Real love dolls, however, are easy to order:
When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it’s not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa.
Each has a name. Ta-Bo often watches television with his toys before bathing them, powdering them so that their skin feels more human, dressing them in lingerie and then taking them to bed.
“A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those thing. They belong to me 100 percent,” says the engineer who has spent more than 2 million yen ($16,000) over the past decade on the dolls.
Of course, if you can’t bring yourself to spend time with a fake woman, you can always hire a real woman that looks like a fake, anime woman:
Anigao Girls offer you the exciting chance to pay a measly 10,000 yen to take photos of an Anigao Girl for one whole hour. The session is 1×1 and you get to choose what costume you want her to wear. It costs 1,000 yen per extra costume and if you bring your own costume for her to wear then its going to cost you an extra 1,500 yen. If you want her to wear a bikini then its an extra 2,500 yen
There are some interesting pics to be found at the new bookmarking service fffound.
Gun makers take aim at women buyers (via Obscure Store and Reading Room).
As Gary Goessner, his buddy and their two pre-teen daughters shopped the Gander Mountain store hunting department in Waukesha Friday afternoon, the two girls were immediately drawn to a rifle and a youth shotgun.
As Gary Goessner, his buddy and their two pre-teen daughters shopped the Gander Mountain store hunting department in Waukesha Friday afternoon, the two girls were immediately drawn to a rifle and a youth shotgun.
The .22-caliber Crickett rifle ($169.99) has a bright pink stock, and the Remington Express Jr. .20 gauge shotgun ($379.99) has a laminated pink-and-black stock emblazoned with the slogan “Shoot like a girl if you can!”
It’s OK, she’s got another one. (Via Boing Boing)
As you might imagine, she found the experience very odd and moving. “Seeing my heart for the first time is an emotional and surreal experience. It caused me so much pain and turmoil when it was inside me. Seeing it sitting here is extremely bizarre and very strange. Finally I can see this odd looking lump of muscle that has given me so much upset. It’s tremendous it has become an object of fascination and will get people thinking about the disease, heart transplants and organ donation.”
I’m taking a short holiday. Be back in 10 days or so.
Fraud in the wine trade:
The extraordinary inflation of rare-wine prices—of which the Jefferson bottles are the most conspicuous example—has led in recent years to an explosion of counterfeits in the wine trade. In 2000, Italian authorities confiscate twenty thousand bottles of phony Sassicaia, a sought-after Tuscan red; Chinese counterfeiters have begun peddling fake Lafite. So-called “trophy†wines—best-of-the-century vintages of old Bordeaux—that were difficult to find at auction in the nineteen-seventies and eighties have reëmerged on the market in great numbers. Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, jokes that more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the fiftieth anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to begin with. The problem is especially acute in the United States and Asia, Sutcliffe told me, where wealthy enthusiasts build large collections very quickly. “You can go into important cellars and see a million dollars’ worth of fakes among five or six million dollars’ worth of nice stuff,†she said.
A follow-up post to Secret Underground Cities. BLDGBLOG interviews urban explorer Michael Cook about his journeys in the drain networks underneath Toronto.
We are still finding new tunnels beneath Toronto, and we’re on the trail of others that we know about but just haven’t discovered access to yet. There are also still a few underground gems in Hamilton that haven’t been seen by anyone except municipal workers and a handful of journalists.
Also check out Cook’s site Vanishing Point.
BLDGBLOG has a great post on forgotten underground cities that have recently been discovered. The comments at the end are as interesting as the article itself. Yes, yes, I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum.
