Nature gets it wrong .. again

Sometimes nature goes so horribly wrong







TV Documentary about a toddler born with eight limbs and believed by some to be the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Lakshmi(correction.) She is set to undergo a 40-hour operation to remove half of her limbs.

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a 'parasitic twin' and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs. The headless 'twin' is joined to Lakshmi at the pelvis and has its own spinal column and kidney.

Without the operation the little girl would never be able to walk or crawl and would be unlikely to live past her early teens, doctors said. The extraordinary eight-limbed baby was born in a poverty-stricken region of Bihar, India - on the day devoted to the celebration of the four-armed Hindu deity Vishnu.

Her mother Poonam Tatma said she believed her daughter was "a miracle, a reincarnation" of Vishnu.

Bring back the bonnet ...

Long before the dawn as I lay deliberating upon the mysteries of this reality, I wondered about why it was, after WWII, that westerners on the whole, in general - and mostly - have stopped wearing hats as an everyday thing.

Save, of course, for those who wear baseball type caps. As casual headgear, these curiously peaked caps have crossed the great divide of fashion sense and attained acceptablity among men and women.

And crikey, I even have one to wear in the spa through daylight hours.

While hubby has a collection of them. In the daytime he doesn't leave home without one but then we live in a 'sunburnt country'; and it would be sensible for all Australians to 'slip on a hat' through the hot weather, wouldn't it?

But most of us choose to face the world bare-headed (although for babies and young children we might make an exception).

I guess I'm curious about the psychological underpinnings of this (me and origins!). I wonder what social shift occurred in the westernised world to label the wearing of hats as making a person look 'stupid', causing people to lose the habit of wearing in the everyday what is a very practical item of clothing?