Day: December 20, 2011

Weird Baby Products

My sister sent me the link to the funniest, creepiest and weirdest baby products that must have come from a completely diseased mind . Here are some of them:

1. A set of baby-holding pillows that look like scary giant hands. How would you feel waking up being held by these?

2. If your baby is the cutest one in the world, then why not put it up as a wall ornament?

I kind of feel sorry for this kid.

3. But I feel much sorrier for this one:

And if you think I selected the creepiest baby products there were, you are wrong. See the entire freaky collection right here.

From One Universe to Another

A talented translator and linguist (whose name I cannot force  myself to remember because I have already plunged into a holiday haze) once said, “Translating from one language to another is translating one universe to another.” Here is a little true story that illustrates this statement.

The Chair of my department is a polyglot who always addresses people in different languages.

One day, he came into my office and said to me in Ukrainian, “Harna divchyna!”

At that moment, an older female colleague walked in and asked, “So what did he say to you?”

I opened my mouth to respond and realized that what the Chair had said means “You are a beautiful girl!” And that sounds really bad in English when said by an older senior colleague to a female junior faculty member. In Ukrainian, however, this doesn’t sound creepy at all. It’s completely inoffensive.

This was one of those cases where a word-for-word translation would have perverted the original meaning of the utterance. So I looked for a statement in English that would be as neutral as the original.

“He said I’m a good person,” I translated.

A language is truly a universe, people.

On Low Self-Esteem

People think that it is possible to feed the beast of low self-esteem by accomplishing enough, by stuffing some huge and impressive achievements down its throat.

It doesn’t work this way, though. No matter how much money you make, how popular you become, how many accolades you receive, your low self-esteem will devour all that in a moment. And you will be left feeling small, miserable and worthless, trying to figure out where its next meal will come from.

Low self-esteem does not in any way depend on any external circumstances. Rather, no matter how you organize your reality, it will chew everything that surrounds you down, spit it out, and growl for more.

Evo Psych Bingo

I haven’t made fun of the adepts of evolutionary psychology for a while. Now seems like a good time to do so. Look at this cool bingo made by somebody who definitely knows what evo psych is all about:

Evo psych is beloved by men who are extremely unattractive and can’t get laid. So they need to convince themselves that paying for sex is not buying a prostitute but, rather, encountering legitimate desire according to the formulations of evolutionary psychology.

Evo psych is equally beloved by women who are completely frigid and want to sell sex but who cringe at the idea that this turns them into prostitutes. So they need to convince themselves that selling sex is not prostitution but, rather, an evolutionary adaptation.

This bingo card is great at showing men’s pay-out from evo psych. Now it would be great to have an equivalent card showing the benefits women get from it. I’ve had a misfortune of hanging out with a group of female adepts of evolutionary psychology for a while, so I picked up a lot of their lingo. On its basis, I created this

Evolutionary Psychology

BINGO

For Women

I’ve heard a version of each of these statements from my female evo psych buddies. They had a lending library of evo psych books and articles to justify every single one of these scary beliefs.

Feel free to use but don’t forget to link back!