Wordy Wednesday - Losing One's Cool

You Jane, Me Tarzan? Me Not Remember.

It's the old, old story. A man met a woman. I don't know where, though I'm guessing it was in Holland, and I don't know the circumstances. Maybe he went to his local bank or post office. Maybe she was behind the counter. Maybe they were both in the waiting room of their local STD clinic, or perhaps she ran into the back of him at the traffic lights.

In any case, he hadn't met this woman before, but he was somewhat taken by her physical charms. Perhaps it was her well-endowed ears, or the way her thin top clung to the hump on her back, or the smooth curve of her seemingly endless nose. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

They only spoke a few words, before she asked for his address. Which is why I was guessing that they had just been involved in a minor prang. Anyway, what we do know is that he couldn't remember where he lived.

It could be that he was drunk, or concussed, or (like me) permanently in a daze, but he was shocked by this and reasoned that it must have been the attractiveness of the woman that had made him lose his mind. Being a psychologist, he set up an experiment to prove that it was all her fault.

The experiment involved measuring the mental capacity of students before and after chatting with someone. The male students who had just been talking to someone they found attractive achieved significantly lower scores than anyone else. In particular women aren't affected by men in this way. Presumably the men's mental capacity was fine once the blood had found it's way back to their brains.

I'm sure this is hardly earth-shattering news, though I wish they'd done the experiments here. I wouldn't have minded getting plied with gorgeous women in the interest of serious scientific research.

The full story is here.

Please Use the Other Toilet

I'm not a great fan of Stephen King. I've never read his novels, so I suppose I mean that I'm not a great fan of his films. Apart from the Shawshank Redemption. Unlike that one, most of them are concerned with the supernatural.

A colleague lent me a DVD of one of them, whose name escapes me now. Sadly, not because there's a stunning woman in my flat, but just because my brain is like a sieve at the best of times. In this film there is some kind of evil monster which first becomes apparent when some friends go on a hunting trip into the middle of nowhere.

Actually it first becomes apparent when one of the guys decides to use the facilities. The monster is somewhere in the plumbing and understandably doesn't take kindly to someone crapping on it. The result of all this is horrible and bloody. And fatal.

For most of us, this sort of thing only happens in Stephen King films. But in Australia, the contents of your toilet can quickly turn out to be deadly. At least, from what I know about Australian toilets. All of my knowledge about Australian toilets, and indeed Australia comes from lager adverts. I couldn't find any on You Tube about deadly spiders in the "dunny", but I'm sure they made at least one.



According to my extensive research, one might want to be careful about sitting down before making sure that there are no poisonous spiders or scorpions lurking somewhere on the porcelain. But even in Australia you would not expect to find a three metre python grinning up at you.

If it had been me in that situation, whatever bodily functions I went in there to perform would probably have happened spontaneously as I ran out of the room screaming, but our Ozzie guy lives in the bush, so I bet he calmly walked out and shut the door, went to another toilet, and then phoned the local snake expert, and arranged for an appointment.


The expert went round, but was unable to remove the snake, because it was tightly wrapped round the S-bend. He finally got it out on his fourth visit. I wonder how many days later this was. The snake was then released back into the wilds.

I've decided I won't emigrate to Australia.