Sorry to have to disappoint people here but that book that Carrie reads from in the Sex and the City movie, “Love Letters From Great Men” does not in fact exist. Despite there being hundreds upon hundreds of people asking booksellers for it, no, there really is no book called “Love Letters From Great Men”.

Well, yet that is. The story has been all over the place in the past few days.

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the feature film version of “Sex and the City”: There is no such book as “Love Letters From Great Men,” from which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with her beloved Mr. Big.

Well, that’s from AP so I guess we have to take it as being true. Certainly, when the Christian Science Monitor (I find the philosophic ideas there a tad odd, I have to admit, but the newspaper is certainly first class) says them same I’m inclined to believe it.

They called the show “Sex and the City” but as those of us who used to watch it know, far more often it was about love – or the search for a close facsimile, anyway. So there’s nothing surprising about the fact that in the movie version we see Carrie sitting in bed reading a book called “Love Letters From Great Men” (and pondering tender words from lovers as diverse as Beethoven and Napoleon.)

What is kind of funny, however, is last week’s Associated Press story on the hundreds of queries retailers have received from readers looking for that book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.

The news has even reached as far as Australia:

Fans of the new ‘Sex and the City’ movie have been flooding bookstores and online retailers in an attempt to track down the book ‘Love Letters From Great Men’ that Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading - the only problem is, it doesn’t exist.

The thing is, this is true now, yes. But I don’t think that this book not existing is going to last for very long. For some bright spark is bound to write one and get it out into hte market…..if hundreds or thousands of people are willing to buy something with that title, wouldn’t it be a sensible idea?

In fact, I have to admit that it sounds so sensible that I’m likely to start writing it tomorrow.

There’s something that doesn’t really quite make sense here about Natascha Kampusch.

For years television was her main form of entertainment and view of the world as she lived in an underground prison. Now the kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is to become a TV talk show host herself - a career of which she dreamed during her incarceration.

Less than two years after her release, the 20-year old Austrian says she is now learning “the other side” of the media. On Sunday she will host the first in her chat show series, “Natascha Kampusch Meets …” on the private television channel Puls 4.

I mean, yes, she is famous, she’s certainly had a different life so far to almost everyone else. But, umm, are we entirely sure that the best training for chatting to people is to spend eight years in a cellar on your own?

Yet another report, this one from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, telling us something really rather different from what they think they’re telling us. This is like on, “Oh, gosh, there’s Sexism! Eeek!” report:

A time warp of 1970s sexist attitudes is driving women in their late thirties from careers in science and technology and undermining key sectors of the economy, according to an international study.

Researchers claim to have discovered a “hidden brain drain” as women opt out when facing a choice between family life and pushing for promotion at work.

The majority choose their children and alternative careers instead of struggling with the hurdles of a macho “lab coat culture” with long hours, old boys’ networks and the risk of sexual harassment.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist at the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York and the lead author of the study, said the research had revealed a world with values seemingly stuck in the 1970s.

She said: “It has been a bit like a time warp. This predatory or condescending culture [towards women] was more common across the workplace 20 to 30 years ago but has somehow survived in an engineering, science and technology context.

“It is the hidden brain drain. We have this amazing, talented pool of women who have left the industry. It is highly destructive to our society and economy.”

The thing is, they haven’t found some outpost of 1970s sexism, there’s nothing “macho” going on here (really, the geeks, macho? Sure you’re not all getting confused with the jocks there?). What they’ve found is that it is very difficult to balance both the climbing to the top of the career tree and having and raising children.

That’s it, tout court. One of their examples:

Nancy Lane, a cell biologist at Cambridge University, recalled the conflict she felt between work and her two children. “I felt forced to make agonising trade-offs, asking myself, ‘Do you abandon an experiment or abandon a needy child?’ ” she said. “I found myself deliberately choosing questions that allowed me to run experiments in a five-day week.”

See, it’s not the employers, it’s not the society, it’s not anything other than the intrinsic demands of doing science at the highest levels.

And women get a choice: do they want to pursue that science or are they more interested in other parts of life, like their children and their family? The absence of such a choice would be something to bemoan: but given that the choice exists, it seem very strange indeed to complain about the choices which are being taken.

Essentially, all that this research has uncovered is that women tend to carry the greatest burden of child care and that carrying this burden means that they might need to make compromises in other areas of life.

Wow! Surprising finding, eh? People have to make choices?

This really rather amused me:

About 19% of men admitted they were potential gold-diggers and would tie the knot with someone in order to benefit from their wealth and luxury lifestyle, compared with only 11% of women.

There’s so many little things to unravel: you mean that my plans for making a huge pot of money by the time I’m 60 won’t actually be worth it? That I won’t be able to get that youthful babe?

Slightly more seriously I really don’t find this at all surprising. Men are always told that we are the less emotional gender: certainly, that we seem to be ready for sex without requiring the same levels of emotional intimacy that the distaff side claim to. So give that whole non-empathic side of the male psyche, the idea that more of us would put money ahead of love doesn’t surprise.

