus is or what the olfactory system is? Or for that matter what are the pits they refer to; arm, lava, money? And finally please note the use of the word ‘if’ in the paragraph above. If is a seldom used word in science. If you see ‘if’ written in a scientific paper, it generally means they don’t know either.

I don’t understand Pheromones and I would challenge anyone to say they do. Unless you are a Pheromone scientist that is, if such a thing exists, then I might believe you.

I might ask you why though.

Christmas and the madness which goes on at this time of year is another older and un-wiser subject of mine. I think I have blogged till I am blue in the face on this subject so I wont. 

Christmas is safe this time round.

Naturally though at this time of the year thoughts also turn to what we might or might not have achieved in the previous year and what we are resolving to definitely, definitely, do or stop doing during the next year. Definitely.

Let me just get past Christmas and then I will definitely eat less, definitely stop smoking, read more, study to become a doctor, stop having illicit thoughts about Amanda from purchasing or whatever dirty shameful thing it is you want to change.

All good stuff if it ever happens.

I myself prefer to depend on more tried and tested methods of determining what I am going to be doing tomorrow, the day after and so on.

I read my horoscope.

Now (I’m holding my hand up) before you say anything just hear me out.

Were the Greeks stupid?

I’m not talking about the current tax avoiding, ask Germany to bail them out and then complain when they do, dinner plate and economy breaking, version.

Not them, no.

I’m talking about the Greeks from ancient times. The ones who gave us Hippocrates, Leonidas, Archimedes, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and, I might add, Astronomy.

They also gave us Astrology.

Astrology was a collateral byproduct from figuring out how the planets moved in relation to each other and what happens when you sit in the bath so yes, the ancient Greeks also gave us our daily horoscopes.

So if you believe that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the object submerged why not that you might meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger tomorrow?

My horoscope from Astrology.com for today tells me this:

What a relief! Your energy is returning, especially regarding affairs of the heart. Today you'll be freed from the bonds of doubt about your judgment. With you, self-doubt is an especially touchy subject. You're miserable when your confidence is gone. The energy flow has been re-established, although it may take you a few days to fully recover from the ordeal of recent weeks

And from CafeAstrology.com it tells me:

Prepare for the possibility of adjusting your plans today, dear Cancer, as wires can get crossed and plans can turn around, although it's likely only a temporary situation. Energy levels are not at their best right now. In fact, it can be difficult knowing what your next step will be, so aim to go with the flow, or take extra time to yourself if the flow is not very comfortable. Haste makes waste today, particularly with family and home matters, as well as in love.

I interpret this as my energy is returning. Or its not. I need to go with the flow because next steps are not clear. I also need to be careful rushing into something.

And here in lies the problem with horoscopes.

I don’t really check my horoscope just in case you were wondering. Aside from, that is, the weeks of intense and heavy research I have conducted for this blog.

No. I do what everyone else does and resolve to do something on the 31^st

I also, like everyone else, break it two days later as the painful, sober, withdrawal infested cold light of the new year cuts through the party fog.

The problem with Horoscopes is they are just rubbish. Vague, contradictory and rubbish.

Oh and of course they are utterly made up.

They have as much probability of being correct as have fortune cookies, those stupid love heart sweets, a smelly gypsy with a snow globe in front of her or me for that matter.

I therefore give you my Horoscope for whatever day you end up reading this;

Sagittarius

Venus is in equinox soon and the aura from this celestial event will be affecting your mood. If not, its because you have managed to circumvent the negative ying waves. Don’t throw money away today as it will seriously affect your finances.

Leo

A disturbing warp has occurred in the moon-galaxy of your zodiac. Don’t worry, your energy levels will return with the ebb and flow of Taurus. Do not sleep with him/her tonight! You/she will get pregnant! And the baby will be really ugly - have a glass of milk and an early night.

Taurus

Alcohol and cake have taken their toll. Do not worry though, the plutonium rays from a recent Klingon retrograde will sort out your balance and you will be back to your normal happy self before you know it. If you are depressed, fat and an alcoholic – don’t drink or eat any more cake mind. Klingons cant help you. Try dieting, therapy and the AA.

Cancer

This is my star sign so tomorrow will be great. You will wake up in perfect harmony with the normally destructive Babylon waves and your body will feel perfectly equipped to deal with whatever the day has in store. You will also look great and be a great lover.

Libra

Don’t bother. Its gonna be bad whatever you do.

