Or was that defining stereotypes?

What songs can never be played again in Our Sanitized Future?

• Brown Sugar
• China Girl
• Only 16
• Kung Fu Fighting
• Knock Three Times
• Coward Of The County
• Young Girl


This is just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are hundreds of others banned from the public consciousness for not meeting today's "standards". And that's not even considering all the songs that assume there are two genders, generally attracted to each other.

Gangsta rap is somehow immune to these bans, for much the same reason that animal-rights activists don’t go around assaulting Hells Angels for wearing leather, and slutwalks don’t take place in neighborhoods filled with “youths”.

[Update: how could I forget Running Bear and Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room?]

Chisa Maruyama is a 26-year-old model and race queen, who likes manga, anime, and playing with her cats (nickname taken from her twitter account).

She looks healthy, happy, and well-adjusted, which is a lot better than the first picture I saw of her…

more...

(via Akiman’s Pixiv page)

I have no practical use for an 18-inch-long, eight-pound, 1.25-inch hex key, but it would make an awesome paperweight and conversation-stopper.

(via Amazon Prime)

Bonus: the 1.5-inch version is two feet long and weighs fifteen pounds.

(via)

(via, which includes a video going through the turn)

43-year-old pop singer Hikaru Nishida got her start as a fresh-faced 15-year-old, and I’d like to thank the glamour photographers who documented her career so thoroughly. Seriously, do a google image search for “西田ひかる” and enjoy the timeless cheesecake (like the undated sample above). Still quite an attractive women today, and still active in the business.

How’s her music? A quick sampling of Youtube didn’t do much for me, and I was initially struck by how odd the random English sounded in her songs. Turns out she was raised in the US, and I’ve gotten used to the phonetic approximations used by most Japanese singers.