Jokes have a double reputation. If many people consider them the heritage of a long gone sense of humor, other ones underline their historical and popular value, like any form of culture passed down orally, a sort of collective patrimony made of folk songs, proverbs, traditions, maxims and principles…
Genoa, stingy and generous
Closed, cold, grumpy, but also tenacious, prudent, gifted… every great city and Italian region has its own, and these are the first negative and positive stereotypes that you hear about the Genoese. “Some are Sampdorians”, someone jokes. But above all they are said to be stingy (the famous “little short arm”), and at the same time, they are said to be generous… but the negative stereotype is often more famous! And that’s all the proof we’d need of the fallibility of the stereotype itself, being able, over time, to affirm everything and the opposite of everything…
Our brain takes 66 days to adapt to change (more or less…)
Health, economics, how to balance the two aspects in these pandemic times. All crucial topics, as well as a less debated one: how to keep mental sanity in a lockdown. Of course, there are many possible situations to have a univocal reality, but psychologists underlined the necessity to create new habits in order to maintain a balance, reduce stress and anxiety and get ready for a new “normality”…
Entertainment and its responsibilities
It’s been a little while since more recent or older movies and TV series get watched with current standards. The last victim is Gone with the wind, that has been suspended from HBO catalog and will reappear with disclaimers for “ethnic and racial prejudices” and “product of its times”. But even popular and apparently harmless shows like How I met your mother and Friends had been criticized for their (alleged) sexist, homophobic, transphobic messages and/or fat shaming…
Princesses, (social) mirror on the wall
Beautiful and thin, graceful and harmonious, romantic and always in search of love, kind and helpful, affable and loving, obliging and attentive. The Italian (and English) provide an infinite number of synonyms to describe the gender role, always the same, of fairytale princesses: characters that are basically unreal in which, however, many girls still try to mirror themselves. But it is useless to blame the choices of the last century. From 2012 things have changed more in the entertainment rather than in the women’s head…
Tourette’s Syndrome and the stereotype of coprolalia
Tourette’s syndrome had been diagnosed for the first time in 1884 by the French doctor George Gilles de la Tourette, but its causes are not utterly known, unlike the symptoms. The main stereotype concerns the association with coprolalia, a compulsive behavior that forces to use foul language. Coprolalia is surely one of the symptoms, but is not the only one and it’s not that frequent. Case studies can be really different, too much to have a typification…
Diary from a Roman quarantine… and a half
We are (almost) done. Maybe. And we are here to tell our point of view… without taking into account the deaths, the infected, the people without home or job, or both, the deep discomfort for a lost freedom, fear, uncertainty of the present and the future… we are “fine”. Even if this “emergency” seemed to regard only Italy in the “Western world”, we had the record of deaths. Actually all the world was involved since the beginning. It was just a matter of time. All the countries that lost time now have reached their “records”…
The bat is not a “plague-spreader”, it’s more like an “antivirus”
Medically speaking, bats are behind all the viral epidemics of the last decades. SARS in China, MERS in the Middle East, Nipah in Malaysia, Ebola in Africa, now Covid19. The pattern is always the same, the virus goes from bats to an intermediate host and then there is the spillover towards humans. Once again, bats have to shake off their negative reputation: they’re not the problem, they can actually be the solution…
Coronavirus, how to navigate the confusion of data
An English study has recently claimed that there will be like 6 millions of infected only in Italy. Others say that they are now probably around 1 million. Everything is plausible, but most of the numbers that we chase everyday, fed by journalists, are only a guess that must be taken with a grain of salt. Especially today, every “expert” claims this while giving new data. So what should we look at to better understand the situation? The few certain facts and one deeper study that can give a far more positive perspective…
What does the bunny have to do with Easter?
From central Europe to the United States, one of the Easter symbols is the bunny, or better yet the hare. Apparently, this animal has nothing to do with eggs, the emblem of birth, or, for those who believe, with resurrection and Christianity. But it actually does…