Regarding Henry (the Eighth)

Henry Tudor (1491-1547)  was certainly something of an overachiever, but he didn't know shit about biology.  After all, he went through six wives any number of ministers and all the wealth of the monasteries of England.  It didn't hurt that he was the surviving younger brother of the heir apparent and son of the king of England at the time, Henry VII.  Henry VII was the first Tudor king, a somewhat peripheral Lancastrian claimant to the throne who managed through conquest,  historical revisionism, and his marriage to Elizabeth of York, to resolved the unpleasant late medieval mess of succession that has come to be known as the "Wars of the Roses".  

It was the excessive fecundity of Edward III (1312-1377) that, ironically, started it all.  Edward had the following children by his wife Phillippa of Hinault:  (1) Edward the black prince,  (2) Isabella, Lady of Coucy, (3)  Joan of England,  (4) William of Hatfield, (5) Lionel of Antwerp , First Duke of Clarence, (6) John of Gaunt, First Duke of Lancaster, (7) Edmund of Langley, First Duke of York, (8) Mary, Duchess of Brittany, (9) Margaret, Countess of Pembroke,  (10) Thomas of Woodstock, First Duke of Gloucester, and finally (11-14) John, Jane, and Joan de Southeray.  This set the stage for some monumental family squabbles concerning who got the prize after Edward shuffled off his mortal coil. 

Then there was the  Hundred Years War, which was a series of conflicts from 1337 to 1453 (more like the hundred and sixteen years war but never mind).   In 1066 William the Conqueror added England to his existing domain in Normandy.  At the same time he was the vassal to the king of France.   This conflict or series of conflicts was the protracted sorting out of the national identities of France and England.  For a long time English kings had claim to a lot of French real estate owing to the complex web of intermarriage and primogeniture.  

Primogeniture of course is the practice of maintaining royal and ducal houses and land by the expedient of granting the eldest son of the household ownership of all.  The younger siblings in this arrangement were left with nothing.  This was thought preferable to the division of kingdoms into however many heirs as there were, which, in time would lead to a fragmentation of kingdoms and an intolerable situation related vividly in Shakespeare's King Lear. 

Getting back to Henry the Eighth,  these successional problems seemed to have been the focus of much of his reign.  It has been speculated that Henry may have been a victim of McLeod Syndrome, which leads to both neurological problems in the possessor but in hemolytic disease in his children (1).  It works in much the same way as Rh disease in which an Rh- mother develops antibodies to her Rh+ child.  The first pregnancy goes without a hitch because the mother gets immunized by exposure to the baby's blood at the time of birth.  However each successive child dies from an immune assault on its blood via antibodies that cross the placenta.  

If only I could have sat down with King Henry and explained this to him without being labelled a heretic and burned at the stake.  And if I could also have explained to him the fact that the father (you, Henry) are the determiner of the sex of the child and that it has very little to do with the woman.   In short the problem was with HIM not with the ladies he was mating with.   

I would say to him: 

"In the process of meiosis, wherin males have an X and a Y chromosome in each of their cells, one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes all normal humans have.

  The production of gametes (sperm and egg) requires the reduction of those chromosomes to half their number (23 individual chromosomes) that then go on to unite with the 23 chromosomes of the mother.   Since each one of your sperm cells contains either an X or a Y you determine the sex of the child.  If an X sperm cell reaches the egg first, then it combines with one of the mother's X chromosomes (She has two X chromosomes) then the child is a girl.  :(      If one of your Y sperm cells reached the egg first then the child is a boy. :)   And your succession is assured.  

"The fact is, Hank, (can I call you Hank?) every child is a crapshoot.  You KNOW that the child gets half of everything you inherited from your parents, but what you don't know is which half.  I am talking only about your "genes" not your royal possessions.   The only way to avoid this problem is if I could take a sample of your precious jizz back to the 21st century and put it in an ultracentrifuge. 

You see, your X chromosome bearing sperm cells are heavier than the Y chromosome bearing ones, enough so that if you speed up the process of gravity (using this machine) the heavier ones you don't want will sink lower in the test tube.  Then we could harvest the Y chromosome ones you want from the top of the density gradient and deliver them to the queen's womb at the right moment in her 28 day cycle and you would have a male heir or at least we'd hope so.  Even in the 21st century this isn't an exact science.  You would have to promise to keep your hands off her until she has conceived.    

"But of course you have to do this when the queen is ovulating.   Some time between the time of her previous period and the next one she will ovulate, and you can kind of tell when this is,  by using this handy digital thermometer.

At that moment give me a sample of your jizz and go back to the 21st century.  I brought along a condom for you.  You aren't allergic to latex are you? 

 Just so I don't try to switch tubes or something let me take Cromwell back to verify the procedure.  Less than an hour later I'll return  and we'll artificially inseminate your queen.   Now just to help you in producing your sample material I have taken the liberty of bringing along these magazines.  I expect you will find something to your liking here, but I'll need those back when you are done, okay?"

