Morts Musings

Saw this interesting piece on the BBC site today. It discusses research which indicates that you’re more likely to get a positive response, when asking for something, if you speak into the someone’s right ear. It also highlights that, given the choice, the majority of people will use their right ear for listening to the phone, or when holding a conversation in a noisey environment, like a night club.

In some senses this news shouldn’t come as a surprise; the left side of the brain processes input from the right ear, and is the side of the brain which tends to be focused more on interpreting speech and language, and, apparently, also tends to be more ammenable to requests.

The studies mentioned in the article don’t seem to use the kinds of sample sets one might hope for, in order to produce truly significant results, but the indications do seem to be that if you’re trying to blag a fag in a night club, you’re more likely to get one if you ask people in their right ear.

A couple of my friends are getting married soon, and while having a couple of jars, with the groom to be, the other night the subject turned to wedding flowers, and their meanings. Flowers have had meanings and symbolism attached to them since time immemorial, and the reasons why some flowers are used for specific events, or occasions, today often goes back to these, mostly forgotten, symbolic meanings.
It’s a subject that my friend (the groom to be) & I soon got round to, (although it’s not normally the kind of topic I’d rush to the encyclopaedia to investigate, it was of more interest to me than hearing the minutia of their wedding plans,) and actually ended up talking about for a little while; I guess it was some common ground, he’s hearing all about this sort of thing from his betrothed, and I’m generally interested in historic traditions, & symbology.

Anyway, I learned a few things I didn’t know, and was even inspired to do a bit of looking around for myself, to find out more, &, good natured, sharing, soul that I am, I thought I’d write a bit about the symbolic meanings of some of the more common wedding flowers.

Carnations

A common wedding flower, partly because of tradition, but also because they’re often a cheaper option than some of the other traditional wedding flowers. Carnations in fact have a wide variety of meanings, depending on their colour. Overall they symbolise love, distinction & fascination, although these general meanings are altered by the carnation’s colour. Pink ones symbolise a woman’s love, red ones admiration, and white ones are often used as a Groom’s buttonhole because they symbolise fidelity & ardent love. Yellow ones, however, should be avoided as they symbolise refusal or disappointment. Carnations should also be avoided if your beloved is French, as in the french speaking world they symbolise misfortune.

Roses

Everyone knows that the red rose is a symbol of romantic love, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the other colours also have meanings attached to them. White roses symbolise purity, but can also indicate honour and reverence, while yellow roses are used to display happiness or friendship, & pink roses are often given as a sign of admiration .

Orchids

Often an expensive choice, but also a distinctive one. Orchids, in general, symbolise beauty, but also have other associations, such as love & wealth, and in ancient Greek society also alluded to virility.


Whatever flowers you want, and whatever occasion they’re intended for, there are a host of places that they can be ordered online these days, for example the Marks & Spencers Flowers section, this allows one to shop around and find exactly the flowers to suite, not only the event, but also your pocket! Isn’t the internet a wonderful place?

It’s something that I touched on briefly in my post, Strange Bed Fellows, last week, but the stats on bed related deaths, which I found while researching that piece, were just so odd that I thought the subject deserved another mention.

If you’ll remember I managed to dig up some stats on the number of deaths in 2003, involving falls & beds, broken down by country. The stats don’t actually make it clear which deaths are due to people falling out of bed, and which were caused by falls on to beds, or even by being crushed under a falling bed, but the figures are apparently based on actually death certificate entries which recorded that a bed, and falling, were, somehow, involved in the deceased’s demise. They make stark reading!

I mean really who would have thought that something so common, & (usually) comfortable could be so dangerous! I’m surprised the Daily Mail hasn’t picked up on this insidious menace to society & started some kind of campaign to pressure the Govt into banning beds, or at least producing stricter laws about their production and use.

Afterall, according to the stats, Beds killed more people in the UK in 2003 than cannabis, a substance which is apparently dangerous enough to warrant being (re)classified as a “Class B” drug*. So, shouldn’t there be stricter warnings on the dangers of beds?
Having said that we in the UK can sleep relatively safely in our beds, coming, as we do, 42nd in the list of 46 countries for which per capita data is given. The UK only have 0.083 deaths per million people, which, in the grand scheme, amounts to a few really unlucky sods each year.

If anybody deserves pity it’s the Hungarians, the nation to come out top of the per capita listing. In 2003 they had a staggering 14.39 bed related deaths per million people! While Finland comes in, in second place, with 9.19 deaths per million. Still a startling figure but, well, I can imagine that up there in the frozen north things might be more icey, making trips and falls more likely overall. Not to mention the fact that the country lives mostly in darkness during the winter months, that has to make the chances of having accidents, in general, more likely.


But, really, what is up with those Hungarian beds??? Are the Hungarians a particularly accident prone nation? Is there a national tendancy for bedroom acrobatics? Or are their beds construsted in such a way as to make them more lethal than the warm, comfortable, beds which we Brits might pick up from one of our department stores?


I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions, but it is one of those odd little things that makes one wonder, or at least it does me. God bless bizarre statistics! *shrug*

*A report prepared, last year, by the The Global Cannabis Commission for this year’s UN drug policy review attributed two reported deaths, ever, worldwide, to Cannabis use (I presume this figure relates to deaths attributed soley to cannabis.)

A group of Australian women holidaying on Magnetic Island, off the coast of Queensland, had quite a surprise over the weekend. The article, in The Times, doesn’t mention whether the three women were looking for steamy holiday romances with the island’s natives, but even if they were they can’t have been expecting the uninvited visitor who decided to drop in.
They were unsurprisingly shocked when the hirsuite, drug-addled, intruder ambled into their holiday home, and procedeed, without a word, to crawl on to one of their beds, where he made himself comfortable and settled in for a nap.
So, who was this interloper? One of the natives for sure, but not, as you might have thought, some kind of “surfer dude” gone feral, looking to rediscover the joys of “flaking out” on a real bed? No, this was an entirely different kind of native, a young male Koala from the National Park on Magnetic Island.

Fortunately the women did the sensible thing & called the local ranger, who arranged for the creature to be removed to a part of the island more frequented by his own kind, than by tourists. So all’s well that ends well, no harm done to the koala, or to the tourists. That latter might sound like an odd statement, but koalas, for all that they have a reputation as being cute docile creatures, can actually exhibit quite a mean streak when riled, & have pretty wicked claws; Afterall, how else do you think they clamber around in those trees so easily?
Another little known fact about the beasties is that their docile appearance is, at least in part, due to their diet of Eucalyptus which, while toxic to most creatures, apparently just gives the koalas a mild euphoric effect, or, if you prefer, gets them high!
Still, despite those claws, and a potentially nasty temper, if disturbed while going cold turkey, it turns out that, statistically speaking, the koala was far less likely to seriously hurt the trio of tourists then the beds themselves. Despite being genuinely soft and comfortable, beds are apparently far more dangerous than koalas, or so it appears judging by the stats for bed related deaths.

Actually, like many marsupials, koalas are quite interesting creatures, the wiki article isn’t massively comprehensive, but isn’t a bad place to start if you’d like to know more about them.