Further, I’ve read a few historical novels in my time. No, I don’t mean bodice rippers written now but set in the past, rather, novels that were written in the past. A standard plot device is of the man (often but not always a cad) looking for an heiress, any heiress, to marry. Good grief, Jane Austen’s work is famous enough and at least one of the novels turns that convention on its head: the girls cannot marry as they have no dowry to take into the marriage with them.

But to return to flippancy about the survey. What we’ve really found is that there’s a different attitude towards the truth between the sexes (again, something that’s not examctly news). 89% of women will lie in surveys, while only 81% of men will.

I’m afraid that this is one of the things that makes me really rather angry about those who would reject science. Those, that is, who keep insisting that there’s some problem with the current system of vaccinations. No, mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, no, the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. But not vaccinating children can indeed kill them:

A child has died from suspected diphtheria – the first fatality from the rare infection in Britain for 14 years, health chiefs disclosed yesterday.

The Health Protection Agency said diphtheria, which attacks the breathing system, was the “most likely” explanation for the death in London. The child had not been vaccinated.

The only reason the infection is indeed (thankfully) rare is that almost all children are indeed vaccinated against it. It’s fairly complex, three injection, one at two, one at three and one at four months. Then a booster before starting school and another between 16 and 18.

And the reason we go through all that effort is that it’s a great deal better than having to bury a child.

As more people reject the science, as more people fall for the woo woo stories about how children are damaged by vaccination then more children will die from these easily preventable diseases.

Grr.

Here’s something you might think it was unlikely you would ever see:

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ Napoleon Bonaparte’s lacklustre response to the bedtime blandishments of his wife is being repeated every evening in bedrooms across the country. Men are simply going off sex, according to the UK’s largest firm of relationship counsellors.

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

No, it’s not because they can’t have sex, it’s because they’re not really worried about it. Even more, it’s not because they don’t want to have sex with their wives (a regrettable state of affairs to be sure, but not one that has been all that unusual in history) but would like to do so with women perhaps unobtainable. No, it’s just the whole idea of sex simply isn’t all that fascinating any more.

Who would have thought of that happening?

Various possible explanations are offered and the one I find funniest is the idea that as women know more about what they want these days, or perhaps it’s rather that they’re a great deal more vocal in letting on what they want, thus men find it all too much of a strain. That makes us sound even more wimpish than just not being interested really.

However, there is one explanation which we can reject entirely:

Professor Cary Cooper, president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, agreed. ‘Men have less social support and, as a generalisation, are less emotionally intelligent than women and have not traditionally been encouraged to share their feelings,’ he said.

Cooper, who is professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, also blamed Britain’s culture of long working hours. ‘Britain’s work culture has gone from 9 to 5 to extremely long hours, which makes for a very stressful life,’ he said. ‘Stress can be cumulative, which means eventually people can find it impossible to switch off and relax.’

I agree, as a thesis, it sounds plausible. The stresses and strains of modern life, long working hours culture, yadda, yadda.

The only unfortunate thing is, male working hours have been declining for at least a century, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in it. So the stress associated with work has also been declining: so sad, isn’t it, when a beautiful theory gets destroyed by an inconvenient fact?

Well, yes, of course, all of us are in favour of part time politicians: they do so much less damage than the full time kind. But Holland seems to have gone a stage further with the idea of allowing people to be such:

A nurse and part-time pop singer has fulfilled her dream of becoming an MP by taking a seat in parliament on maternity cover.

Under a new provision in a country that is known for its liberalism and progressive social laws, Sabine Uitslag will serve as an MP for the Dutch ruling Christian Democrat party (CDA). She will be a stand-in for Mirjam Sterk.

Ms Uitslag, 35, will spend four months in Parliament until the maternity leave of Ms Sterk has finished. It is the first test of an arrangement that both women believe should become the norm across the European Union.

The reason that this works is the slightly odd electoral system that they have in Holland. Instead of being elected for a district the election covers the whole country. You stand as a member for a particular part and you get a number on that party list. If your party only gets a few votes across the country then only the top three or four on the list will get elected: if the party gets a lot, then perhaps the first 40 or 50 on the list will. Ms. Uitslag was in fact number 50 on her party’s list and the top 49 actually got elected. So she’s the top one who didn’t, if you follow me.

So the part time politician thing isn’t all that odd: if one of the people who did get elected were to die, or be so ill they could not continue, then the same thing would happen. The next one on the list would then take their seat.

Still, it’s an interesting way to deal with maternity leave, don’t you think?

The latest attempt to link vaccines and the mercury within them (not that there is any mercury within them any more) with the causation of autism seems to be laid out here.

According to David Geier, the father-son team first became interested in this question after viewing a poster in which Dr. Boyd Haley showed how the addition of even a small amount of testosterone greatly enhanced the destructive power of mercury.

Through the work of Dr. Jill James, the Geiers were aware that people with autism had significantly lower levels of glutathione. In their investigations the Geiers found that testosterone blocks the body’s ability to make glutathione and that mercury binds to glutathione, thus inactivating whatever stores the body may already have.

According to the Geiers mercury also raises testosterone levels, while dramatically lowering glutathione. At special risk would be those individuals who have a family history of low estrogen and high testosterone. The Geiers’ theory might tie together several disparate findings and give hope for those children who have not fully recovered through bio-medical interventions.

