French brains altered to remove fear

This is a follow on to my previous blog -
"Brain altered to remove fear" 21/9/2013

I explained that the parasite Toxoplasmosis has a very clever mechanism in which it alters the brain of its host to lose fear.
The infected mouse loses all fear of cats and becomes an easy prey
The parasite can then finish it's life cycle and reproduce in the cat.

Now

I have recently talked to an eminent parasitologist
He told me, that when lecturing on this topic, he finishes his lecture like this.

It is possible for man to become infected by Toxoplasmosis. This most commonly happens when he eats raw meat.
Which nation is most notorious for eating very raw meat?
 - There is that famous recipe - Steak Tartare?
It is the French.

Perhaps - he postulates - this may explain French driving

March for separation - or not

Last weekend there was a march in Edinburgh - Scotland's Capital - by those who believe that Scotland should separate from England
According to the organisers - the SNP - it was attended by 30,000 people
According to the police it was attended by 8,000 people

Do we believe in fairies
or
the police
or
the SNP  - who are also trying to make us believe - that if Scotland separates from England -
- the Scots will have better pensions and be able to retire at a later age than the English

Well
I know who I believe

Wolves eat sheep

There are mutterings about re-introducing wolves to Scotland.
The logic seems to be this -
1. Wouldn't it be nice if Scotland had all the same flora and fauna as it had thousands of years ago.
2. Wolves would eat deer. There are too many deer and they eat young trees.

Well - I would like to say something to these crazy people.
If a wolf is on a lonely Scottish Highland hillside (such as where our little croft house is) he will have the choice of lots of fat, stupid, slow, tame sheep or the very occasional, wild, highly nervous, fast-running deer.
I know which I would go for and wolves are not stupid

In northern Portugal and Greece wolves primarily or almost exclusivley feed on livestock.

In Greece farmers are paid more than £1 million in compensation for
32,000 sheep and goats
2,000 cattle
2,000 horses and donkeys
which are killed by wolves - each year!

My neighbouring crofters struggle to survive on the income from the sale of their lambs -. Every lamb counts - they cannot afford to lose any (see Blog- lamb sale 27/9/2013)

If there are too many deer and they eat young trees - then do, as has always been done -
Put deer fencing around plantations of new trees and cull the deer.

Duh - stupid!

Someone has contacted  me suggesting that wolves be introduced to our towns and cities.

Well

I don't think Mr Fox would like that.

However - It is an interesting thought.

Would Mr Wolf get rid of Mr Fox 

or would they team up to make a terrifying pack of human baby eaters?

Lamb sales

Our neighbouring crofter was telling us how he had done at this years lamb sales.

Now this is important to a crofter because his main income comes from the lambs he sells.

Our neighbour sold about 125 lambs for about £50 each - a slightly lower price than last year.
Simple multiplication tells one that he made £6250

This has to be split with his son who now runs the croft with him, but has his own house.

After deductions for winter feed, supplements, vaccinations and sheep dip etc then that is their yearly income.

Luckily they both have other jobs.

It is no wonder that the sons of crofters are not keen to carry on for so little money.

My heart's in The Highlands

My heart's in The Highlands
My heart is not here
My heart's in the Highlands a chasing the deer
Chasing the wild deer and following the roe
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go

When I was just 10 years old, I was sent away from my home in the Scottish Highlands to a convent boarding school south of London.

I had learnt that poem by Robbie Burns at the little village school, where I had been up until then, and I loved it. It expressed everything I felt about being so far away from my beloved home
During that first term I was honoured (or so I thought) to be asked to recite the poem in front of the whole school. My recital was given an enthusiastic reception and I felt great pride. It was only a while later, I discovered that the whole thing had been a set up, to hear me talking in my "odd" Scottish accent.

But where are The Highlands?
Scotland has recently been divided into regions by some bureucrat. He has delineated an area which is called Highland and another called Grampian (Aberdeen-shire) and another called Tayside etc etc

We Highlanders know that The Highlands are all that land north of and including the Grampian Mountains and that everywhere else is The Lowlands. Those of us from The Highlands  are Highlanders and all the rest are Lowlanders and I wont repeat here the adjective we used to describe lowlanders at my primary school.
Orkney and Shetland are not in the Highlands.

