Foreign Dispatches

Prudish Brazilians?

I know it sounds oxymoronic to associate the land of the samba and the Brazilian wax with prudery, but that's exactly what this strange story suggests.

A Brazilian university has publicly expelled a woman who was heckled by hundreds of fellow students for wearing a short, pink skirt to class, taking out newspaper ads today to publicly accuse her of immorality.

The private Bandeirante University in São Bernardo do Campo, outside of São Paulo, said 20-year-old Geisy Arruda disrespected "ethical principles and academic dignity and morality".

Arruda made headlines last month when she had to be escorted away by police after she tried to go to class wearing the mini-dress. She put on a professor's white coat and left amid a hail of insults and curses.

Video footage of the incident, which occurred last month, was posted on YouTube and picked up by Brazilian networks.

Something isn't right here: one would have thought most young Brazilian adults incapable of batting an eye to something as mundane as a miniskirt, so ordinary a sight it would be for them. There must be another angle to this story that has yet to be told, e.g. is this university some sort of religiously motivated establishment, a Catholic Bob Jones University or something along those lines?

Shocker: Foreign Douchebags Provoke Xenophobic Reaction

When I wrote a while back about certain Westerners taking Japanese niceness for granted, one (of many) incidents I had in mind at the time was the notorious Yamanote Halloween Train Party, on the annual occasion of which certain foreign residents of the Tokyo region took it upon themselves to test the patience of their Japanese hosts to the limit by getting drunk and behaving obnoxiously on the Yamanote subway line, acting on the presumption that the "gaijin pass" Westerners tend to get in Japan were actually a licence to behave like assholes.

A Hard Lesson in Respect

There's something about traveling abroad that seems to turn many a Briton into a complete asshole; whether one can attribute this to a mental hangover from the days of Empire or to some other cause is unclear to me, but nevertheless, a great many British people seem to go out of their way to annoy the locals they encounter. Sometimes this attitude can lead to rather ... unfortunate consequences, take the charming gentleman in this video, for example.

English Man Brutally Knocked Out In Bangkok Bar

Lesson of the day: just because the locals you're dealing with tend to be soft-spoken doesn't mean you get to run your mouth off at whomever, wherever. Not all the people of the world are like the conflict-avoidant Japanese, who tend to give far too much leeway to Western morons with no respect for others.

[Via Digg].

A Strange Way to Advertise Denmark

Have you heard about Youtube's "Karen26", a young Danish woman who decided to teach a foreign visitor just what "hygge" means, only to land with a bun in the oven for her efforts? Would you be willing to help her find the father of the child resulting from this one-night stand, a man of whom she remembers neither his nationality nor even his name? What if I then told you that this charming little video was actually cooked up by an ad agency, and paid for by VisitDenmark, the country's official tourist board, in the name of "viral marketing"?

0xKaren26 - Karen in Denmark seeking August's father - (2009) (Denmark)

Personally I think it's a little strange to sell one's country to the world by advertising that its full of promiscuous blondes, but what do I know? Then again, the Danes themselves don't seem to be too keen on this sort of branding (related article in Swedish here).

I can't vouch for the "promiscuous" part myself (not yet having the chance to find out), but I can verify that the streets of Copenhagen are impossibly full of tall, slender, gorgeous blonde women, the average Western heterosexual male's fantasies brought to life, in fact: hopefully they're a bit keener on contraception than the fictional "Karen26" supposedly was though ...

PS: I've just discovered Politiken's English-language article on the controversy.

From Russia with Hate

One of the countries I left out of my personal list of places to avoid in Europe was Russia, and not because I think Russia is a place one shouldn't avoid: on the contrary, I'd say the entire country is a no-go zone, at least if you don't happen to be white (and yes, that also goes for East Asians and others accustomed to thinking of themselves as "honorary whites"). Rather, the reason I left Russia out was because I haven't been there and have no intention of going: in fact I think only a fool would go to Russia if he or she were in my position. Watch this video and you'll start to have an inkling of what I'm on about.

