It seems Maid Cafes — where the waitresses dress as French maids wearing (I kid you not) cat ears — are becoming passe here in Tokyo.

Lately it seems the otaku boys lurking about Akihabara are hanging out in coffee shops where the waitresses treat them rudely and insultingly until they get up to leave. At his point, the girls become very affectionate and beg and plead with the customer not to leave or to at least promise to come back soon.

Of course, if the customer decides to stay and sits back down, the abuse begins again.

These people are just plain creepy. Check out this video about a group that claims the “cure gayness”. Talk about the the cure being worse than the disease! This would be wicked satire if it weren’t real.

This is so cool, and I don’t know why!

Nike is putting sensors in their shoes that transmit data on time, distance, calories used to your iPod Nano, which provides both a screen display and soothing female voice who reads the information to you.

Yeah, yeah. I know it’s worthless technology. Even though it only costs $30, it performs the same function as a $2 pedometer.  Still, there is something undeniably cool about this gadget.

Trying to get this blog working the way I want reminds me working on my old car — only without the broken knuckles. Try something, see if it works, try something else, see if it works, repeat until it works.

Sometimes I have to simply throw up my hands and admit that I don’t understand America anymore. For the second year in a row all major television networks have refused to run an ad by the United Church of Christ

I don’t get it. I mean I really don’t I wrote about the last ad a little more than a year ago. Both ads show gays and minorities being excluded from other churches and welcomed into theirs. Their tag line is “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we.” and they seem to be a pleasant enough group of people.

Last year CBS and UPN explained frankly that since President Bush was pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage the UCC’s ad was inappropriate. This year the networks declined because other other, but unnamed, religions might find the ad offensive. The ads themselves are pretty funny and rather harmless.

It blows my mind. In this age of Jerry Springer, all of the networks are refusing to run paid ads because they consider a message of tolerance and inclusion to be too controversial for American society.

I sent out the latest edition of Tangled Webs today. It’s been far too long since I wrote the last one.

We barbarians are doing a bit or redecorating. Over the next few days I hope to complete the modifications to BigheaD’s ChinaRed theme.