Crunch Time

Judi, Crunch, Me
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

I have to say that this isn't the yoga angst entry I promised yesterday. That's taking a little more time and effort to write than the entry that follows.

The Photo

Kaori, my most recent visitor from faraway lands, took this picture on the day that she and I went to Judi's house to meet Crunch. Look at that dog! How is he not the cutest thing ever? And the funny thing is: That's a nine-month-old puppy right there. He's enormous. Almost seventy pounds. At nine months!

The Googling

Here are a few recent google searches that led some troubled folk in need of knowledge to my little corner of the interweb:

chikan pictures

I think this one came from someone in Singapore.

Chikan is the Japanese word for the men who molest women on trains. Chikan is pronounced like Chicano without the final -o.

There are sex clubs in Japan that cater to this sort of fantasy, places where men can pay to enter a setting that is decked out like an office or train car or a classroom and molest the women who are dressed like school girls or office workers. I guess what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there were pictures of this sort of thing out there on the internet.

one glass eye

This term came from a Korean search engine, and oddly enough, it’s not the first time the Korean search engine has led someone enquiring about a single glass eye to my little blog. I think there was a musical group that released a CD called “One Glass Eye,” but that’s not what I was writing about when I used this term. I was actually writing about something I read by Hemingway, who was talking to a Chinese general about a British military officer who wore a monocle. The Chinese general asked Hemingway if he knew why the Brit did so and Hemingway admitted that he did not know. The general said that it was so the Brit didn’t see more than he could understand.

Brilliant, I think.

mae west measurements

Perhaps the most innocuous of the search terms that led people to my blog. Yes, I did write about Mae West’s measurements quite recently. No, I don’t know what Mae West's measurements were. I do know that she was quite short--not a whole lot taller than five feet (if that), and that, to appear much taller, she often wore platform heels that rivaled Elton John’s during his platform shoe years. (Her little trick wasn't common knowledge--I've only read it in one book about her--but you can see in publicity stills that show her from head to toe that, even though her dress comes to the floor, the proportions are wrong from the knee down. She seems to have remarkably long shins--though with that hourglass figure of hers, probably no one was paying attention to the length of her shins. Miss West's penchant for platform shoes reminds me of a friend I used to have who was a stripper in her youth and, once when I asked about those ridiculous shoes that strippers wear, explained the six or eight inch heels by telling me that men, however unconsciously, pay close attention to a hip-to-height ratio and that women with only so-so figures could make crazy money by exploiting that fact. The bigger the hips, the higher the shoes so that even the big girls could appear "perfect.")

I do know that onscreen, though corsetted, Mae West appears to be quite stout, even during the years when she was at the peak of her box office appeal (though she did continue to make movies as the irrepressibly sexy caricature she made popular until she was into her eighties).

We’ve sadly become to expect our modern movie starlets, sex symbols like Mae West though largely lacking her comedic talent, to be painfully thin and distressingly young. Our loss.

nanpa movies

Nanpa is the Japanese word for the boy-girl pick up. I’ve only ever heard it applied to men picking up women. It implies that the intent is sex and it works more often than you might think given the reputation Japanese have for natural or cultural reserve. (But I’ve always wondered why it works. I mean, nanpa is not the art of the bar pick up, it's really often nothing more than young men standing on the street near train stations or anywhere really, and propositioning the women who walk by. The women ignore them, brush them off, or accept.) Sounds like a boring plot for a movie to me. But that’s porn for you, I guess.

“corner rule” high school kissing

I’m always convinced, when I see these kinds of google search terms, that I have never before, in my little blog, written these particular words in these particular combinations. Ever. But usually, I'm wrong about that.

This search led the person to the entry I wrote about the gaijin corner rule in Japan (which is, of course, only an implicit rule and which states that all gaijin will be placed in the corners of restaurants, furthest from all Japanese customers). The same blog entry also included a discussion about Japanese middle and high school girls who engage in what is called “assisted dating” or “compensated dating”--a euphemistic term for prostitution--with older, usually married businessmen. (How do they get away with this? Cell phone culture, baby. The girls register their cell phone numbers with a club or service, and the men buy the numbers from the service. What’s it cost for a “date” with a twelve- to eighteen-year-old in Japan? About $300 to $600 dollars.)

Welcome to Japan.

But seriously: Is there a corner rule for high school kissing? Sounds more like a Hall & Oates song, don't you think?