So Mr Salmond - I think we need something different to what you suggest.
If you insist on separating Scotland from England,
then us Highlanders - with our whisky - want to be separate from you lowlanders
 and
Those Vikings up in Orkney and Shetland - with all the oil and fishing - want to to be separate too.
So
What does that leave you Mr Salmond and your lowlanders?
You can keep all your welfare  problems left over from de-industrialisation

so
Farewell to The Highlands, farewell to the North
The birth place of valour, the country of worth
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove
The hills of the Highlands forever I love

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow
Farewell to the straths and green glens below
Farewell to the forest and green hanging woods
Farewell to the torrents and loud pouring floods

My heart's in The Highlands
My heart is not here
My heart's in the Highlands a chasing the deer
Chasing the wild deer and following the roe
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go

Brain altered to remove fear

Now here is an interesting thing.
Suppose it was possible to completely remove our fear of something very very dangerous. Say a hungry lion or a venomous snake or a ticking bomb or a madman with a knife.
It would be a disaster  - for us!
Suppose an evil dictator like Hitler could develop a means to alter our brains that removed our fear of him?
There would be no conflict - we would voluntarily walk into his gas chambers.

This is what happens with an amazingly clever parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.
This little parasite can only reproduce in a cat. It is excreted by the cat in its faeces, but to reproduce it has to get back into a cat again. So it needs the cat to eat an infected mouse. It makes this very easy for the cat by altering the brain of that mouse, so that the mouse loses all fear of the cat.
The mouse voluntarily walks into the gas chamber -so to speak.

The researchers found that the effect- the lack of fear of the cat -  remained even after the mouse has been cured of the parasite infection.

If we could harness this ability for good causes, it would be very useful for all those with paralysing phobias.
But it could be a horrifying weapon if harnessed for evil

Blog reading vampires

I thought my blog had suddenly become very popular  - as the number of hits soared.
Sadly - No
It seems like many others - I am being visited by weirdos.
The main weirdo is
Vampirestats.com.
But there are other similar ones.
Luckily I Googled them before clicking on them.
It would seem that those that have clicked, have ended up with infected computers and worse.
So - other bloggers  be warned - don't.
Otherwise harmless - just annoying.
All one can do is just ignore them and realise that the hit counter is more or less useless

Priests to marry

It looks like it really might happen
Priests will be allowed to marry.

The second in command at The Vatican is preparing the ground by explaining that celibacy was never a rule from God but one invented by the Church
and perhaps - nowadays -it is not such a good rule?

And anyway the church already has all those married Anglicans priests who jumped the Anglican ship when it got choppy.
and
In Africa large numbers of priests who don't like being celibate just ignore the rule - as many others have done elsewhere over the years.

So - could the tide be about to turn  - the waters to part - the unthinkable happen?

Rumpy Pumpy wants EU corruption cover-up

Rumpy Pumpy aka Herman van Rompuy (the European Union President) wants to cover-up all the corrupt spending that goes in the EU.
- Instead of being outraged at reports by Europe's Court of auditors, who regularly have to refuse to sign off EU accounts due to 'irregularities'.
- Instead of demanding an immediate reform of the EU to uncover and address this massive corruption
- Instead of doing those things - he demands that the press should consider 'toning down' their reporting of the problem. He asks for "more nuanced" reporting

David Cameron is outraged
He says
"This kind of nonsense is why he wants to reform the EU"

Quite right
The EU spends £110 billion each year - our money
They are not a democratic body
We can't vote them out.
We can't reform them.
We have given birth to this huge, bloated, corrupt, undemocratic beast which is a law to itself.
It will grow and grow and eventually devour those who gave birth to it

There was a recent move by  the EU nations to block a 1.7% salary that EU officials at Brussels had awarded themselves.
It now looks as if this will not happen.
They will get their pay rise and millions in back pay because an EU official called Yves Bot (who is advocate general at present at the European Court of Justice) wants to annul the decision of our elected nations

Cabers getting bigger

My favourite two events to watch at a Scottish Highland Games are -
Dancing and
Tossing The Caber.
It is quite mesmerising to watch a huge man, with bulging muscles, in a kilt, pick up a caber - a huge tree without branches - and toss it right over onto its other end - so that it then topples right over again.

You don't really believe it is possible until you see one of them doing it.

Well - apparently last year at Pitlochry Games, the men were all so strong,  they all tossed the 17 foot long caber easily - thus spoiling the competition.

So this year a bigger tree has been found - it is a foot longer, weighs 100 lbs (45Kg) - about 12 percent more.

Caber throwers have apparently got considerably stronger in the last 10 years.
Lots of Porridge Oats perhaps !

Happy Glen

         On returning to visit the peaceful Scottish Highland glen of my childhood home, I was amazed to discover it riven by a scandal of such proportion, that  it is now named Happy Glen  - after the Happy Valley set of aristocrats in Africa  - portrayed in the film White Mischief.

