.. Mum’s dad Norman, on the other hand, was as bald as a badger (what does that mean?) well before he died at the frighteningly young age of 55. I can remember touching his clammy pate when we were jumping all over him at the end of the day as he tried to relax with a glass of scotch in his enormous red leather armchair, the one with the vents in the cushion that sighed satisfyingly when you sat in it. Or jumped up and down on it. I think it was due to sweat that his head was so clammy, but it could have been some early hair product employed to glue down a desperate comb-over.
Skulls.. Hmmm..
I think it was Stephen Fry that alerted me to this bit of recent history that we tend to overlook these days. It was a quite interesting fact about phrenology, the practice of interpreting the bumps on people’s skulls, which Arthur Conan Doyle set great store by apparently, but which is generally discredited these days, mostly because it was associated with racial stereotyping, which was seized on by the Nazis, of course.
I thought that was about all there was to it, but I was wrong, because around about the same time I heard a radio doco about the practice of eugenics and mass sterilisations in North Carolina in particular, and I was staggered at how widespread the practice was in the US in general and how long it persisted. In fact, the sterilisation program in North Carolina lasted from 1933 to 1977, but it seems of all the thirty-two states that adopted similar programs, laid back and groovy California was the most avid practitioner of compulsory sterilisation – there were reportedly 20,000 such procedures authorised between 1909 and the mid-sixties. (See Wikipedia)
I need to pause for breath here, because I have to adjust my view of the leader of the Free World yet again. But we should remember that Australia’s Stolen Generations policy was also guided by those same principles of eugenics.
While these state endorsed programs have largely disappeared, there’s another related problem I read about just today under the heading Disabled 'sterilised illegally'
Parents and carers of the disabled are regularly doctor shopping and going abroad to have their children sterilised illegally, according to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Under Australian law, only the Family Court or a guardianship tribunal can authorise the irreversible medical procedure.
But national Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes said anecdotal evidence suggested unauthorised non-therapeutic and forced sterilisation were still common in Australia.
Mr Innes is seeking to have the practice criminalised, with penalties as harsh as imprisonment. read more

It’s all too depressing really. But wasn’t this P&W supposed to be about something trivial?
Oh right – surreal.
Well, the evolution/corruption of the English language is just another irritant for us hapless baby-boomers as we slide into the abyss of irrelevance, just as it has been for hundreds of successive generations of English speakers. The latest word I’ve detected being devalued by its misuse and/or overuse is ‘surreal’. ‘It was bloody surreal’, he said at the end of the footy match. ‘It was surreal’, describing a car accident. ‘It was surreal’, describing Spectrum’s recent appearance on the LWTTT tour.
I would accept ‘unreal’, which itself was done over thoroughly in the ‘70s. ‘Surreal’, however, has a quite specific meaning, of which I’m sure you’re aware, but I was going to expand on it anyway - until I got side-tracked again.