The Japanese have this thing for heated toilet seats with built-in bidets. That’s all fine, but Toto has announced a partial recall of one of its more popular models because of a nasty tendency to burst into flame.
That’s gotta hurt.
It was only a matter of time, I suppose. The pharmaceutical companies now make anti-depressants for dogs in oder to combat “Pet Separation Anxiety.”
I’m far too young to be a crusty old man complaining about the “way things are these days,” but it seems to me that messing with the brain chemistry of our pets, our kids and ourselves in all but the most extreme cases is simply asinine. We barely understand how the brain works, but we are quick to use mind-altering medications as soon as feel something is not quite right. And this in the nation with the harshest drug laws outside the Muslim world.
Oh yes, according to the article the “symptoms” of this new syndrome are
In other words, “Being a puppy.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to roll over and play dead.
One of the reasons Christianity spread through the ancient world so successfully was the flexibility with which the church adopted and re-purposed the holidays and festivals from competing religions. Today capitalism succeeds in much the same way. (Christmas being quite ironic on this point.)
Mother’s Day in America was begun by Julia Ward Howe in 1872 as an anti-war holiday. It was a time for mothers (particularly those who had lost loved ones in the Civil War) to appeal for diplomacy and peace. You probably won’t find that on a Hallmark Card.
It remained a minor holiday until a clothing company starting lobbying for wider acceptance and changed the focus away from politics. Four years later in 1914 the holiday became official.
It’s kind of a heavy topic today, but for the last few days a stray thought about the nature of free will has been stuck in my head like a 70s disco tune.
While we may be free to do whatever we want, we are obviously not free to want whatever we want. We can choose our actions, but we don’t choose the desires and values that form the basis for those actions.
The gullibility of Japanese girls is legendary. In fact, I’d just finished writing a newspaper article on that very subject when I stumbled across this.
Japanese Fooled in Poodle Scam
It seems that thousands of Japanese women have been sold “exotic poodles” only to discover that they were, in fact, sheep. (I mean the poodles. They literally were sheep. The women, on the other hand, only figuratively were sheep.)
The pet importers would have gotten away with it to, if not for those meddling kids! No, what tipped them off was when movie star Maiko Kawamaki appeared on a talk-show with her new poodle complaining that it would not bark or eat dog food.