Leftover links

There’s a good chance you have some leftover turkey from the holidays, so here are some leftover links from my backlog to go with it.

My big-ass Spanish boat is full of eels

Back in October, Washington State University’s campus newspaper, The Evergreen, somehow lost something in the translation:

The Daily Evergreen would like to sincerely apologize for an injustice served to the Filipino-American, Spanish-speaking and Catholic communities on the front page of Thursday’s Evergreen.

The story “Filipino-American history recognized” stated that the “Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza,” the galleon on which the first Filipinos landed at Morro, Bay, Calif., loosely translates to “The Big Ass Spanish Boat.” It actually translates to “Our Lady of Good Hope.”

Parts of the story, including the translation above, were plagiarized from an inaccurate Web site.

Actually. the Web site from which they plagiarized wasn’t inaccurate, it was a joke. C’mon folks, “big ass Spanish boat”?!

Well, it’s supposed to be a bad thing to have too much friction in your marriage…

This sentence says it all:

“The K-Y® Brand Married for Life Challenge could put you directly in the spotlight for your 15 minutes of fame.”

But wow, you’d want to have that 15 minutes very, very badly.

Maybe they could starting giving out Girl Scout merit badges for stuff like this

The CBC (that’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to my non-Canuck readers) reports:

MONTREAL – A teen magazine in Quebec has raised eyebrows with its latest issue, which includes an explicit guide for keeping a boyfriend.

The magazine has a sex guide with what it calls “99 Naughty Tricks,” including instructions on French kissing and oral sex.

Marie-Claude Magnan bought her 12-year-old daughter a subscription to Adorable because it’s one of the only magazines in French for teenage girls in Quebec.

Ah. A French magazine. The culture that brought us the terms laissez-faire and menage a trois.

Let me tell you — speaking from a purely Macchiavellian perspective — my adolescence would’ve been considerably more interesting had they run this sort of article in Sassy or Seventeen back then. Thanks, guys. Thanks for nothing.

(I speak in jest. Well, sort of.)

Adorable’s editor defended the article:

“It’s girl talk,” she said. “It’s what you talk about with your girlfriend. It’s the same thing with this guide.

“We are just saying ‘tricks,’ and if you don’t want to do them you don’t, and it’s not degrading to women because women do that all the time.”

I’ve witnessed this girl talk and have to concur that many girls do talk this way. It’s the second part of her defense — “We are just saying ‘tricks,’ and if you don’t want to do them you don’t” — that rings a little false. After all, the article is a “how to keep your boyfriend” guide and the implication is that failure to perform these “tricks” will have your boyfriend saying “Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: you!“

Perhaps she should’ve said something a little more truthful: that this sort of article is written with tongue firmly planted in…erm, cheek, by smartasses brainstorming over beer and pizza and not by social scientists, psychologists or counselors.

The problem is that until recently, Adorable was aimed at a much younger crowd: the 11- to 17-year-old set. They changed their focus to the presumably more profitable (and randy!) 16- to 24-year old demographic, but kept the name. It must’ve caused all kinds of confusion for parents who wanted to buy a nice magazine for their young teen daughters in their mother tongue. The end result will probably be that a few readers from their former demographic will grow up a little too quickly. That’s a pity, because while some people who leave childhood earlier than scheduled turn out all right, many don’t.

I should know; I’ve dated a couple of them.