Concerning Your Front Bottom

Ladies, think how lucky we are to be living in the nowadays when a clean vagina is just a quick and painless step away! Because according to this little ad, in the 1930s, doctors were suggesting women douche with Lysol. As you can see, it fixed this woman's marriage. Now her weasel-faced husband shows no fear in having his once-rank wife sit on his lap -- whew! Never mind that his trouser-snake probably doesn't smell like a spring day in the Alps.

But let's talk about the illustrious Vagina Institute where I found that lovely link. Is this a site for men who like their porn served with an equal dose of scientific content? "None of that sloppy naked-lady-wearing-a-stethoscope stuff: I want statistics, dammit! I want facts!" But then why do they have the "How well does my vagina measure up" quiz? (In which you are required to take a ruler, T-square, level and god knows what else to your most sensitive bits in the pursuit of knowledge. Just stay away from those laser-levels.) Why can you also read it in Spanish? (I don't know, but Estudios Vaginales sounds like a really classy condo in Barcelona.)

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And now, onto the Critter of the Day! The Critter of the Day is the humble chicken. Why? Because chickens are edible, versatile, lovable, can grow human faces, and live without a head for 18 months! Who needs GMO?

The Burning Question

I ask myself this question at least once a day.

S. Rock Homes and Watu-son

Tonight I was eating rye crackers and hummos in a quixotic mood, and I referred to it as "homes." "Like Sherlock?" said my boyfriend. "No, like whassup, homes?" "There is a connection though." he said. Then: "S. Rock Homes and Watu-son."

The Science of the Sexiness of Mayonnaise

I was just watching a McDonalds ad. The fact that it was McD's doesn't really matter, it could've been any fast food restaurant, but McD' s has the money for the high production values. The point is, there was a close-up shot of mayonnaise being squeezed on to the bottom of a hamburger. Imagine, they probably shot a dozen takes of mayonnaise being squeezed on a burger, and they had to choose one, the sexiest one, the one with the "most personality". Well, in the middle of the take, the mayo looped in on itself, which is probably as sexy as it gets in the mayo world. And I thought, there is a guy (or gal) out there whose job it is to comb through slo-mo shots of lettuce and onion falling sproingily on a burger, tomato slices slicing through the air, chicken breasts being slowly, lovingly flipped on a grill... all in the service of a giant, unmercilessly grotesque corporation.

Ai yi yi.

Summers in Rangoon, Luge Lessons

Europeans. They can be so dark, so complex, so tortured...

Take Henk van Rensbergen, a Belgian who flies Dutch charter planes and spends all his free time sneaking into abandoned buildings and taking artful black-and-white photos for his own amusement. He has his own wonderfully pseudo-Gothic website called http://www.abandoned-places.com.

Just while I'm on the topic of compelling abandoned places.

Motor City

I'm fucking obsessed with Detroit. I was only there once but the place is burned indelibly in my mind. There's this windswept modernized downtown corridor with all these new skyscrapers and no one walking around. It doesn't look deserted, it looks uninhabited. There's not one little friendly sign of human life. Like if you were walking around University and Dundas at 5 in the morning on Sunday, you could tell people had been there in the not-too-distant past. But in Detroit, fuggetaboutit! There never was anyone here! "We just built an entire city core without checking to see if anyone ever wanted to use it -- and guess what -- they don't!" But that's not all. We visited this street that was the ne plus ultra of divey streets. The name escapes me. But it was hopping. It was like a four-lane street flanked by one-story furniture stores and bars, but you couldn't even see the interiors of any of these places because they seemed to built on the concept of impenetrability rather than marketability, so they were either windowless to begin with, or the windows were boarded up. But people were "shopping" there. One of these windowless bunkers claimed to be a health-food store. I don't think it was the hippie kind, but I'm not sure what other kinds there are. One that sells all kinds of scary body-bulking products that feature giant sweaty meaty man-torsos on the label and silver lettering cut by lightning bolts, I guess.

If you wish to see pictures of the real Detroit, please look at http://www.seedetroit.com. "Seed" is the operative term here.

How could I have forgotten to mention the Detroit train station? I'm in love with the photo above, which is from the train station circa 1930. Doesn't it reek of glamour? Aren't you positive everyone is smoking in the train station and saying things like "Swell, kid"?

Now look at the colour photo (darn it! I have no control over the placement of these photos!). Some people would contest that it has a glamour of its own. I would amend that to mystery. In a way it is kind of cool. I mean, even if they did restore the station, it would be full of annoyingly anachronistic people in Phat Farm caps. At least the way it is now, you can populate it with imaginary 1930s characters, women carrying hat boxes, etc.

The Difference of International Feeling

I'm creating a blog.

This is going to be a repository for all those obsessions of mine that I think everyone should know about but which I have no intention of foisting upon them. You read this by your own choosing, and I don't have to see your, or anyone's, eyes glaze over if it all becomes too much.

Right. To begin, cuteness, of the animal variety: http://stuffonmycat.com

Actually, as cuteness goes, it's fairly standard. To see something a little more rarified, you should look at Yuebing (formerly Oolong) the Bunny's website. Yuebing is a bunny from Hokkaido, Japan, whose owner likes to take photos of his bunny with things balanced on his (her?) head. I would like to offer you a little quote from the bunnies' owner: "Oolong is so calm and patient -- he never gets angry when I take pictures of him. When I put various objects on his head, he stays still for a minute.This is just a result of an intimate relationship between me and Oolong.The main theme of my site is not to show these 'headperformance' links, and it's not my hope to propagandize nothing but the strangeness of his headperformance over the world. Oolong's headperformance-- many foreigners seem to feel it 'crazy', but Japanese people feel it just cute and funny.It is the difference of international feeling."
Unfortunately, the site is mostly in Japanese and thus a little tough to navigate, so I'll supply you with this multimedia rabbit haiku: http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~yuebing/041121/041121-2.htm

I could have called this website "Headperformance," easily.

Thanks to http://beedogs.com for the links.