Gemini

If you share the house with a Libra, get the hell out. If you are with a Cancer, get back into bed with him/her, they are on fire. If you have neither go out and find a Cancer but be careful of mistaking a Leo for a Cancer. There will be consequences from such a mistake.

Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces

Whatever, a bit like Sagittarius

Aries

With a full moon equinox happening within the next twelve months anything could happen. Be a nice person, don’t pee in the shower or wear pink shirts if you are a guy.

And so on.

Its easy to do horoscopes. I could do twelve a day no problem. I might even put more effort into it if pushed.

What I don’t understand is why so many people actually read this stuff. As a bit of light-hearted fun yes but whole industries have grown up around this. Facebook and the rest of the internet is chock full of it. Newspapers are filled with this pseudo rubbish.

Astrology is fake, Pheromones are fake, quantum physics, as I have discovered, are also probably made up. 

Or maybe its just me.

Maybe as I get older and supposedly wiser I am just content to understand what I understand and everything else I will just drop into a box labelled ‘made up nonsense’. I’ve recently dropped Minecraft into that box along with Pheromones and now horoscopes.

It’s a big and growing box and this is what scares me. I’m terrified when the day arrives that I drop ‘Music or the youth of today’ into that box.

I therefore resolve in 2014 to start taking an interest in my thirteen year old son’s musical preferences. I will strive to become hip (again) next year. I will learn how to build badly pixelated stuff in a fake world with a rubbish looking axe. I will also sign up to a daily Facebook horoscope feed.

In short I will do anything to rid myself of the sudden liking I have for collecting fridge magnets, general aging and the realisation that my 43 years of collected wisdom is fairly useless.

I might even buy a motorbike.

Planet Stanford

With a few hours to kill before my flight to London departed and not wanting to kick my heels around San Francisco airport I took the decision on the spur of the moment get off 101 and take a look at Stanford University.

I had heard rumours about an alternate, parallel world existing and wanted to see if they were actually true.

On planet Stanford apparently only the rich, beautiful and super smart are allowed in and I wanted to see it for myself.

Almost immediately after leaving the highway it was confirmed to me. I found myself driving up a tree lined road surrounded by manicured lawns and bubbling fountains. Ahead of me sat a low rise Spanish hacienda, squat, resplendent and seriously wealthy.

The Californian sun glinted through the leaves. The birds sang songs that only happy well fed and groomed birds can. Most birds sound desperate. Sodden Scottish crows are fucking miserable. 

A Stanford sparrow could lead a bel-canto opera.

I parked my car in a pristine carpark on campus and climbed out dressed appropriately for 15hours of travel; 7 year old shorts, t-shirt and flip flops.

On the greenest grass you have ever seen sturdy handsome young men threw small rugby balls between them. Studious pretty bespectacled young women sat cross legged under pine trees reading poetry and groups of teenagers quietly debated 17^th century Hungarian politics.

Even the air was cleaner. It was as if the dirt and grime of Highway 101 only a 5minute drive away couldn’t break through the invisible force field protecting the Stanford idyll.

I stood a safe distance away. I was still jet lagged, smoking and drinking polystyrene coffee.

I was hiding.

No one smokes on planet Stanford and the few who looked in my direction gave me the sort of look normally reserved for lepers with child fiddling tendencies.

I peered into their chino and polo shirt filled perfect lives. I was a voyeur and stayed only for the time it took to smoke one cigarette.  I felt so out of place it was unsettling.

Stomping out the cigarette on the pristine tarmac I climbed back into my budget hire car and re-joined the dust, dirt and strip malls of 101.

Planet Stanford offered me nothing other than confirming its existence and making me feel grubby, poor and unhealthy.

But I’m not that unhealthy or even that grubby. I might have been skint in comparison but really I’m just a normal person with pretty much average everything.

Looking back on that moment now I can see it for what it was.

Those twatty, cheesy, happy clappy, arm and hammer, cleverer than you will ever be kids were the freaks, not me. So there that’s that.

As I grew up everyone I knew, who happened to think they were in a position to give me advice, would tell me fitting in wasn’t the way to go.

Stand out from the crowd. 

Don’t be a sheep. 

Lemmings are the stupid ones.

If Colin jumped off the bridge would you do the same?

Well no. I wouldn’t jump off the bridge but I might laugh with him at a drawing he just did of a penis on Shirley’s school jotter.  

I couldn’t then, and still can’t for that matter see the parallel that was always drawn between me getting into trouble by joining in with someone else’s silly prank and jumping to a horrible icy watery death. But they were the grown ups so they must know best.