A Feminist Discovers the Pleasures of Motherhood

Don't get me wrong, I'm no troglodyte who looks back with nostalgia on some mythical "good ol days" when women "knew their place" (i.e. in the home with the kids); in fact I think it's a wonderful thing that women are now able to pursue careers as ends in themselves rather than simply as a way to tread water until "landing" a suitable husband. In short, I think feminism has had a substantial net positive effect on Western societies, and is undeserving of most of the scorn heaped upon it by conservatives.

Why Everybody Hates Gwyneth

I have no intention of turning this blog into a celebrity gossip site, but there's one very noticeable phenomenon I can't help commenting on, to wit, the breadth and ferocity of the hatred expressed online for the actress Gwyneth Paltrow: it seems no matter what the woman does or says, hordes of voices come out of the woodwork to ridicule her for her supposed pretentiousness, arrogance or stupidity, and the strangest thing of all is that the issue being seized upon is usually nothing of any real consequence - for instance, a comment on a gift on her GOOP website, or some such, hardly on par with, say, explaining your lackluster acting career by saying you're just too beautiful, or childishly ridiculing another actress for daring to possess and utilize a less than impoverished vocabulary.

Why Twitter?

Farhad Manjoo asks a question I've long been meaning to myself: what exactly is the reward in using Twitter? I've never been able to come up with a good answer to this question, which is why I've never ever bothered to use my Twitter account even once after creating it. 140 characters doesn't suffice to share all but the most banal thoughts, and when I look at what active users of the Twitter service actually put out, I find myself scratching my head as to why anyone would care to follow such material. Is it really news to anyone that politicians and celebrities engage in all the same mundane daily activities that the rest of us do? I could care less that Ashton Kutcher is mowing his lawn or that Lindsay Lohan just bought an iced frappucino, and if the minutiae of the lives of these famous individuals are of so little interest, I fail to see why anyone - other than  perhaps a stalker - would care about the many non-events that make up my typical day, which might look like this in all its gripping detail:

You Know Obama Worship Has Gone Way Overboard When ...

His name is even being used to flog heroin. What happened to good old brand names like "Blue Magic"?

Seriously, though, the level of adulation being accorded to Barack Obama and his wife is seriously starting to creep me out, and I suspect that to some extent it must creep the Obamas out as well. It's all very well for Obama backers to be euphoric about their man getting into the White House, but to hear many in the media (both in America and abroad) talk, you'd think America had just elected the Messiah, and that a new golden age was just about to begin, with swords turned into plowshares, lions lying with lambs, etc. Why not at least wait until the man's half way through his term before treating him as if he could walk on water?

It's That Time of the Year Again

I promised your respite from my cynicism would be a short one, and as such here I am doing my best not to disappoint. I went into my local gym this morning, and what did I see? Lots and lots of new faces, some being shown the facilities and others simply wandering around aimlessly from machine to machine. At the sight of these newcomers the first thought that occurred to me - apart from some annoyance at their generally getting in the way - was that hardly any of them were likely to be around by the end of the month in any case, so all of their pre-paid gym memberships were in effect subsidizing those of us who don't wait until January to decide we're going to get in shape.

While I'm grateful for the unthinking generosity of all these fair-weather fitness buffs, it is precisely behavior such as theirs which makes me so cynical about festivities like Christmas and New Year's Day in the first place: there is nothing especially significant about these particular points in spacetime, and as such one should not have to wait for some date on the calendar to be nice to others or begin to act on resolutions to improve one's life in some way. To me, the fact that people wait for such days to act in ways they ought to throughout the rest of the year spells out very clearly that they aren't serious about the efforts they do make on these supposedly "special" days either, which means that all they are really doing, in sending presents and well-wishes or making resolutions, is engaging in self-deluding, feel-good theatrics. That is why all those Christmas well-wishers turn back into monsters of egocentricity once the festivities are over, and why all those new-year gym joiners will only have paunches and cellulite to flaunt by the time summer rolls around.

As for myself, I take my own medicine. I have no new year resolutions to make, and everything I intend to do in the course of the year is precisely what I'd been planning to do from the year before; to the extent that I fail to meet any of said goals, it will not be because I've been pursuing them half-heartedly or waiting for some supposedly more auspicious time to begin to act on them.