Friday, January 19, 2007

Girls, it's NOT OUR FAULT! Music and sport is in our genes ....


Here's another classic study of human nature from my old pal Stix.

FOR centuries, women have complained about their blokes not helping out around the cave.

The fellas are dispatched to the doghouse for browsing through the sports section of the paper or twanging away on their guitar, while their wives whirl around the kitchen preparing kids' lunch boxes and doing the dishes, all the while flailing away with a cluster of chook feathers, flicking dust from every flat surface within arm's reach.

The male of the species dutifully endures his lot without so much as a snarl (because that would provoke ``an incident'', and he has learnt from experience not to do that -- or his hopes of watching the cricket henpeckless will turn to dust and be flicked into the realm of farce).

But now the truth has been exposed, and it's time for AN APOLOGY! No! Not from us, dammit ... from all those spiteful spouses who relentlessly harangued us to perform domestic duties which, put plainly, are scientifically impossible for us.

Yep, it's true. A new study has been released which confirms that men physically cannot do housework.

It turns out that, because of an inexplicable genetic oversight of the part of The Creator, men are simply incapable of seeing dirt until there is enough of it to sprout a crop of potatoes. That, of course, gives women -- who can spot an atom of dust at the far end of a cricket pitch -- an unfair domestic advantage.

This is the reason a married couple can both be looking at the same family kitchen, and the man - peering through his haze of double-helix handicap - sees a sink which is so spotless you could perform liver transplants on it.

His wife, on the other hand - innately hawk-eyed by virtue of her double-shelix chromosomes - recoils at the sight of a seething, sink-shaped mass of bacteria which is moving threateningly in the direction of her children.

After more than an hour scouring the sink plug-hole with sulphuric acid-based cleaning gel, a woman is still convinced it is way too grubby for dinner guests to see.

But if you asked a man to clean the entire City Circle railway tunnel, he'd go down the steps at Town Hall with a bottle of Windex and a single paper towel, and emerge 25 minutes later at Museum, weary but satisfied with a job well done.

When I first mentioned this amazing scientific fact to my friends and workmates, some of them -- okay, all of the women -- declared I was a chauvanistic pig who was simply trying to camouflage the fact that most men are just bone lazy.

But hey, this study in the eminent Boston Medical Journal, entitled Why Men Can't Do Housework, is based on irrefutable scientific proof.

It states, in terms which even bone lazy chauvanistic swine can fathom, that ``men's brains perceive far less sensory detail than women's brains, meaning that the household dust and domestic mess that their partners see is virtually invisible to them''.

So there you have it! It's not our fault! Blame the Higher Power or Mother Nature or even Old Mother Hubbard. Anybody but us.

And that's not the only difference between male and female brains. There is a section of the frontal lobe called the ``maculus effluvium'', in which basic emotions originate. The afforementioned study fails to give more detail about it, but in female brains I imagine the ``maculus effluvium'' would be roughly the size of a coconut, holding a vast stockpile of complex, constantly-revised emotional data aimed at punishing anyone who can't see dirt properly; whereas in men it is basically a jelly bean filled with One-Day Cricket, Bledisloe Cup and State-of-Origin highlights, plus a few snippets about playing the drums or strumming on your Strat.

In women, the ``maculus effluvium'' also exudes a pheremone called ``dopamine'', which, according to the study, give women an overpowering urge to go shopping. No, no, no, I'm joking about that bit.

Women don't need dopamine to make them hunt down new handbags. They just need a credit card. Preferably their partner's.

But anyway, this study just goes to show that women are wasting their time trying to make men help with the housework -- unless they have the remote control and you are practising a few licks while you wait for the big game to start.

In which circumstance, there is only one thing left to say: ``Sorry darling, I’ll put me axe away right now, and

... erm, pass me the chook feathers ''.