So the wise advice I received was to not follow the crowd and make my own, unique way in the world. 

Sage advice indeed but it never really took into account the most immediate real world issues which in doing so this would have presented me:

• People who stood out got punched, bullied and ended up with penises drawn on their school books.
• People who stood out generally had no friends.
• People who stood out generally were poor and had toast breath.

So I didn’t. I did my utmost to blend into the middle and kept saying no I wouldn’t jump off the bridge whilst staring at my shoes.

I hid behind the crowd clutching onto the median pole and watched from a safe distance as other less fortunate ones got wedgied. It was a survival technique which served me well.

But of course in the long run, the spekky kid with permanent marker water vole whiskers drawn onto his face ends up as David Bowie. The poor kid with a plastic Tesco’s school bag ends up as Morrissey or Jon Bon Jovi. 

They are the ones who end up with more girls and money than they can handle. And this is how it should be. The world is doing the right thing when this happens.

Its Karma working properly.

Getting lost in the crowd isn’t so bad either though. If I was an Impala sauntering through the savannah I would make sure I was in the middle. It’s a guarantee of safety. The odd weird one jumping around doing handstands to impress the girls on the periphery might look cooler. He might even get more interest from the girl Impalas (Impala-esses?)  but I guarantee I will be having the last laugh as a pride of lions chew on his ears.

In my world I know it means I will never be the first to find Eldorado but it does mean I will survive long enough to visit it some time later as a tourist. And with a handy audio guide rather than a nasty dose of malaria.

How all this is linked to the beautiful freakish people of Stanford I honestly don’t know. On one hand I was trying to make them out to be the oddballs and on the other they seem to be the epitome of what is considered in khaki wearing American wholesome and good looking.

I guess it’s all relative, in Stanford I stood out. I was the odd one out just waiting to have my head shoved down a toilet. In another environment I am as invisible as they come.

So my advice for what it’s worth is to blend in.

Only stand out if you are absolutely firmly 100% confident of your ground. Be bloody sure there are no lions around before you start your front leg hopping show. Make sure you can actually sing before climbing on the x-factor stage and be really sure of your peeing ability before challenging John ‘Pneumatic’ McPhee to a highest up the wall competition.

Be quiet, keep your head down and don’t shout a lot.

You might not get groupies, drugs or the attention of a bunch of in-season Impalas but that’s ok, you will also survive. Leave the rest to the Sid Viciouses, Jim Morrisons, Kurt Cobains or Indiana Joneses of this world.

They are better at it, much better looking and you can always watch them on telly or read about them in the newspaper from the safety of a warm comfortable magnolia life.

Or, ignore everything I have just said. Stand out, be seriously cool and have a lot of fun.

Just don’t do a header off a bridge because Colin did. 

That would be stupid.

Neeps & Tatties

October is nearly gone.

The weather is fast turning dreich. Snow is visible on some of the lower alpine peaks. Winter tires are being fitted, skis are being cleaned of dead spider’s webs and the whole countryside around me is peppered with large piles of dirty looking root vegetables.

Everywhere I look they are there. Sitting quietly and unobtrusively beside a road. A muddy war zone behind them which was until very recently a pretty field sits testament to uprooting horror they have endured over the last few weeks.

I for one look forward to lathering salty butter on some freshly harvested baked spuds but if October is the time for the potato harvest then how can I still eat chips, wedges, mash or roasters in July?

If I buy a bag from the local supermarket, within a week or so they either start getting soft and squishy or start growing creepy green tentacled feet. Is there a potato preserving trick I am missing or are there other secret things going on behind the scenes which facilitates this modern miracle?

Are they flown in from some poor southern hemisphere third world country leaving the locals to starve? Is there some fiendish scientific group from Belgium creating non October sourced tatties with chemicals and tested on Beagles drugs?

I honestly don’t know the answer to this, and given the answer is most likely out there very easy to find Google, I also clearly don’t care too much about it.

I get my creamy mash every month of the year if I want so why should I care where it comes from or if its loaded with chemicals or other such preservatives?

I don’t but the other common thing about October is the amount of children wrapped up and playing in the streets. October brings with it the October holidays. It seems only a few sleeps since the Summer holidays drew to a close and I’m pretty sure only the blink of an eye before they are breaking for Christmas, then half term, then Easter and I think you get my point. 

All in, by my rough and ready reckoning, it tots up to 13 weeks off school.

