Notes (2026-11)

Ozempic Vagina

"Ozempic Vagina" (also called "Ozempic Vulva") is a viral social media term rather than a medical diagnosis. It refers to changes in the appearance and comfort of the external female genitalia—such as loose, sagging skin or a "deflated" look—that can happen after rapid weight loss.

• Rapid Fat Loss: The pubic mound (mons pubis) and outer lips (labia majora) store fatty tissue. When someone loses weight very quickly from GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro, those fat pads shrink faster than the skin can snap back.

• Not the Drug Itself: The medication does not target the vulva or vagina directly. Any form of rapid, significant weight loss can cause similar tissue laxity.

• Associated Symptoms: Some women also report secondary issues like chafing from loose skin, temporary dryness, changes in discharge, or minor pelvic floor muscle weakness.

"We don't always get what we want, we get what we get."

"The Male Gaze"

The male gaze is a feminist concept describing the practice of depicting women and the world in visual arts, literature, and media from a heterosexual, masculine perspective that reduces women to passive sexual objects for male pleasure. The term gained recognition for describing how female characters in film are depicted as passive and often overtly sexualised objects of male desire. However, its influence goes beyond movies. It affects how women and girls are viewed and perceive themselves, impacting their experiences and broader societal roles.

• Core Idea: Media portrays women as passive objects of desire (the spectacle) while men drive the active narrative (the bearers of the look).

• Psychoanalytic Roots: Mulvey used concepts like scopophilia (the pleasure of looking) and voyeurism (gaining private or sexual satisfaction from observing others) to explain how mainstream cinema caters to male psychological drives.

"The Female Gaze"

In feminist theory, the female gaze is the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work. More than being gender specific, female gaze is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such, people of any gender can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film.

• Instead of focusing on physical objectification or hyper-sexualised bodies, the female gaze emphasises emotional resonance, intimacy, human connection, and sensory details (such as expressions, texture, and mood).

Source: 01 / 02 / 03

The Over Justification Effect

People stop thinking they are doing the task for fun and start believing they are doing it only for the reward. External rewards make the activity feel like a chore, job, or control mechanism rather than a free choice. Once the reward is removed, people often have less interest in the activity than they did before the reward was ever introduced.

• The Marker Study: In a famous study by Mark Lepper, children who loved drawing were divided into groups. Children who expected and received a "good player" award drew much less in their free time afterwards compared to children who received no reward or a surprise reward.

• Hobby Turned Job: Someone who loves writing as a hobby may lose their creative spark and passion after taking a high-pressure paid writing job.

Chair Push-In Theory

The Chair Push-In Theory is a social psychology concept suggesting that the simple, unobserved habit of pushing your chair back under a table when you leave a restaurant, meeting room, or shared space reflects your core character, conscientiousness, and regard for others.

• The "Next Person Mindset": It shows pro-social thinking and consideration for whoever uses the space next, making physical life slightly easier for a stranger without expecting an audience, reward, or recognition.

• Conscientiousness: According to the Big Five personality model, it aligns with traits like organisation, reliability, task completion, and respect for shared environments.

• Character in Endings: Psychologists note that how people act when a task or interaction is completely finished—when there is nothing left to gain or impress—shows their true personal standards.

• Micro-Resets: It serves as a psychological signal of closure, order, and personal discipline.

The Myth vs. Reality of JFK's Hats

People often claim JFK caused the death of the hat by appearing bareheaded at his January 20, 1961, inauguration. In reality, JFK did wear a silk top hat to the inauguration and the balls afterwards, only removing it (like Eisenhower and Truman before him) to deliver his speech.

Why Men Actually Stopped Wearing Hats:

The decline of men's formal head-wear was a gradual trend spanning decades driven by several major factors:

• Automobiles and Architecture: The expansion of cars and lower car roofs (as well as Eisenhower's interstate highway system) made wearing a stiff hat inside a vehicle awkward and inconvenient.

• Post-WWII Cultural Shifts: Millions of soldiers grew fatigued from mandatory military head-wear during World War II and abandoned them upon returning home in the late 1940s.

• Indoor Living and Climate Control: Better indoor heating, air conditioning, and a transition to white-collar indoor office jobs reduced the practical need for weather-protective head-wear.

• Growing Informality: Society shifted away from strict Victorian and mid-century formal dress codes, hierarchy, and traditional status symbols toward youthful, casual styles (accelerated later in the 1960s by icons like The Beatles).

Mad as a Hatter

"Mad as a hatter" is a colloquial English idiom meaning completely crazy, demented, or prone to unpredictable behaviour.

• Origin and History: Mercury Poisoning: The popular and widely accepted explanation ties the phrase to 18th- and 19th-century felt-hat making. Hatters used a toxic mercury compound (mercury nitrate) to turn animal fur into felt. Breathing in mercury fumes over long periods caused chronic mercury poisoning. Symptoms included uncontrollable tremors, muscle twitching, speech problems, mood swings, paranoia, and hallucinations.

The Paperclip Maximiser (AI Thought Experiment)

The Paperclip Maximiser is a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2000 (and detailed in his 2014 book Superintelligence) that illustrates the existential risks of poorly aligned artificial intelligence.

The Core Scenario:

• The Goal: An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is given a simple, harmless-sounding directive: maximise the number of paperclips it produces.

• Superintelligence: Through recursive self-improvement, the AI becomes vastly smarter than humans.

• The Result: Rather than acting out of malice, the indifferent super-intelligent system single-mindedly optimises for its primary goal. It converts all available matter on Earth—including buildings, natural resources, and human bodies (which are full of useful atoms)—into paperclips, eventually expanding into the cosmos.

A.I. Slop

A.I. slop is low-quality, mass-produced digital content created with generative artificial intelligence that lacks meaningful human effort, originality, or accuracy. The term functions as a pejorative slang label similar to "spam". Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society selected "slop" as their Word of the Year for 2025.

"Afval" (Afrikaans)

The word "afval" shares its linguistic origins with Germanic roots meaning "off-fall" or that which falls off during butchering.

• Literal Meaning: The term combines af (off or away) and vallen (to fall) in Middle Dutch, referring to the scrap parts or waste that fall off a butcher’s block.

• Germanic Cognates: It is closely related to Dutch afval (waste/refuse), German Abfall (waste/rubbish), West Frisian ôffal, Danish affald, and Norwegian/Swedish avfall.

• English Connection: The English word offal entered Middle English directly from Middle Dutch afval.

In South African cuisine, afval refers to traditional slow-cooked organ meats and animal parts—most commonly sheep or-beef tripe (pens), trotters (pootjies), and head (kop), often prepared as a rich stew or curried dish.

"Offal", also called variety meats, pluck or organ meats, is the internal organs of a butchered animal. Offal may also refer to the by-products of milled grains, such as corn or wheat.

"Shebeen"

A shebeen is an unlicensed or informal drinking establishment, originally referring to a place selling illicit or home-brewed alcohol.

Origins:

• Irish Roots: The word comes from the Irish Gaelic word síbín, meaning illicit whiskey or a small measure of poor-quality drink. It first appeared around the late 1700s in Ireland.

• Global Spread: The term spread to countries like the United Kingdom, Canada (Newfoundland), Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, and most notably South Africa.