A known side-effect of high testosterone is precocious puberty, or the early development of adult features in children. When the Geiers went looking for signs of precocious puberty in the autistic children in their clinic they found it in approximately 80% of their patients.

According to the Breast Cancer Fund, over the past forty years the age of puberty in girls has dropped one to two years. The Geiers believe this is a population-wide effect of mercury from the vaccines. When the Geiers tested seventy children with autism for abnormal testosterone levels they found results outside the normal range in approximately one-quarter to one-third of their patients.

Now, no, I’m not a scientist (at least, not a physical scientist) so I’m not going to try and either prove or disprove this thesis. I’ll leave that to the people with the appropriate qualifications. That they’re discussing chelation as a treatment for autism makes me think it’s unlikely at the best to be true, but that’s not my point in mentioning it here.

Rather, it’s the way in which they seem to think that this post birth, indeed, post vaccine, connection between mercury and autism has anything at all to do with Simon Baron-Cohen’s views on autism being a product of the extreme male brain.

Just one little thing about Baron-Cohen’s ideas: he does think he’s found the explanation for many or most cases of autism. That hesitancy is because autism isn’t so much a disease or a genetic condition as it is a set of symptoms. Those who have the symptoms are said to be on the autistic spectrum: but that doesn’t mean that all occurences of said symptoms have the same cause. We know very well that there are certain genetic conditions which produce the same or very similar symptoms just as we also know that most showing the symptoms don’t have those genetic conditions.

But the little thing: while he thinks he’s along the right lines he most certainly has not ruled out there being either environmental causes for some cases or even all. It could be that there is a predisposition which needs a trigger to cause the full syndrome. I might add that he doesn’t think that it’s mercury in vaccines, as that has been removed from vaccines in different countries at different times and the incidence of autism hasn’t fallen after that removal in any of them.

But on to the major point here: Baron-Cohen’s connection between testosterone and autism, that extreme male brain idea, is something to do with in utero exposure, that is, fetal exposure to testosterone. As the brain develops in utero the various hormones it is exposed to do indeed change the paths of development: this is why pregnant women are advised so strongly not to drink, or why sufficient folic acid needs to be in the mother’s diet to avoid spina bifida. This creation of the extreme male brain is nothing to do with testosterone levels in the bloodstream post partum, nothing to do with the receptors for testosterone in the child (if it were we’d be having female autists growing beards). The theory is about what happens in the womb, not anything that happens after it.

Now, as I say, I’m not about to declare the theory put forward in the linked post to be incorrect, even if I think it is. Rather, I just want to point out that you can’t use Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory to support it, not unless you’ve got some interesting form of time machine. He is saying that autism is connected with fetal exposure to testosterone, not to the levels of testosterone (or mercury) that the child is exposed to after birth.

Apropos nothing very much, just really liked this blog post. From a woman with Asperger’s making sense of life:

Grounded in heart. That is often an aspergerian asset, a self-defense from squandering our lives in larger realms we cannot fathom. Contrary to the NY Times article – and my own life experience — I suspect there are numerous aspie women whose marriages succeed and therefore, their minds are never labeled. They are just appreciated by their families. They are honored as leaders in small groups. They produce and educate professionally accomplished sons.

No, I suspect that universal screening for aspies and other learning differences would yield a more complex picture of aspergerian women than this article held forth. Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this syndrome, and some of it has been romantic love. And it has been bestowed on us. Likewise, I cannot believe there have not been successful aspie women in unheralded careers. In fact, I consider it likely that many of the “behind every successful man” women – the ones who consistently find themselves training a succession of hot young male bosses – are aspies who deserve a lot more credit.

Worth noting:

Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this…

That is true, and wonderfully so, of so many things we encounter in this vale of tears.

I do love these survey style things. This one was trying to find out who is rated as the most seductive woman of all time. The answer?

She is two parts Kelly Brook, one part Jennifer Lopez and one part Angelina Jolie.

Angelle combines Brook’s hair and body, Lopez’s nose and Jolie’s lips, wrapped up in “the most seductive dress of all time”: Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch.

Don’t worry if you don’t know who Kelly Brook is, I didn’t either. From Wikipedia:

Brook’s modeling career began at 16 after winning a beauty competition, her early work was in a range of advertising campaigns, including for the new “Bravissimo” company that specializes in bras and lingerie for big-breasted women, and for Foster’s beer. Brook is 5 feet, 7 inches (168 cm) tall, and her voluptuous figure caught the eye of the editorial team of the Daily Star tabloid, which began featuring her as a Page Three girl.

Umm, a certain plushness to her figure then, something that appeals rather to the male mind.

However, there is in fact something of an error, unfortunately one of a rather basic nature, in the logic of this whole survey.

She was created from a survey of British women’s views about seduction, commissioned by fabric conditioner firm Lenor.

Yes, they were asking the women to define the most seductive woman of all time. Doesn’t really work, does it? As it’s (with a small set of exceptions of course) the men who will be the seducees, it would be rather better to have them defining the seductiveness, wouldn’t it?