How to be sorry
Some people may have enjoyed themselves too much over the weekend. Here's what to remember when apologizing:
It's not about you. The act is a step in support of a relationship that's considered important.
Accept responsibility. This isn't the time to share the blame or to present mitigating circumstances or excuses.
Express regret. Show remorse over the hurt the action caused. Sometimes, things are said or done that aren't necessarily wrong or untrue but are still hurtful. We still need to apologize. Not "I'm sorry if you were offended," but "I'm sorry that I hurt your feelings."
Apologize face-to-face if possible. Delivering it over the phone or through e-mail lacks sincerity.
Source: The (Virginia) Daily Press
Fedoras
Thousands of fans wearing fedoras lined the red carpet at Cannes this month for the premiere of the fourth Indiana Jones movie. Some notes:
The hat is named for Princess Fedora, the heroine of an 1882 play by Victorien Sardou who wore a similar hat. Sarah Bernhardt played the princess. In Britain, people wear trilbys, which have a narrower brim.
For the movie, Hollywood wardrobe designer Bernie Pollack had to create 30 identical, weather-beaten fedoras. A Stockton, Calif., company holds the licence to the Jones hat design and expects to sell up to a million fedoras in the coming year; it has been selling 50,000 of them annually.
The new movie should carry an advisory, contends Lore Sjoberg of Wired magazine. He dreads the upturn in fedora sales and suggests: "Warning: Indiana Jones is a fictional character. His movies are all set decades ago. He is more physically attractive than 98 per cent of humanity. These are all reasons you should not attempt to dress like him."
The psychological meaning of a hat depends on whom you ask. Freud said it was "a symbol of the genital organ, most frequently the male." Jung's view was that hats are personality caps. "Just as in summing up we bring ideas 'under one head,' so the hat, as a sort of leading idea, covers the whole personality and imparts its own significance to it."
Other sources: news services, Smithsonian magazine
In case you wondered
A person produces 30,000 litres of saliva in a lifetime, according to Raymond Tallis, author of The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head.
If a female shark has bite marks, that's a sure sign she's had sex, reports Britain's Focus magazine.
Feeding fussy kids
Many toddlers are fussy eaters. A few pointers for parents:
Get the kids involved in the entire meal process: looking at recipe books, shopping for ingredients and, if they are old enough, helping with simple cooking tasks.
Arrange food in fun shapes and vary the menu. Prepare foods in bite-sized portions; toddlers especially love finger foods.
If you're having trouble getting kids to eat their veggies, try hiding the vegetables, pureed or grated, in pasta sauces.
Children do not like, or need, excessive spices and seasonings.
If toddlers won't eat new foods at first, try serving the new food with an old favourite.
Source: Joondalup (Perth, Australia) Times
Losing the geek vote
In the 1980s, among adults, the words "geek" and "nerd" exchanged status positions, writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. "A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked. ... The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he's energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be."
Opportunity knocked
It sounds like every student's dream - turning over an exam paper and finding the answers on the back. But that was what happened, Reuters reports, when 12,000 lucky teenagers wrote their GCSE (graduating) music exam this month. Because of a "printing error," examination board officials said, this paper had "more detail than is usual." The students won't have to resit the exam because only 5 per cent of the overall marks on the paper were at stake and, besides, most students seem to have been unaware of their luck.
A robot bigmouth
French researchers have built an artificial mouth than can reproduce the mush created by a human munching on an apple. It could form part of a robot taste-tester designed to improve food safety and quality, says the New Scientist. Many of the flavours humans taste are generated by the release from food of volatile compounds that pass up to the nose. These chemicals vary as an apple is crushed, sliced or liquidized. The French device, five times larger than a human mouth, rotates food, chews it and simulates breathing with helium to carry the flavours away. Thought du jour
"Scientists are explorers, philosophers are tourists."
- Richard Feynman,
Nobel laureate
