Movember is now in its tenth year but like many men, I’ve resisted the urge to grow a Mo because of
- an inability to grow a decent moustache
- a reluctance to look like a p0rn star / seventies pervert / gay cowboy [delete as appropriate]
- a fear of scaring off potential collaborators, customers, undergraduates, postgraduates, friends etc
- a long history of fine facial foliage from Errol Flynn to Tom Selleck, Henry Wellcome to Freddie Mercury, Charlie Chaplin to Lemmy from Motörhead. How can you compete with distinguished facial hair like that?
Then I looked around me and thought, what the heck, that’s not stopping anyone else. So with a few colleagues we got together and created the University of Mo-chester, CSMCR team. So far we’ve raised over £1000 for prostate and testicular cancer and you can still sponsor us. There’s a group photo of us below – you can’t actually see my moustache in that picture because it is blonde. Honest guv’.
CSMCR Mo Bros, from left to right: Bijan Parsia, Sean Bechhofer, Alan Stokes, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Dimitri Tsarkov, Kristian Garza (cheating with a beard!), Matthew Makin, Simon Harper, Jim Miles, Yours Truly, Michele Filannino and Toby Howard.
There’s an interesting back story to Movember, told here by its Aussie founder, Adam Garone:
Movember isn’t just about raising money, it’s about raising awareness too. If you’re a bloke, have you felt your balls lately, for testicular cancer (obviously)? Do you know about prostate cancer? With a few caveats [1], Movember is having a generally positive effect on human health [2] – and its a lot of fun too!
References
- McCartney, M. (2012). Is Movember misleading men? BMJ, 345 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e8046
- Jeffcott, M., Cagiannos, I., & Zorn, K. (2012). Movember update: The Canadian perspective Canadian Urological Association Journal, 6 (3) DOI: 10.5489/cuaj.12037
O'Really? 