Waiter #1, pointing: Tammy's* either gettin' a poochy belly, or she needs to trim that beaver.
Waiter #2: It's beaver. I fucked her last month, after her sister died, and I thought I was suddenly in a '70s porno.
Manager: You guys need to go find something to clean.
Circle Centre Mall
Indianapolis, Indiana
Overheard by: Shatmandu
"Today we played a game of fill in the gaps with the third graders. While listening to John and Yoko's 'Merry Xmas (War Is Over)' they had to fill in the appropriate words on their lyric sheets. The results were mixed to say the least.
Here are some edited highlights:
So this is Christmas
And what have you don't
Another year over
And a new one just discuss
And so this Christmas
I wow you have ever
The me and the dear ones
The new and the year
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for fear
The old is so young
The rod is so long"
"Until quite recently in rural Japan, yobai, or “night crawling” would have been an introduction to sex for many young people. While a young woman slept, a silent intruder would creep into her room, slide behind her and make his intentions known. If she consented, they would have discrete sex until the early morning, when he would have to slip out of the house as stealthily as he had slipped in.
The young man might be known to the girl and her family. Also, in a seasonal agricultural economy, farmers might have a number of laborers sleeping under their roofs sometimes, knowing that their daughters might be targets for yobai. In some cases, groups of friends would travel miles to neighboring villages, where the embarrassment of capture wouldn’t be as great, and each target a different girl.
In many cases, yobai would be conducted entirely with the knowledge of the girl’s parents. In fact, it was sometimes a prelude to marriage - parents would turn a blind eye the first few nights a young man secretly visited their daughter, but then he would be “caught”, and a more public courtship would begin.
Yobai tactics
* Take your clothes off before you even sneak into the house. In Fukuoka, it was once illegal to attack a naked intruder, as he was probably engaged in yobai rather than theft.
* Keep it quiet, even if socially questionable acts are required. One technique to avoid detection was to urinate along the bottom of doors to prevent them squeaking as they were slid open.
* Practice safe sex. A night crawling man would often cover his face with a cloth, protecting himself and his chosen lady from embarrassment if she rejected his advances.
Yobai clubs
Reportedly, yobai still happens in the more remote areas of Japan, and there seems to be nostalgia for the practice elsewhere. The seduction of sleeping women is a popular theme of Japanese pornography, and some image clubs offer special yobai services - providing prostitutes who pretend to be asleep while the client slips into their futon."
"There is a long history of Tattoos in Japan, which remarkably evolved very artistic. This one combines Kanji Characters with Figures from japanese Mythology. However, nowadays many people with tattoos are affiliated with yakuzas, organized crime groups..."
There was in June 2006 a tattoo convention in Tokyo, which was called "Love and Tattoo Daikanyama". A 25-year-old Chiba woman, attending the "Love and Tattoo" exhibition in Daikanyama said"When you get a tattoo, something you can treasure the rest of your life is added to your body. There's a feeling of joy to be had from that."
"Lady, people aren't chocolates. D'you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. But I don't find them half as annoying as I find naive bobble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine."
"Given that police officers carry guns, night sticks, and tasers, and that they have the power to use lethal force when necessary, one would think our politicians would be more concerned about illegal use of a drug known to contribute to fits of rage and violence among law enforcement than use by a bunch of baseball players. Of course, it's easier to score political points with the latter. It's also probably a pretty sweet power rush to make larger-than-life sports icons cower at the sound of your hearing gavel."
Will no government agency regulate the thickness of sliced bread in Britain?
The House of Lords has been listening with interest to a call for thick slices of bread to be cut down to size.
Baroness Gardener said: "I speak as a member of the All-Party Group on Obesity. Why is it that in central London you can hardly find a thinly sliced or medium-sliced load of bread to buy, and any sandwich you buy in any supermarket is now made with thick bread?
..."Surely at a time when we want to reduce people's consumption, there should be more pressure from the Food Standards Agency, or one of the many departments the Minister speaks about, to take us back to normal-sized bread instead of these super-sized sandwiches."
"Archbishop Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a “huge blot on a democracy”.
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government...”"
"All this has had me thinking about the FISA debate when proponents of the warrantless wiretapping were quick to argue it was necessary to give up freedoms for security. Would these same people apply that argument to the second amendment instead of the fourth? I think we all know the answer on that. Perhaps the next time a Republican Senator says that we should give up freedoms for security when it comes to listening in on phone calls, then he should be asked about giving up the right to bear arms as a way to protect us in church or at the local mall. Let’s see how quickly the subject changes then."
A well-known writer walked into a producer’s house and said to the producer that he had come up with a great act. The producer, intrigued, told the writer to briefly describe his idea.
“Well,” said the writer, “I have an idea for a political party who claims to be against the war in Iraq, but won’t do anything about it. The party will also claim to be against torture, but won’t do anything about that either. In fact, they will be swept into power precisely because of their public opposition to both of those things, but privately they will be informed of possible acts of torture performed by our government, and they won’t say anything about it. At any rate, they continue their two-faced behavior- publicly opposing the war and torture, but privately being apparently content with it, until the end of their congressional term, when they will all gather together on the floor of the House, where they will all publicly shit on the original version of the Constitution, on loan from the National Archives.”
The producer looked at the writer, and said, “That is really quite disgusting. What do you call the act?”
The writer responded, “The Democrats.”
"I haven’t seen the movie The Golden Compass, but I will, and soon. I don’t care if it’s a complete piece of crap – I want to see it because the Religious Right told me not to.
They say that sort of thing a lot. Here’s what pissed me off. They said the author of the books upon which the movie is based, Philip Pullman, is an atheist. They’re afraid that if your children like the movie, they might actually pick up the book and read it. Somehow, the book will destroy their belief in the unigod.
Now that seems a little paranoid to me, but even if it happens, well, damn, we sure don’t want kids to make up their own minds – overruling the evidently flimsy influences of their parents, their relatives, their pastors, and their friends just by reading a damned book, right?
...I’ll tell you what scares me even more. Last week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, and I quote, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Say what? Historically, organized religion and its militant outreach has been an astonishingly awesome suppressor of freedom. That’s history, folks, and we’ve had a hell of a lot of wars, crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, cross-burnings, and Jihads to prove it...."
"Here’s a pretty interesting concept: see if a few of Thailand’s prettiest ladyboys could beat some handsome young Japanese actors dressed in drag (For those of you who don’t understand the Japanese spoken in the video below, Thailand = blue door, Japan = red door)."
"From our experience in Japan, Eliza and I find this video to be very similar to getting on a Tokyo subway, except replace exhausted salarymen on the cusp of a nervous breakdown with naked schoolgirls."
"December 7, 2007 - Fox Studios, Los Angeles California. When Joss Whedon put out the call to Mutant Enemy fans to join him on the WGA Strike line at Fox Studios, 400 enthusiasts trekked from as far away as Australia and England to show their support for their favorite writers, many of them flying in for the day so they could walk the line. Many members of the Screen Actors Guild were also in attendance, including Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, Juliet Landau, and a host of others. 'First March' looks at the events of the day, and a few of the basic issues that brought the WGA to strike."
"FUKUOKA, Japan – Salarymen are the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to long-suffering wives. Now they have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.
Divorce.
A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 per cent – 95 per cent of them made by women.
Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counsellors predict. They say wives – hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect – are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.
Skittishly aware of the trouble they're in, 18 salarymen gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage. These members of the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association began the evening with a toast that summed up their strategy for arguing with one's wife.
"I can't win. I won't win. I don't want to win," they bellowed in unison..."
"The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said."
