Please surgically remove my sack, when the time comes.

My brother-in-law tends not to agree with me very often. The reasons are many and varied, and probably subjects from additional blogs. But I digress. He does agree with me on one thing: When I am an old man and need to be placed in a nursing home, I want you to please have my testicles and sctrotum removed first.



Here is why.

1. I am a fairly misanthropic person to begin with, and I am likely only going to get crankier as I age and become infirm and dependent.


2. Pain makes any one, myself included, crankier and more irritable.


3. There is some correlation between testosterone levels and aggression in humans.


4. If some one helps me out of bed into a wheelchair, they are highly unlikely to then reach inside my adult incontinence garment and adjust my cluster for my maximum comfort.


5. Sitting such that pressure is on my scrotal contents is painful, and will rapidly make me miserable and irritable (see point 2).


6. If I am wearing an incotinence garment, it is because I am incontient. Just changing the diaper won't be enough--my lower region will need to be cleaned and wiped down. Often.


7. If you start scrubbing me with a washcloth anywhere near a testicle that is aching from being squished unremittingly for a few hours, look out!


8. Miserable old guys who hit out at the well-meaning personal care attendants who actually do the bum-wiping in nursing homes are, guess what? Not going to get the best job done on their care. So, more likely that there will be little crumbs and cling-ons, a further source of irritation and discomfort.

Solution? It is obvious--be rid of the pesky scrotum and all that it contains! Scrotectomy. Incontinence garment equals no more sex, my wife has made that clear enough. Hence, no concerns about impact on libido or sexual function in this scenario. In fact, nursing home staff tend to take a dim view of old men who masturbate, and so I am better off with as little sexual appetite as is possible in this setting. If loss of the balls and the testosterone they produce leaves me a little more docile then that is also probably going to be better for me when it comes to interacting with facility staff and demented co-residents (they can be highly frustrating at times). I should be easier to clean with a smooth featureless perineum, scoring me extra points with the care staff and making my life with them a little easier. Most importantly, I won't ever suffer a squashed nut, pinched fold of redundant scrotal flesh, or incessantly tugging sack-hairs entrapped in the folds and tapes of the paper & plastic undershorts I wear.

It's better for me, it is better for the nursing home staff. Apart from the small risk of surgical infection, there is no down side.

Now, I have to confess that I originally expounded on these ideas in the course of after-dinner speaking at a family get together. It was really intended for eliciting laughs. But when my brother-in-law quietly pondered and soberly agreed with the idea, it made me think. He is the jock, the ladies man; macho, if that was a term that had made it out of the last century. For him to agree... maybe there is something in this after all. Will I have the balls to find out?

Come on, you had to see that coming.

They'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only use the edge

I can still remember the radio adverts for the very first monster truck pull that was ever put on in my hometown. The announcer's voice was pitch-shifted down to a baritone rumble, and saturated with echo. In later years it was a style that became a parody of itself, but at that time it was still new, and all business. It was particularly memorable because of the tag-line, "We'll sell you the WHOLE seat, (eat...eat...eat...), but you'll only need the EDGE!(EDGE!...Edge!...edge!...edge)".

Wow. I could really imagine myself leaning forward off the front of one of the flip-down plastic seats in our new football stadium, bristling with excitement along with the rest of the crowd. I was sold. This I gotta see. This was before web commerce (a couple of friends insisted that I should "get on BitNet" but I never did--it seemed too nerdy compared to CompuServe's 7N1 true ascii dial-up service) so we went downtown my brother and I, stood in line at TicketMaster and bought our tickets.

The event was nothing like I imagined it would be, based on the TV ads and Sunday-afternoon motorsports shows I'd seen. It was surprisingly entertaining but it was not edge-of-your-seat excitement, not by a long shot. I never did go to another one of those monster truck events, and I never really gave much thought over the years to that advertising slogan that hooked me in so effectively. That is, til earlier this month.

