More fun than popping a large, juicy pimple is sticking a pin in the side of a big head and watching with pompous pleasure as it deflates. Fans of gawking at others’ floundering had a good week as the United Nations told George Clooney to shut the hell up, the Sicilian mafia was decapitated by the largest mass arrests in 20 years, and Dean Lavine’s questionable anonymous sourcing was investigated. If this makes you smile, stop: Smiling can kill you, or get you sued.
Keep smiling and you’ll go mad
To all of the fools who walk down Sheridan Road with a permanent smile plastered on their stupid faces, I say: Keep smiling. The joke’s on you. Remember when your mother told you not to make that face because it’d stick? Turns out she was right, says Japanese psychiatrist Makoto Natsume.
Forcing a smile too often leads to a fascinating catalog of bad health effects including headaches, an inability to turn off the smile, muscle aches, depression, and going downright nuts.
It’s called smile-mask syndrome and its zealous adherents in the Japanese service sector have suffered real mental collapse. Hundreds of thousands of working women in Japan are taught to smile alluringly to draw customers. This sustained, compulsory smiling is smothering real emotions, making the women lose the ability to turn the smile off.
Japanese author Tomomi Fujiwara was quoted by the London Times as blaming Disneyland Tokyo, opened in 1983, for requiring “perpetual smiles that are the product of manuals.”
But apparently the smile lessons pay off. Plus, who wouldn’t want a job whose only skill set is stupidly flashing your pearly whites?
So there you have it: A scientifically proven reason to continue scowling at exes, the chronically cheerful, and any little muggers you may find hiding in your closet. It could save your life.
A little thieving goes a long way
A sufficiently small person, large bag and feeble conscience are all you need to make a profit in the theft business. How? Thieves in Sweden took a page from Virgil’s “Aeneid” and are using Trojan horse tactics to steal stuff from others’ bags on buses.
There have been at least two reported cases this month in Sweden of items going missing from bags on coach buses. Police suspect that a child or a dwarf (is that the politically correct term?) is stuffed into a bag that’s then hoisted into the baggage area of the bus. During the trip, the child sneaks out and items meander from other passengers’ bags into the crook’s hands. At the end of the trip, accomplices retrieve bag, person and stolen goods.
“It is very possible that a very small adult or a child is being placed in a bag in order to search through the other bags,” Swedish police said.
Their main piece of evidence for the theory seems to be a woman who witnessed the suspicious act of two men struggling with lifting a heavy bag into the baggage area of a bus.
Have you seen those people on campus, usually dressed in grey-and-purple sweatsuits, struggling with oversized duffel bags? You thought they were carrying lacrosse sticks and shoulder pads. Wrong! Apparently we’ve got our own Northwestern child-thief smuggling ring going on. Fabulous.
Courts not laughing at lawyers’ jokes
A commercial for a New York law firm features a lawyer dispensing legal advice to aliens with a crashed UFO. Another of the firm’s ads shows a lawyer who, as described in court documents, “stomp[s] around downtown Syracuse, Godzilla-style.” But whatever the ads lack in artistic competence is more than made up for in cold, hard irony: The lawyer is suing the state of New York on First Amendment grounds after they tried to shut down the commercials.
Saying the ads were full of “patent falsities,” New York officials squashed the budding careers of these cinematic innovators (watch their trippy work here). But a federal judge found that, bizarrely enough, the First Amendment applies even to those whose job is to defend it, and upheld the firm’s right to air the ads. The case is now on appeal.
Nationwide laws restricting how law firms advertise are a comedic romp of their own. “Showmanship, puffery or hucksterism” are outlawed in South Carolina (but ads on public school buses? Totally legit).
The inimitable Floridians have already banned “slogans, jingles, ‘manipulative’ visual depictions, background sound (except for instrumental music) and ads that ‘create suspense’ and have prohibited ‘appeals to emotion.’” Their rationale is something about preserving the dignity of the profession; this is an odd concern, considering that lawyers who advertise on TV generally have no dignity to lose in the first place.
Avid fans of Chicago-area bankruptcy lawyer Peter Francis Geraci’s ubiquitous “infotapes” advertising needn’t worry. Upon careful examination of all his commercials, NBN fact checkers didn’t find any vicious animals, puffery, or anything capable of holding viewer attention for more than a second. Although, focus groups suggest he might want to try smiling occasionally.