If Rats Could Talk...

Scientists are liable to claim that all animal experiments they conduct are vital for medical research.

How then do they explain the recent news stories about their efforts to disprove life after death by killing rats?

And why would they choose experimental 'models' which they cannot even agree possess a 'consciousness' to vivisect for parapsychological experiments?

How can any creature which is seemingly without a consciousness be any help to medical science whatsoever in this field?

Furthermore why does medical science seek to disprove theories of the afterlife in the first place? To depress humans who like to hope there is something better than this cynical self-seeking world afterwards, to reward them for their long-suffering in putting up with this cynical self-seeking world for a lifetime?

In the event, all these experiments actually proved was that brain activity increases immediately prior to death, which they believe may give rise to 'hallucinations' of the genre reported by humans who have had near-death experiences of travelling at speed through long white tunnels, feelings of overwhelming love and their deceased loved ones waiting to greet them (the most typical type of NDE which has previously been shown to be common to all cultures irrespective of faith or belief systems, age or gender, medication or no medication). Though why they couldn't wire up a willing dying human volunteer to find this out and even ask some useful questions of, I do not understand. There are also many thousands of pre-existing accounts of not just near-death experiences but human beings who were resuscitated or say they 'chose' to come back after up to twenty minutes clinically dead.

I look forward to the rat seance where we get to hear the sequel of this research.

Some metaphysical medical experiments impress me. Such as the one where a Christian group prayed nightly for everyone in one hospital wing but not another hospital wing for a month. So great were the recovery results in the first wing, that they were forced to revise their conscience and start praying for all patients, thus ending the experiment.

Another interesting test was a hospital where terminally-ill patients agreed to be weighed shortly before death and immediately afterwards to establish how much a soul might weigh. 21 grams apparently.

But then they didn't weigh a scientist...

It's Nuts!

On the left is lad's mag Nuts.



















On the right is women's magazine Pick Me Up.

One panders to the red-blooded young male's need for a sexy outlet of bags of silicone covered in skin. One panders to the female's recently discovered (and rather disturbing) need for red blood. Stories about rape, murder, incest and cannibalism among other salacious horrors are apparently what women want as a 'Pick Me Up'

And yet guess which one of this toxic twosome the Co-Operative supermarket have co-operated in removing from its shelves...?

Yes, that's right, the one featuring mock mammaries, come hither looks and articles about which Go Faster stripes boy racers should affix to their cars.

Although not a paid-up feminist by any means, I have long noticed women's magazines becoming increasingly abusive to women, as even if they don't focus on more human horror stories than True Detective magazine, they are encouraging women to believe that they are too fat, too old and not getting enough sex and of the right quality and variety with 'The One'. They seem deliberately designed to undermine the female self-esteem rather than build it as women's magazines of yesteryear believed was their benevolent duty to their readers. They have become one long fest of victimhood and not being good enough. I often wonder what kind of misogynists run these rags, and then, what kind of idiots buy them, but then that might be eroding the idiots', er, sisters' fragile sense of self-esteem, so I'd better not go there...

A male poet friend has even summed up this phenomenon in a frenzied comic poem called 'Fat Sex' which always brings the house down when he performs it.

It's a topsy turvy world we live in and no mistake. But let's not forget that perversion comes in many forms. As does the hypocrisy that invariably accompanies it. So if Nuts is covered up or suffers from premature ejection then the same should apply to other lurid publications unwholesome to the human soul.

On the plus side, Women's Realm seems to have weathered the fashion and has even been known to still give away the odd free knitting pattern. I believe a few Reader's Digest readers are still alive too, gawd bless 'em.

Buzzy, the Helicopter Parent

As anyone who works in University administration will know, there are few phonecalls to make your heart sink like a stone than those which begin; 'I'm phoning to complain on behalf of my son/daughter ____ ____
It's an absolute disgrace that blah blah blah and I demand blah, blah, blah!'

I'm not saying these parents never have a valid complaint and I am always perfectly patient with and polite to them but I invariably have to point out firmly that their Josh or Jocasta will have to contact us directly as THEY are the student/contract holder and not their parents. 'But Josh/Jocasta is far too busy to report this. Have you seen how much coursework he/she has? He/she is on a hospital placement studying 24/7 to be a DOCTOR, I'll have you know!' (God help us, I'm thinking at this point. I hope I am never treated by a doctor incapable of picking up a telephone and reporting a problem or asking a question!)

'Nevertheless if it's important to him/her, I am sure we will hear from them. Please do encourage them to contact us.' Sometimes the crazier parents will ring every colleague in my office to try and elicit a different response, but bottom line; students are legally adults and should be more than capable of picking up the telephone, dashing off an email or visiting the office all by themselves (we even open late on Wednesdays to assist if they are too busy during the academic day). And even if they are not, we are legally obliged to treat them as adults who are, unless they have advised us they have special needs of some kind, in which case they will be offered the appropriate support.