My wife had received rock concert tickets as a birthday present--"good seats "on the floor of the hockey arena. The idea of seats on the floor at a rock concert was kind of an odd one for me, I have to admit. Festival seating has been gone for a long time, because of what happened at a Who concert once. Still, I remember lots of concerts where the floor remained "festival" style with no seats and just empty space between the stage and the boards at the back of the rink where the Zamboni goes in and out. Everybody mobbed the stage: how close you got depended on how determined you were and what your tolerance was for close physical contact with total, probably drug-crazed, strangers. I only remember two rock concerts specifically where there were assigned seats on the floor. One was Kiss, on their Crazy Nights or possibly their Hot in the Shade tour. I was in a floor seat that night and hated the entire show because everyone stood to try and see better, and within moments everyone stood on their seats to see better, and none of us saw any better than if we had stayed sitting. Except that I kept falling down because the flip-up chair seats were tippy and when ever the stoned rocker chick next to me would weave and bump into me or grab my arm to keep herself from falling I would lose my balance. And no, I wasn't stoned at that concert either--shows even then were too expensive to not be able to remember what went on afterwards. I cursed the interlinked folding cardtable chairs for being what they were and cursed myself for thinking that they would provide a good vantage point in the first place.

Fast-forward to this millennium. The Barenaked Ladies, good Canadian kids with great music, some social conscience, and seemingly down-to-earth personalities (this was pre-coke bust). Should be a mellow crowd, folks my age. Should be civilized. Reserved seating on the floor, close to the stage? Should be awesome.

The performance was everything I expected and more--can't say enough good about the band. Who I can say something bad about is the immense fat f*cker and his enormous tub-of-goo companion who sat near us. Between them, they literally took up three seats, the two they paid for and half of the seat on each side of them. Can't discriminate and penalize the morbidly obese now, can we! Can't charge 'em extra and have 2 tickets, one for each cheek. Nope, no way would civil society tolerate that. One person, one vote. One person, one seat on the plane or in the theater.

So, just as surely as you can't squeeze three pounds of sh*t into a two-pound bag, there is no way that these two 400-pounders can squish into the space allotted and guess what? Big surprise, their lard cascades into the space that we have paid for. I am not going to make a scene and tell the porcine pair off--it won't make them suddenly lose weight, or make an extra seat magically appear. If I was to try to be abrasive enough to make them want to leave I am sure I would get tossed out long before they would depart. Besides, this is Canada. We are polite, and tolerant people. I take pity on my wife, who doesn't relish the potential for frotteurism in this scenario, and shift half-off my chair to make more space for her. Having an aisle seat, I am able to do this without seeding a blog in some other hapless concert-goer. My wife has to sit straddling the crack between our seats, but no big deal.

That was when I started to laugh. "Sitting on the edge of my seat" I always imagined to mean sitting on the front edge. Yet, here I am literally on the edge of my seat for the entire show --the right hand edge.

Yes, they sold me the whole seat, but I only ever got to use the edge. I guess maybe there can be truth in advertising, of a kind.

Sexomones: A strong human pheromone effect

If you have ever gone for a walk with a bitch in heat, you know that scent is a powerful message in the animal kingdom. Empirical research seems to argue against the existence of human sex pheromones, but there sure are a lot of spammers who would have us believe otherwise.

I have given the topic considerable thought, and I can say quite confidently that I can now reconcile these two seemingly contradictory points of view. Human sex pheromones indeed DO exist. They just don't work as attractants for the opposite sex--that's why the research studies have so far failed to reject their null hypotheses. What human sex pheromones do NOT do is attract your mate. What they DO do is attract your CHILDREN.

I have observed that our children have an unerring ability to detect any hint of amorous stirring when my wife and I are together. A simple hug and deep kiss is enough to bring them running from the opposite end of our 6500 sq. ft. home. They don't know why they are all of a suddeen in desperate need of getting our joint attention RIGHT NOW! They will come and physically insinuate themselves between us while chattering away, making any hope of liaison vanish completely. If asleep, they will waken. (This seems especially true in the early morning pre-dawn hours.) Because the effect is diametrically opposed to the idea connoted by the general use of the term "pheromones", I have proposed that the newly identified factors be referred to as "sexomones."

This sexomone effect has been consistently demonstrated by all four of our children in turn. The response has been most pronounced in neonates, and it seems to weaken steadily with advancing age. Upon entering puberty, there appears that there may be a "polarity reversal" of the effect wherein any hint of parental sexuality sends the adolescent bounding from the room, preferrably to a different floor of the house. I admit that I am less certain of the changing adolescent sexomone response, because so far only the first of our kids has hit that particular developmental stage. Replication of these observations must wait, for now.

Because the sexomone phenomenon has been so pronounced for us over the last decade-plus, we have become completely convinced it is a real effect. For a while it seemed to be a almost a running joke for us. Some joke. Sure a pratfall can be funny, but when it repeats over and over and over, it becomes nothing more than pain in the ass.

