Bananarsevertising

I’ve been seeing this banana ad on TV quite a bit recently (there are a few versions of it, but this is the one I want to talk about).

Transcript:

“Natural” does not equal “safe” or “good for you”

Something I find frustrating sometimes is the idea that, if something is “natural”, it is safe and good for you. (And don’t get me started on the “no chemicals” thing!)

It is an especially dangerous trope in the field of herbal medicine. You don’t have to go much further than “deadly nightshade is natural” to disprove “natural=safe”, but many people don’t get that far. So while a study may not have been strictly necessary, it is nonetheless useful that a review has been done.

(Also, someone has clearly been doing some publicising here. I read about the study in the SMH, and when I went searching to see if I could find the article, there were a lot of other newspaper (etc) stories about it. It’s nice to see some reporting of a paper like this!)

Carnival goodness

Just a quick post to say thanks to Chally for including me in The Thirteenth Carnival of Feminists and to Rayedish for including me in The Twenty-First Down Under Feminists Carnival.

Thanks to both of you for all your work! Both carnivals look wonderful.

Talking about mansplaining…

… I ran into a charming mansplainer this week.

I have just acquired a new computer for work, so I thought I should go best practice and get some surge protection, too.

I dropped into my local hardware store a couple of weeks ago, and was shocked at the price difference between the top and bottom ends. The specs on these things are not very clear, and so I couldn’t figure out whether it was worth paying extra or not. So I asked someone.

The someone I asked was a big burly bloke who seemed to know what he was talking about. He was absolutely adamant that I needed to buy the surge protector at the top end, and his explanation made some sense. He was a little condescending, but I’m so used to that that I ignore it, as long as the information is useful. But I am always suspicious about people who try to sell me the most expensive item in the store, so I decided to think about it.

I had some time this week, so I went back to the same shop and asked another person. The someone I asked this time was a short burly bloke, maybe 18 or 20 (ie significantly younger than me, and nobody ever thinks I’m younger than I am), who in a blusteringly condescending tone gave me the exact opposite advice the first man had given me – but who couldn’t explain why, just said with a patronising sneer: “you don’t need that”. Let’s call him Condescending Fool.

Is it just me …

… or is anyone else slightly frustrated by the assumptions which are just absolutely loaded into Panasonic’s current catchphrase, which is “The smartest guys in the room”?

I know, I know, there are assumptions loaded into every statement, but these ones really get my goat. In particular, the following assumptions:

- Panasonic’s stuff was conceived/designed/built/sold/etc by men.
- Men are the default person/there are only men in the room/the only people in the room that matter are men/men are smarter than women anyway so one only needs to talk about the smartest men to get the message across.

*sigh*

(And yes, I know that “guys” can be used to equal “people” in some contexts – I myself use “hey guys” as a generic greeting sometimes, although with less frequency than I once did. However, the use of “guy” when talking about “a guy” or “the guy” (or the plurals thereof) is generally used to refer to men – I’d say almost exclusively so.)

New security measures at NSW Parliament

This post is probably not what you think it is! (And probably much more trivial than you are expecting.)

I dropped into NSW Parliament today (as you do). They have just built a new guardhouse, which means that instead of walking straight through the gates on Macquarie St and then going through security just inside the building entrance, you use a single entrance at one end of the building and go through security there, then wander into the front courtyard and from there into the building.

I’m a little sad that the main Macquarie St gates are no longer in use – it does make it more difficult to tell that you are actually welcome to go into the building – but for purely aesthetic reasons, I’m really happy that the building entrances themselves are now clear of security gear. (A single street entrance through a guardhouse probably increases security, too.)

But that’s not the point of this post.

To get back to Macquarie St, you use the gates at the opposite end to the new guardhouse. As I came out of the building and towards what appeared to be two sets of locked gates, I saw a grinning security guard. Several metres from the gates, I might add.

I had a guess as to how it worked, but not being the sort of person who wants to walk into a pair of locked cast iron gates, I was looking around cautiously to make sure there was nothing I was missing.

“Keep walking,” called the security guard, grinning even wider.

I got to about 1 m of the first gates and they didn’t yet open. “Keep walking,” the guard said again.

And the gates opened. As did the second set a moment later.

I turned back to see the security guard watching, still grinning hugely, clearly very chuffed with his shiny new toys.

It made me smile.

How do you make a movie about a girl popular?

You make it all about a man, of course!

I heard a day or two ago that The Lovely Bones had been turned into a movie.

Last night, I saw a trailer for the movie.

Now, my memory of the book is something like the one in this review – that is, that while Susie’s father’s obsession with finding Susie’s killer was an important part of the book, it was by no means the focus.

According to the trailer I saw, it is the main point of the movie.

[Trigger warning for the next sentence]

Which possibly means it’s just another “young virginal girl gets raped and murdered, great, let’s make a violent revenge flick”. Which misses so much.

I’m wondering whether the movie will even pass the Bechdel test? (I’m pretty sure the book does.)

I don’t think I’ll be watching it to find out.

(And let’s make this clear: the trailer may have misrepresented the movie, and this assessment may be wrong. In that case, they should have created a trailer that better represented the movie, shouldn’t they?)

19th Down Under Feminists’ Carnival!

The Nineteenth Down Under Feminists’ Carnival is now up over at The Professional Lap Cat.

Some good reading. Thanks, mynxii!