As a child, I would long for the moment the school bell would ring and the long endless summer would begin. We would run out throwing books in the air and start a spontaneous song and dance routine just to show how gleefully happy we were. The teachers would stand and watch, shaking their heads, smoking and planning a summer of hippy gatherings or union mischievousness.

I could be wrong but I understood that the October holidays were specifically there to help with the aforementioned root vegetable harvest. I'm so old that I actually picked potatoes during the October holidays. This was in the dim and distant past before they invented a machine to do it.

When most countries were agricultural societies the extra labour from school kids was required to deal with the peak harvest times and thus, October holidays and Summer holidays were invented. The other holidays – Christmas, Easter, are obviously there for other reasons. I have no idea at all about half term.

So if my chips are able to reach my plate without the assistance of child labour then why do we still maintain an agricultural cadence for our school holidays?

The vast majority of working parents don’t work in agriculture. 

The vast majority of working parents don’t get 13 weeks holiday a year so there appears to be a huge gulf between society and the current schooling system.

This issue exists in most countries. The UK and Switzerland are not alone with this and I don’t understand why.

Michael Gove, the current Education secretary for the UK, proposed earlier this year to try to take some steps towards fixing this and was torn to shreds by the National Union of Teachers. The basic thrust of his argument was that the agricultural based holiday schedule had no place in a modern Britain and he wanted to change it.

From what I managed to pick out from the hefty smelly lumps of vitriol thrown back at him is that the agricultural link has been debunked. One argument I saw on a teachers website told me that the longer holidays were a reflection of the standing of teachers in society – i.e. a reward for being a professional. 

And back in 1863 this was considered a valid argument.

I have seen nothing which discusses the effect of longer or shorter time in school on children. What I would like to know is if we reduced the school holidays to say, 25 days a year, would a child’s brain explode from all that extra learning. Would familial structures as we know it melt away? Would we create a generation of geniuses or just dull boring people? Would crime go down? Or up?

And would teachers be dropping from exhaustion having to work the same amount of time as the rest of the population?

What would really happen? 

That is aside from allowing working parents to not have to scrabble around finding childcare to cover the weeks when they still have to work.

I would contend nothing. 

Well nothing apart from a Thatcher-esq confrontation with the NUT that is.

I get 25 days holiday a year.

I work from about 8.30am till whenever I decide to stop in the evening. Sometimes whole weekends are lost. I am not complaining. This is my choice. I could simply choose to not do this and I am fairly compensated for the intrusive nature of my work. Most professional people I know work in a fairly similar way.

I don’t know any teachers though.

In the run up to the 2013 summer holidays my older son told me he wasn’t bothering to go to school for the last week of term. This was because they just sat in class playing games or watching films. When I questioned this with his step-father and mother they essentially confirmed this telling me his time would be better served helping out at home. I couldn’t agree more if this is what happens in school as they ramp down after the three weeks of hard study since Easter but I cant say I’m not concerned.

Surprisingly I have a great deal of respect for teachers. They do a job I couldn’t. The thought of trying to educate a room full of sulky shoe gazing smelly teenagers is one of my many versions of hell. My latter years in the British school system were harpooned by the long lasting and bitter teachers strikes and I know this has slanted my view on the role unions play in general. Since then I have had many interactions with unions through my day job and the view formed 28 years ago hasn’t changed much over the years.

I still have a great deal of respect for the job teachers do though.

What I have serious issues with is the militant unhelpful lazy arsed unionistic blocking of anything which might somewhat resemble change. And the bloody complaining.

So here is the Mike Shanks 3 point plan to change this immediately;

1. Stop complaining about any out of hours work required. Everyone else does it.

2. Burn your union membership card.

3. Cut the school holidays in half.

The benefits would be multiple:

1. People would stop moaning about teachers. Myself included.
2. You could quite justifiably ask for more money.
3. The extra time could be used to teach children other less academic stuff like sports or culture.
4. There could be classes on how work in the real world really is (note; probably best to get outside help in for this one)
5. There would be significant savings for working families on childcare.
6. Families could all take holidays at the same time.
7. Crime would drop. Probably.
8. Children would most likely leave school with a much higher standard of education. 

I can’t think of anyone who would lose out in this alternate crazy world.

Its a win, win, win solution and should be implemented immediately.

And as an added bonus it will have no impact whatsoever on the all year round supply of genetically modified mashed tatties or neeps from Bora Bora.

So there.