Danskcolin: Thursday February 22nd 2024

Dear reader, have you ever had a promotion at your workplace? Or do you know somebody else who has? That second thing is perhaps more common an occurrence but not necessarily quite as welcome to colleagues - am I right?

a typical promotion ceremony in an office-style environment

However, if the promotion was yours, did you notice that, suddenly, for no apparent reason, you were getting more money from your employer, putting you onto a whole new level of consumption in our admittedly very "consumerist" society?

Well, it happened to a local man just the other day, and he wasn't shy about talking about his delight to local newshounds at the Onion News Worcestershire Desk, was he, to put it mildly!

Well, that story certainly made a bit of a "splash" locally, didn't it. And Gordimer rightly "got some stick" from his Bell End neighbours for his alleged "shallowness", and there was no small level of satisfaction when Roberta quickly dumped him, that's for sure!

But it's a story that's interesting to recall this morning, for Lois and me, because, if you noticed, Gordimer went specifically for a redhead as his girlfriend upgrade, and we've recently been looking into what people are calling the "redhead phenomenon", what with this week's furore over hair-colour pundit Israel Ramirez and the graphics he's been publishing on the quora forum website.

Here's Israel, and his now famous graphic showing the areas of Europe where red hair is most commonly found, and the basis of Israel's attempts to address the question - why this obvious regional bias?

In his comments Israel wrote "Natural selection can make a mutation more or less common. But no one has ever shown that there’s an advantage to having blonde or red hair. There’s definitely a disadvantage for red hair, because people with that trait are prone to sunburn and skin cancer. Overall, scientists suspect that hair and eye coloration do not fall [strongly] under ... natural selection.

"Sexual selection could make blonde or red hair more common if men or women preferred marrying people with blonde or red hair. But that doesn’t explain why these traits are common in Northern Europe but not elsewhere. Why wouldn’t Asians have the same preferences as Europeans?"

And what's Israel's big "takeaway" from all this?

He says, "Maybe hair colour variation is the result of pure dumb luck. Geneticists call that neutral variation or genetic drift. It’s a real possibility!"

And today, Steve, our American brother-in-law has been weighing in, talking about other surprising features of redheads that Lois and I didn't know about: (a) redheads smell different and (b) they have a higher pain threshold. Steve's third feature, that they're perceived as more temperamental, is I think has been a view popularly held in the UK for a long time, certainly in my family and Lois's family, in both of which red-headedness is rife, to put it mildly. And even Lois's "majority-blonde" hair has a "sandiness" to it, when viewed from certain angles - it's all a bit of a madness, isn't it!

Steve writes:

(1) Redheads smell different: scents applied to redheads’ skin do smell differently because of the different biochemistry of the body, which scientists are still trying to understand. And research has also found that scents don’t last as long on redhead skin, either.

(2) Redheads have a higher pain threshold: Several studies have found that women with red hair have a higher pain threshold. “The pain threshold is the limit from where you don’t feel anything to where you just start to feel pain,” explains David Fisher, MD, PhD, chief of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital , who has conducted a number of studies on red-haired individuals.

A 2021 study co-authored by Dr. Fisher sheds light on why this is. The research involved red-haired mice (which possess similar MC1R variants as humans) and indicated that the MC1R gene responsible for red hair is also involved in regulating expression of factors that govern certain pain sensations. The simple explanation is that redheads’ melanocytes (pigment-producing cells) release factors that effectively favour the signals to the brain that say “don’t feel pain” over “feel pain.”

(3) Redheads are perceived as more temperamental

brunettes, blondes and redheads tend to get

different reactions when they walk into nightclubs

There have also been studies on the perceived personality and attractiveness of redheads. One group of researchers instructed the same woman to sit in different nightclubs with hair dyed either blonde, brunette or red. She was approached significantly more frequently by men in the blonde condition. Researchers then used images of the same woman, rated by 126 men. This study, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, found that the redhead was rated as the least shy, the most temperamental and the most sexually promiscuous of all hair colours. Brunettes were considered more approachable, while blondes were perceived as more needy.

Fascinating stuff, isn't it!

09:00 Yes, fascinating stuff, and something to take mine and Lois's minds off the appalling weather we're getting here in the Malvern area at the moment. My goodness yes!

Yikes !!!!!

14:30 Also today we get some welcome distraction from the latest group meeting of the local U3A Intermediate Danish group, that Lois and I lead.

We're reading a Danish crime novel "Judaskysset" (The Judas Kiss) by Anna Grue, centred on an affair between a 63-year-old Danish art teacher, Ursula, and her handsome young virile lover Jakob (29), a story that's got our group's predominantly 60-plus female membership salivating at the very least, to put it mildly!

a U3A group meeting on zoom, with a typical,

predominantly over-60, female membership

Lois and I have noticed that there's been a bit less open "salivating" amongst our female members since young Jakob appeared to "clean out" his and Ursula's joint bank account and disappear to the south of France with no forwarding address, no doubt about that! And Jakob's disappearance was an especially damaging blow to Ursula, who had just won 7 million kroner on the lottery.

Oops !!!!!

Poor Ursula!!!!!

16:00 The meeting ends and Lois and I, as always, feel absolutely exhausted from trying to control our rowdy group, and we collapse in a heap on the couch after it's over. And our thoughts turn to what's on TV tonight - we'll be too tired to do anything else, that's for sure!

Lois spots this "doozy" on the little-watched More4 channel, another programme in the series Secrets of Egypt's Valley of the Kings".

As Lois points out - and it's the "elephant in the room" really, isn't it - that it may be a little too late to do anything at the hospital for those mummies now, although I suppose the paramedics will want to see what they can achieve, even at this late stage.

I wonder...... !

21:00 Lois and I wind down for bed with the first of a new series of pub walks by stand-up comedian Bill Bailey, each programme in the series featuring a different bosom pal - tonight it's fellow stand-up Alan Davies.

Bill is the nature-lover with lots of info about everything, while Alan is the "city boy", who by his own admission was hoping that this walk would be cancelled due to bad weather, so he keeps looking hopefully at the forecast.

This resonates with me, because, as a schoolboy, I used to check the weather forecast religiously on Thursdays hoping for afternoon rain that would lead to cancellation of whatever "sports" were on the agenda, be it cricket or rugby or whatever. I expect you were the same, weren't you. Go on, admit it haha!!!!

There's a promising opening, however, where countryman Bill explains to "city boy" Alan that he doesn't need to feel apprehensive when walking across a field of cows.

Yes, a cow is just inquisitive, and wants to take a closer look at you - and when it approaches you, it's just saying "hello". But that's where people go wrong, Bill says. The people say, "It's coming for us! Run!", and then they "leg it", waving their arms about in the air as they go.

Then the whole herd says, "Look, those people are running. Brilliant! Let's run with them!"

And cows can run really fast if they want to, Bill says, they're faster than horses. So Bill's advice, basically, is not to run.