I get particularly riled by the parent who jumps to the conclusion that we don't care or won't do anything about their progeny's problem, and seeks to escalate it to higher powers almost immediately, without even giving us the chance to investigate or liaise with their son/daughter if it sounds too serious a matter to wait for their call. As for 'updates', these are emailed to the contract holder and it is up to them if they share the information with their parent or not.

It has been noticeable over the course of my sixteen years of university administration how the parental trend has been to grow ever more over-protective of children, to the extent they are effectively refusing to let them grow up in some cases, when their role is surely to guide and equip them to fly the nest and lead successful fulfilling lives (I remember in the late 80s, me and my friends couldn't wait to leave home and start our young lives, even if we had no clue what we were going to do.) It is within living memory that students would attend open days on their OWN, rather than the event being turned into an Ascot of competing mothers' hats and outfits. And yet the most nightmare parent (and we've had a few 'office legends') often turns out to have the nicest, politest son or daughter, who looks deeply embarrassed when standing next to the parent ranting at the front desk as if wishing the floor would swallow all strapping 6'3" of their emasculated selves up, though perhaps it is understandable that a parent might feel more protective of the 18-21 year old who still looks about 12 and we get a few of those as well. Sometimes the student will even contact us to apologise for their parents' behaviour later on, so mortified have they been by being frogmarched to our office when they had no problem from their point of view or it wasn't that important. One mother recently saw fit to rant and rave that we had not made disabled provision for her son. It turned out that her son had not registered himself with us as having a disability and had chosen of his own accord, to live in a house with steep steps to the front door and four storeys high to be with his friends, despite his walking difficulties. Far from being grateful at my offer of a new handrail outside the front door as per his mother's demand for his enhanced health and safety, he was furious that his mother had told us about his disability. I apologised to him and said that I was aware that he had not registered with us as having a disability, but felt obliged to respond to his mother's insistence that he was living in an unsafe environment (we can never ignore potential health and safety issues when flagged up).

Some youngsters decide to switch mobile numbers or not take their parents' calls whilst at university as a response to 'smotherlove', though you get the odd father who is also stricken. Students going incommunicado particularly leads to frantic parental phonecalls, but thanks to the Data Protection Act, we literally cannot hand out new phone numbers or email addresses, nor can we tell parents what their son or daughter's exam results were or whether they turned up to whatever exam, though we are happy to pass a message onto the student that their parents wish them to get in touch, or have them checked on by Student Services if there seems to be a genuine concern over their physical or mental welfare.  Notwithstanding, over-involved 'helicopter' parents have actually been linked to the rise of anxiety and depression in youngsters that our Student Services department has observed in the last few years.

I've even heard of parents turning up at job interviews with their sons and daughters nowadays and then wondering why the would-be boss didn't seem to have any confidence in the youngster's ability to work 'on their own initiative' and offer them the job. Or who telephone ahead of the interview to interrogate the HR department or boss about the terms and conditions and where their precious darling would sit. A sure recipe for having their children tied to their apron strings and financially dependent on them until at least middle-age.

Could this be one of the reasons for the rise of the 'kidult', said to spend at least the first twenty years of their adult lives in the active avoidance of assuming responsbility for themselves and playing either commitment-phobe or co-dependent when it comes to relationships?

Why have parents suddenly become so paranoid and over-protective? Don't they have lives of their own anymore? What are they going to do if their children ever do manage to break free, leave home and become people in their own right?

The most darkly comic aspect of this over-weening attitude is that these same parents who have lavished so much attention and money (if not always time) on their offspring have seldom invested the same attention to detail in teaching their offspring  the Green Cross Code or how to cycle safely so that in a moment, all that investment and obsession could be entirely wasted. The dangers of alcohol and substance abuse might also be a useful topic to educate them in. Where is the over-protection then when it is actually needed? I say 'darkly comic' as it is always an absolute tragedy when a needless death happens in real life and I was emotionally shattered for weeks last time we lost a student to a moment of foolishness involving a bicycle, the nearside of a lorry at a junction and an ipod. It is only the irony that is comic. The reality is anything but. Not that there shouldn't be some inbuilt leeway to accommodate the folly of youth and furnish the opportunity to learn from mistakes  It's just that it helps for a youngster to know the rules before breaking them. Safer too.

Before any parents threaten to sue however, I wish to make it clear that this posting by no means applies to ALL parents. Happily a large number of sane and balanced parents continue to exist, even if they insist on accompanying their sons and daughters to Open Days, but are otherwise thankfully, hands off, respectful of their adult child's need to spread their wings and learn to fly for themselves.