These Days

I told you so…Man Colds are worse than girl colds  Queenslander researchers have found that the immune system in men is weaker than that in women but the differences disappear after menopause.  They reckon it’s natures way of looking after women of child bearing years to ensure the survival of the species.

That got me thinking about the origin of the word menopause.   I thought it meant women put men on pause because of a loss of interest in sex.  But not true.  It actually comes from the Greek “men” meaning month and “pausis” meaning cessation – therefore cessation of the monthly visitor.   Now I’ve gotta say that given a man cold probably only comes once a year thats gotta be better than the alternative.

I’m a little over three months into a nine month contract at my new place of work and I do feel like I’m starting to achieve a few things.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks documenting and developing incident and problem management procedures, a task I could have avoided if I’d just googled “Problem Management” a little earlier and plagiarised the following process.   Much simpler and better than what I wrote.

Melbourne traffic is pretty bad these days but sometimes the drive to work feels like Moses parting the Red Sea as the lanes open up before me.  Other times it’s like being in a sewer with turds dropping into every free spot.  Today though I saw a vehicle which I thought could slip in and out of traffic pretty easily.

I went out for a business lunch today hosted by a bloke from Missouri and we got talking about American politics.  Somehow we got onto Bill Clinton and how he seems to believe that he ought to still be President.  I asked him if he thought Hilary would resign as Secretary of State this year and run in the Primaries against Obama.  He thought it unlikely because it would be considered bad form to run against an incumbent.

From there he got onto the fact that Hilary always wears pant suits to hide her cankles.

Now cankles isn’t something I am familiar with so I sort of laughed and pretended I knew what he was talking about and first thing I did tonight when I switched this thing on was google it.  So for those as ill informed as I am let me say that the Urban Dictionary defines cankles as -

“The area in affected female legs where the calf meets the foot in an abrupt, nontapering terminus; medical cause: adipose tissue surrounding the soleus tendon, probably congenital, worsened by weight gain and improved in appearance only by boots. From the English “calf” meaning wide portion of the lower leg, and “ankle” meaning slender joint of leg with foot.”

So now I find myself wondering if this is a common affliction.  There is a cankle haters group on Facebook and dozens of people called Cankle which I reckon I might consider changing if it was me.  It would be like having a name like Cameltoe or Halitosis, OK for a laugh but you wouldn’t want to live with it.  There are youtube videos on how to get rid of cankles and people have even written books on them.  And apparently the fact that Hilary has them is well known to most septics [for non-Aussie readers septic is short for septic tanks which is rhyming slang for yanks).

So is this a major medical issue of the 21st century or is it so 20th century.  That’s the problem when you get older like me you miss out on popular culture.

And in visiting yet another on my blogroll Pearl over at “Pearl, Why you little…” wrote a post about carrying a notebook everwhere and writing down things that become fodder for her posts and I remembered I overheard something on the train the other day that I was going to mention but had forgotten about.

A young girl talking loudly on her iPhone said “It’s a 50-50 proposition you know, it’s not like it’s 80-30…”

Now there’s a budding economist.