The piece on CBS Sunday Morning about how everyone tells people their baby is cute had me cracking up, because I used to work with a guy who was so much of a curmudgeon that he would tell people ‘That is the ugliest dog I have ever seen” if they ever dared to show him pictures of their baby.
At any rate, consider this your open thread.
Zifnab
haha! Win.
Excellent way to kick off a Sunday morning. Danke John.
harlana pepper
Sorta related. I walked into the office this morning and saw that someone had blacked in some of the Obama family’s teeth on the People magazine cover and left it on the table in the lobby area. Like a humorless, old crow, I snatched it up and stuffed it into my bag.
Dug Jay
If you can only see one chihuahua movie this summer, make it this one. Kids of all ages will love it.
north_aufzoo
You used to work with Jack Cafferty?
p.a.
Here is one of those interesting ‘factoids’ rattling around in my bean that I can neither provide reference for nor vouch for, but it does fit into my jaundiced world-view. Newborns strongly tend to look like the father, because in caveman days, if they didn’t look like the (presumptive) father, off the cliff they went.
Anyone else heard of this?
The Grand Panjandrum
If your own parents don’t think you’re the cutest kid evah; you might be ugly.
Wyrm
I’ve heard of that study. I think it was the University of Georgia that did it, and they had a picture of a child with 3 potential fathers (and mothers in another part of the experiment). People correctly identified the father something like 50% of the time if the child was one, but it was random chance for other aged children and for mothers.
The theory was that it was evolutionarily important to look like your father long enough for him to recognize you as his.
Catsy
I have now been subjected to the trailer for that goddamn chihuahua movie twice, because they insist on playing that abomination before The Dark Knight. It fills me with deep horror. And shame that I share a common culture with the mind that produced this awful crap. I hope it bombs.
rachel
I saw a baby once that looked like Jack Klugman. That was an ugly baby.
John Cole
It won’t. It will probably be wildly successful. Ask advertisers- anthropomorphization always works.
Just go through the Super Bowl commercials and count how many have talking animals from year to year.
Dennis - SGMM
“Lady and the Tramp XIV”
Warren Terra
Since this is an open thread, I’ll depart from the theme of anthropomorphized animals (though, perhaps, stick with the curmudgeons), and say that Hilzoy’s got a truly great post about McCain aide Mark Salter up at her blog right now.
That this kind of a loose cannon would feel free to release abusive screeds under his own name would be bad, but he does it in McCain‘s name and that’s fine with McCain. Not a good sign.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I useta be that guy. I’m too smooth and suave ‘n’ shit to just come right out and say “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that’s one UGLY little fucker” but I’d definitely think it.
I was that guy who’d hear a baby crying in the department store and mutter “someone stuff a sock in that goddamn thing, will ya?”
THEN I became a grandfather.
Christ.
I don’t fucking recognize myself anymore.
EVERY goddamn baby I see is cuter than hell. When some little brat is screamin in the next aisle, I’m saying “Awwww, whassa matta li’l fella, not havin’ a good day?” in the most atrocious baby-talk natter.
My own grandkids are simply the most beautiful, smartest, bestest little humans on the planet, guaranteed.
Uh, yeah. I’ll go take my meds now.
Breschau
Hey, remember 8 years ago, when Dubya promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House?
Yeah, not so much.
jake
Only if cavemen were bald, wrinkled and covered in ick.
Sorry, that doesn’t compute. Aside from the unprovable assumptions about social norms, the group would be small and closely related, so everyone would look like everyone else.
Kind of like small towns in the mid-west.
jake
Also, my sisters were the cutest babies EVAR.
Until my nephew was born.
And I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Dismal
Your caveman study doesn’t really compute. In the paleo and neolithic eras (including early agricultural societies) sex and procreation weren’t connected which is why early societies and many present “primitive” societies are or were matrilineal. Everyone knew which mother the little intruder came from but not so much which father. By the way all newborns look like Ike when he was president.
jake
My experience with mothers with new borns is limited but if anyone tried to chuck their baby off a cliff that person would not get additional chances to procreate. Or breathe.
jagorev
Matrilineal is not the same thing as matriarchal. There has never been any convincing evidence of a human society that is matriarchal. Thus, even if a baby was seen to “belong” to the mother, the mother was still reliant on a male member of the group for the resources she and the baby needed for survival. One good way to get these resources would be for the baby to resemble the father.
jnfr
I have fortunately only seen that chihuahua trailer once, and I unconsciously pushed back into my seat, trying to get away from the horror. If they’d put it on before Dark Knight I think my head would have exploded.