Sexomones seem to function only if the two of us (my wife and I) are in proximity. Gearing up for a vigorous session of masturbation (thankfully) doesn't seem to have nearly the same propensity to pring the preschoolers barrelling through the bedroom door. Conjoint non-sexual nudity, e.g., showers, baths, trimming body hair, etc., does not cause the sexomone effect to be manifest. A fully-clothed grope and grind will. It rarely fails.

The scientist in me wonders, "Why should our species be equipped with this kind of anti-sex pheromone? Would it not be counter-adaptive in propagating one's genes to be subject to this sexomone effect?" After some discussion we have concluded that the evolutionary pressure favours the emergence of sexomones because offspring (ours) of sexomone-producing adults (us) have a vested interest in reducing competition for resources from potential future siblings. If they can detect and prevent us parents having a good romp, then they are less likely to have a baby brother or baby sister to contend with. Selection pressure does not give a rat's ass about whether a marital relationship suffers, apparently.

Knowledge is power. With an understanding of how these sexomones work we have been able to adopt counter-strategies to beat natural selection at its own game. Together my wife and I have succeeded in producing a higher-than-statistical-average number of children. While this may not help the selfish genes of any one of our equally selfish carpet-apes, it has allowed us to more extensively propagate OUR genes. More importantly, it has made it so that the kids can't come between us quite so often.

Honestly...

Although Canada is not entirely a land of perpetual ice and snow (there are areas that broadly fit the description, but the vast majority of the population eschews them) winter does inevitably bring some of the white stuff. It had snowed off and on for several days. Altogether, there was about 20-30 cm of snow in my office parking lot.

Normally, that would not be too much of an issue, because a business would have an arrangement in place with a snow-removal service to deal with this sort of thing. Like much of life, this moment did not quite qualify to fit with the concept of "normally". My office had only officially become mine a few days earlier, and we had not yet moved into the building.
The contractor doing the leasehold improvements had finished just as the snow began falling. I was there alone, with a touque, a telephone, and a rapidly cooling paper cup full of dark-roast. And, the movers were on their way into town with all our stuff.

I found out how truly kind and considerate my fellow Canadians are, as I called around to get a Bobcat service to come and clear my 20-metre square lot. Not a single operator laughed at me (at least, not loud enough to be heard over the phone) as I was being told that they were either "swamped" and unable to consider us for several days or that they themselves were staying put and not heading out until after it stopped snowing. Being a relatively quick learner, it only took eight or ten of these calls before I concluded that, as usual, we were on our own. And, the movers were still coming.

Snowshovel in hand, touque on head, I went out to exert mastery over our newly acquired little piece of the environment.

It was going reasonably well. Slow, dreary and soul-destroying, yes, yet no more so than I expected. For the first two hours I chipped away. Literally, as the 15-25 cm soft fluffy icing-like layer hid a 5 cm ice layer fused to the exposed agregate of the parking lot surface. Occasionally the rattle of apporaching diesel fuel injectors would interrupt my stream of muttered epithets and I would look up to see if it was the now overdue moving truck. Usually it was a 4-wheel drive pickup carrying its occupants on some unknown errand. Most disheartening were the plow trucks that rolled past, not coming to my rescue, not slowing down. Not even a sympathetic nod from the driver. As I said, it was going reasonably well. I had not yet pierced the toe of my boot with the corner of the snowshovel that had been honed to a savage edge by the conctete of the driveway. My supraspinatus tendons were at that point still intact and causing no pain whatsoever. No road salt had yet worked its way under my upper right eyelid. I was just busy, exasperated, and peeved that I had to be doing manual labour when there were clients I could be billing instead.

About that time, a figure walked up. His trouser cuffs were tucked into his boot-tops. His hands jammed deep into the pockets of his parka. The tip of his HS810 was just peeking out from under his touque. "Are you open?" he called. I recognized the voice immediately as one of my regulars. He had known about the move from being in to see me at the old out of town office on the last day before we shut it down to pack and portage. He had also taken away a notifcation card that gave the address of this new place. Clearly, he had read the card. Perhaps not the part about our openning date though--it was still three days away.

"I called your office but there was no answer. I was in the neighbourhood anyway, so I thought I would drop by. Are you open?"

God bless him. He offered to help me shovel.