It would seem that x went off with y's wife. So y  (feeling peeved) went off with someone else and so did x's wife and then as they all felt a bit peeved they went off with other people and .... I quite lost track of the story except for the end part where one of them - a pensioner - went off with his younger cousin's wife and ended up  marrying her and then having a stroke.

Could this be a warning to us pensioners? Are we perhaps too old for such capers?
So -  new younger wife of cousin is having to look after him.
Could this be a lesson to younger wives not to have affairs with pensioners?

How could this all have started in such a respectable, peaceful place?
The answer according to those I have talked to is this -

Incomers - White settlers

It is said that it was all  started by one man from England with more money than morals!

No No say others. It started before that, when the woman arrived who went off with her gamekeeper.

Dearie me - a Lady Chatterley's lover ?
Yes - and another incomer - not "one of us"

Surely this sort of thing never happened before?
Did it?

I explore the old newspapers -
Shock horror and shock horror and shock horror!

It would seem that the old aristo's where just as capable of such things.
How could I have forgotten Lady Magnesia Freelove?

But - most of the old toffs had  their own rules.
Like the monarch, they did not marry for love but for business. After they had produced the "heir and a spare" they could then seek love and sex elsewhere, as long as they were fairly discreet. Scandal was not good for the family name.  Divorce used to be considered a scandal so not encouraged

But all is different now, as Prince Charles discovered. The rules of encounter have changed.
One of the main differences is that the horror of scandal is no more

The Grievances of a Crofter in 1883

I have spent the last few days reading the newly digitised Napier Report done in 1883 on the state of the Scottish Highland Crofters.
To my amazement I came across evidence being given by my husband's great grandfather, whose little croft house we are in at present.

Reading it makes one realise why the crofters were unhappy. Their crofts were made smaller and smaller to make way for big profitable sheep farms. Many were moved to very poor land which they had to try and improve. Many were evicted with nowhere to go.

Did they hate the Duke?
Well a John Mackay giving evidence later on said
"They would hear no ill talked of the Duke"
The Duke was respected but his factors and groundsmen were hated

Here is what our ancestor had to say

Grievances of Alexander Gunn                                                        

My name is Alexander Gunn; my age is 49. I am a crofter living in the parish of Rogart. I pay £7,16s. for twelve acres of land. The number of stock I have are as follows:—Two Highland horses, two Highland cows, two young heifers, and eleven sheep. The returns from my croft will not supply my family with meal and vegetables more than six months in the year. My croft nearly employs my time in its cultivation, and even when I have a few days to spare from being employed on my croft it is seldom I get employment otherways. The fact is that between returns of other employment and cattle and sheep, etc. sold, I can barely sustain my family ; and even I am often compelled to keep my wife and children from what is termed good clothes on account of my rent. If I had double the amount of arable land that I now possess at fair rent, valued by competent valuators, appointed by landlord and tenant, and guaranteed to defend me against capricious eviction, I do consider that I would be able to educate and bring up my family in a manner more consonant to my mind, and have sufficient to defend me against pauperism in my old age.

My grievance is the smallness of my croft, and the inferior cattle I am obliged to have, and no rule to govern the rise of rent or the threat of eviction, as my case will prove.

When my mother died, twenty years ago, my eldest brother, on getting possession of the lot, had to pay death premium, or £1 of a rise of rent. This rise was put on, on the recommendation of two of the Duke's ground officers, who valued our lot. Three years afterwards my brother died, and I became his successor, and I had to pay a death premium of - 4s. that being four shillings more than the Duke's servants or ground officers valued my croft at. Four years ago I received a summons of removal, when on making inquiry I found out that this was an introduction to another £ l,  ls. of a rise of rent, which I had to pay, and pay still;

The actual fact is that I pay £ 1, 5s. per annum more than what his Grace's own servants valued my croft at, and all the improvements on the lot were done by myself and predecessors.—

(Signed) ALEXANDER GUNN.

Anyone wanting to read more go to

http://www.whc.uhi.ac.uk/research/napier-commission

Childrens's bath time

I read a sentence in the paper which made me pause for thought

" One third of parents have to bribe their child to get them in the bath"

I had to re-read this a few times to make sure I had it right.

When I was a child - bath time was huge fun - we all loved it.

My three children all loved bath time. All those bath toys - yellow plastic ducks, boats, water wheels, sieves etc.  I remember occasional  difficulties getting them out of the bath because it was all such fun.

I have never met a child that did not love bath time
I do remember hair washing being a bit tricky with one of my children (who disliked water getting in his eyes). However it was a stage that soon passed..

So why do a third of modern day children so hate bath time that they have to be bribed?
What has happened?