EJ
Somewhat related, I used to work with a Cambodian guy who, whenever a new employee would show the office a picture of their dog, no matter what breed of dog it was, would say brightly, “Oh, that’s the kind we eat!”
The looks on people’s faces were priceless.
Funniest part is people don’t actually eat dog meat in Cambodia.
Chet
I think I know what you’re talking about, but I think you have it backwards – the best defense against infanticide is for the infant to display cryptic paternity, that is, not display the traits of any father, which is why (for instance) Caucasian infants are born with blue eyes and blond hair, regardless of the hair or eye color of the father.
Almost every father recognizes “their” ears or eyes or whatever, even if they’re not really the father, because that’s what infant physiology was designed to do – to be so generic that any putative father would be sure to “recognize” their own features.
Re: infants looking like Ike, I always heard that they looked like Winston Churchill.
Mike
“And here’s a banana for your monkey!”
Nicole
Here. Almost made up for missing the CBS Sunday morning segment:
uglybabycontest.com/
DecidedFenceSitter
Our customer relations training is titled “The Baby is Ugly” and uses the imagery of how to tell a mother that her precious little baby is ugly and have her thank you for it.
Or generally in my line of work, that the system is insecure, and it’s going to cost them a lot of money to make it secure.
KRK
Try again. Caucasian babies are definitely not all born with blond hair. I was born with a full head of black hair. (My mother always said if it weren’t for the fact that I was the only baby born in that hospital that day (maybe for several days), she would have been certain there had been a mistake.) And I’m certainly not alone. Most “blond” babies are actually bald at first.
It has been my observation that babies closely resemble the parent of the opposite sex up until about the time they turn into toddlers, then they switch over. The resemblences (and switches) are stronger with boys.
NR
Rasmussen says only 22% of the public thought that McCain’s latest ad was racist, but 53% thought Obama’s dollar bill comment was racist.
Is it too early to start hating the voters yet?
Bob In Pacifica
Surpised that there’s no story here at Balloon Juice about the Fort Detrick guy (Ivins) suiciding himself to conveniently close the books on the anthrax case.
I went back to look at some of the old stuff, spurred by Greenwald and Alexandrovna, and the original person of interest, Hatfill, put on his resume that he went to the Army’s Institute of Military Assistance, which was a school that taught, among other things, psy ops. He also claimed to have been in Rhodesia’s Selous Scouts, an irregular force that has been implicated in poisoning the Zimbabwean countryside with, among other things, anthrax. Quite a thing to have on your resume, eh?
Hatfill also appeared in the Washington Times a couple years prior to 9/11 in a bioterror article, complete with a picture of himself dressed in gas mask, garbage bags and rubber gloves pretending to whip up some bubonic plague muck in his kitchen. Hatfill also wrote a novel that had Iraq attacking the U.S. with bioweapons. Before 9/11.
So if this Ivins was actually a homicidal maniac and Hatfill was hired when his own resume had him working with white racists killers who used anthrax to kill black civilians, then you have to question who’s running Fort Detrick’s human resources department. At least.
Even if you ignore Hatfill you have a crazy guy working at a top secret government bioterror lab attempting to murder two senators and also broadcasters and newspeople, actually killing federal employees and other civilians with an agent that could only have come from that lab, having been processed in a method beyond his personal capabilities, and using these killings as a false flag operation to blame on Muslims. And then it takes seven years to track this guy down. And according to Greenwald, four sources lied to ABC News about ties between the anthrax and Iraq. And who was working to determine the source of the anthrax? The lab in Fort Detrick! So was either media-savvy Hatfill a source? Was Ivins? I guess ABC will be right on top of it.
Ed Drone
Actually, they look like Winston Churchill even more. Especially that grumpy look he gave if you took away his cigar (and the parallel to the baby’s desire for the nipple is noticed).
Ed
L. Ron Obama
I always thought babies looked like Don Rickles.