As it happened of course, it was a successional train wreck.  "Why can't you accept it, Henry, one boy and two girls isn't bad.  Shame about all those miscarriages however, and in any case, none of your children will make a grandparent of you: your male heir Edward VI, will die when he is only 15,  Mary won't be able to conceive at all, and Elizabeth, seeing what a mess marriage and reproduction had been for you and the gruesome fact that you blithely chose to ax her mum,  will decide not to marry at all.  Can you blame her?  

"So after the last of your heirs die the English will have to bring in this bisexual king from Scotland to carry things on for you royals after 1603. Even James the first will have better luck in the baby daddy game than you did, and he liked boys.  But then England will get Scotland in the bargain so I guess that should be consolation enough, but France will never be your dominion, and besides, around the middle of the next century the people started to get really tired of being jerked around by their kings and queens and also got tired of being dictated to regarding how they were

supposed to worship.   They even had the nerve to execute your cousin Charles for treason.  Imagine it!  A king executed for treason?  The world truly will turn upside down.  

And besides, I suspect a major problem you and all your other royal kindred had was this matter of inbreeding.  If you are going to be marrying your first and second cousins like a bunch of demented hillbillies, you shouldn't have been surprised, knowing what we know now, that you got miscarriages and mental defectives and other problems.  Ask the Habsburgs about it.  They had it even worse. 

And if you must view it from a theological point of view then it is self-evident that God hates inbreeding.  Don't do it, or God will punish you.  Nuff said? 

The Chemical Amusement Park

Phillip Seymour Hoffman 1967-2014

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been. 

-John Greenleaf Whittier 

The tragic death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman comes as  a sad end to another actor's brilliant career.   In retrospect, whether he was playing the pathetic gasoline sniffer in "Love Liza" or the compulsive gambler in "Owning Mahoning", he didn't have to go far to find inspiration from his own life as a recovering addict.  I was blissfully unaware of his problems with drug abuse until late on February 2 when, listening to the BBC news 94.7 I heard the news announcer mentioned that "tributes to Phillip Seymour Hoffman" are pouring in.  I knew right then that he must have died.  No one gets "tributes" unless you have  shuffled off the mortal coil.  

 He was great actor and if he'd not died so suddenly he would certainly gone on to other great roles which now of course will never be. Like Heath Ledger's "Batman, the Dark Knight", Hoffman's last appearances on the screen will be posthumous:  the two upcoming Hunger Games sequels. And "Happyland" will never be.  He was great in just about everything he was in, and even in stuff that otherwise was crap, like "Twister".   And of course he was best remembered for his performance in "Capote" a biopic about another celebrity fixture who like Hoffman came to his end through an overdose. 

And so the heartbeat goes on for some but not for them, these

Ledger 1979-2008

VERY public figures like Heath Ledger, or Whitney Houston, Keith Moon, John Belushi, Elvis Presley, Chris Farley, Michael Jackson etc. These are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head.    I could of course go on and on with the list of show business persons who have died from polypharmacy, drug abuse, alcohol or both.  Show business is very demanding and having to be "up" for the performance is a constant necessity.  Is it any wonder then that all those psychoactive

Belushi 1949-1982

chemical substances are so tempting for a performer, or for anyone else who habitually has to take things beyond normal human endurance.   And of course, with money being no object, or at least less of an object than it is for most of us, there is nothing to restrain the artist from his appetite for mood-altering stuff, from fried food, to drink, and ultimately to cocaine, heroin, or clomethizole.  A delusion about our indestructibility seems to prevail until the moment of death. 


One minute you are on top of the world and the next minute you are a piece of  newly decaying meat on the bathroom floor.   We are God's meat puppets and you never know when he's going to lose interest in you and go on to other toys.  We are fragile, and not enough oxygen or too much dope and it's all over.  Our bladder empties, and our rectum too and all the king's horses and all the king's men aren't going to put you back together again. 

We fill you with preservatives, dress you up in backless tuxedo, present you in an attractive box, say some nice things about you, cry if we must, and then put you in a hole somewhere, since you aren't going to keep in any case. 

We all have to find a way to live within our own skins.  Some of us live from one spurt of dopamine to the next.  Many people, especially those in demanding careers without a regular schedule and lots of money are suddenly given the keys to the candy store and discover all sorts of new ways to control their moods, their energy level.  Sometimes it is the desire to escape from boredom or perhaps at the low end of a mood swing a deliberate choice to escape from life.  Culturally some kinds of drug-like amusements are condoned if not actually recommended by authorities. 

dopamine

Can you go to a baseball game without being offered a beer or maybe two?   Isn't even the common expedient of overeating a kind of self medication?  And of course hundreds of millions of people worldwide can't go more than a few hours without a cigarette.  And so the line between what is licit and illicit is kind of artificial.   Prohibition taught us to leave some forms of chemical amusement alone.  You go ahead and smoke and drink yourselves to death if you want to.  It's your right to do so.  It's perfectly legal if you are old enough to know better.    The only difference is the degree to which the more forbidden drugs will speed your on your way to the grave.  Immortal we may feel sometimes, and it's a tough lesson discovering you are not.  Is the transitory sensation on the way there worth it?