I’m sure many of you have been faced with this dilemma – being cornered by someone you mildly tolerate and faced with “cute baby” pictures. Okay, five minutes of looking at baby pictures, it’s a worthwhile expense to make someone happy — only to find you’re looking at pictures of the ugliest baby ever to enter our world! You’re stuck; you can’t allow your face to contort into anything that may resemble terror or horror. All you can do is pray that there’s only one – and that’s when the new mom, grandma, auntie, and/or the occasional father (thank you, men, for not inflicting strangers with baby pictures) brings out the entire three-hundred-page photo album they miraculously stuffed inside their purse. That’s when I usually find any reason, root canal, hemorrhoid surgery, tax audit –(the more personal and horrific the better so it sounds convincing) just to get out of there.
What do you say to a parent whose new infant is so ugly that he/she makes the wallpaper fester? Or even if the baby is somewhat attractive? It’s just a baby. Face it, human infants aren’t cute. They don’t reach cuteness for another nine months or so. Before that time their just squishy prunes that eat, sleep, cry and poop. You can’t even really tell what they look like, except skin color, everything else usually changes – hair color, eyes, features. You can’t say, “oh he looks just like you,” unless the parent looks like a California Raisin.
“Yeah, your kid’s adorable – now can I have my dinner, please?”
All of which leads me to this: apparently there’s a fad that encompasses making our infants “talk” about subjects involving adult matters before they can eat solid food — the borderline prune – to – cute phase. (See e*trade’s YouTube clip below) I’m curious why this fad came about and why it’s making companies money. It’s an exploitation of our infants – slave… no strike that – drool labor! If we heard about this in other countries we’d be outraged but for some reason here, in the USA, we find it adorable.
Hum… why babies? Kittens, puppies, even wombats are cuter when they’re infants, but I guess they couldn’t “talk” about serious life-long decisions regarding investing and mutual funds. (Yet – somehow Geico managed to use a gecko to sell their products.)
Would any of us take investing advice from a 6-month-old? If you would, well then please come on over and let’s chat about a beautiful piece of property on a fault line I’ll be happy to sell you … and I’m sure it would be a great investment for the future… wonderful expansion opportunities.
But the talking baby fad doesn’t end there. Look at the “Family Guy” TV series. Yes, granted, it is a cartoon so the drool labor isn’t as big an issue, but we still find it entertaining to watch an infant be diabolical. The “Look Who’s Talking’ movies of the late 80’s early 90’s certainly must have been an instigator of this fad but why do we find it so appealing? Are we so conditioned to believe that talking infants are adorable from all those “cute baby” photos we’re forced to be nice about? Or is it that we all secretly wish that we were slobbering, drooling, and pooping ourselves and still have a voice to talk back with? Whatever the reason is I’m avoiding investment advice from anyone under the age of nine… ten-year-olds though seem to have a better grip on the stock-market.
Baby Photos