Third Eye Open
Ramblings from the Taint of America
1. Picked up American Theocracy for five bucks while waiting for my girlfriend to wade her way through a line of teenage girls in white face make-up and home-made capes all clamoring for the latest in the Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Twilight series.
2. All babies look like mini-me Michelin Men
3. Northerners have just the same capacity for racism as southerners…we just do it with a better accent and holding a piece of pecan-pie.
Brachiator
One of the studies that looked into this, and did not support the idea that newborns look like their fathers can be found here as a pdf file (Whom Are Newborn Babies Said to Resemble?).
Logically, a newborn might look like an uncle or other person closely related to the father, and still be said to resemble the father. And genetic studies that indicate that 10% of newborns are not the offspring of the putative father suggest that any easy assignment of paternal relationship is very spotty.
Also, the study cited rightly suggests that there various parties have all kinds of motives in asserting that a newborn looks like daddy, and this is consistent with more current views in evolutionary science that indicate that fathers, mothers and even children all seek selective advantage:
So, a father wants to establish paternity so he isn’t wasting his resources on a child who is not his, a mother wants to secure support for her offspring no matter who the father is, and the child wants to maximize his or her survival chances by being as cute as possible.
This also slightly reminds me of a study that indicates that some women may have a preference for mates that resemble their fathers:
As an aside, there are interesting views of the evolution of dogs that look at more than the old idea of humans domesticating dogs and consider the degree to which dogs manipulated humans into taking care of them by becoming less wolf-like and becoming more cute and lovable, and creating a mutually beneficial relationship.
This, however, does not explain cats.
99 Percent Pure
Eh hee!
I wouldn’t label myself a curmudgeon but I’ve long held that
people ought to stop lying about there being a Santa Claus, and
All babies are not cute.
People shouldn’t lie, whether it is to adults, children or babies.
Delia
I opened my email this afternoon and had some spam inviting me to download the GOP toolbar so I can easily contribute to all my fave gooper candidates and sites. I’m very upset.
gil mann
They just showed up one day a few thousand years ago, in more or less their current form, and were all like “hi, big pink monkeys, feed us and we’ll rub against your legs every so often.” Seriously, that’s the whole story, as far as anyone can tell. That’s why you don’t have to train them to use litter–they’re descended from a desert breed and their instincts are still pretty much intact.
We’ve done some selection on them, obviously, but it’s mostly cosmetic. Even one of those squashed-face things with poofy fur will go feral and live a relatively successful predator’s life if you abandon it (don’t). They’re not domestic animals at a base level like dogs are; they’ve chosen domesticity.
Factoid which I often bring up and will continue to do so until someone besides me finds it interesting: unlike tail-wagging, purring is voluntary.
skippy
please, calm down, ma’am, i’m sure he didn’t mean anything by his remarks. here, here’s a glass of water, and i brought a banana for the monkey.
good night, and be sure to tip your waitresses!
Brachiator
I saw “The Dark Knight” again this weekend, this time at an IMAX theater. Fortunately, no chihuahua movie trailers.
Typically, a mainstream movie is just blown up from 35 mm to 70mm IMAX, but director Christopher Nolan filmed a number of sequences with an IMAX camera. And they are pretty damned impressive. And not just some of the action sequences. One of the earlier scenes in which the Joker is first revealed has additional shock value, his grim visage dominating the screen.
It was also interesting to note that this afternoon showing of “The Dark Knight,” and some in the audience was seeing the film for the first time. Amazingly, a middle aged woman who saw the film with her adult son (and enjoyed it) did not know that Heath Ledger played the Joker until after the film when she saw the actor’s name in the credits.
Credit where credit is due. Here is Flip Wilson on the Tonight Show, with his story about an ugly baby.
Mike
First segment of Thursday night’s Daily Show was genius regarding the latest Obama-McCain media memes.
Stuart Eugene Thiel
I once heard about a minister who would inspect the baby and say, “Oh, my, that *is* a baby, isn’t it?”
Conservatively Liberal
Nothing will ever explain cats, and that is the way they plan to keep it. They own us, and that is the way of the world.
LanceThruster
If my dog had a face like yours I’d shave his butt and teach him to walk backwards.” ~ Capt. Hawkeye Pierce