widdershins

I'm a Japanese bride

Apparently, new brides in Japan are very prone to start farting in front of their husbands. I distinctly remember on our honeymoon in Asheville, NC, out of the blue, for the first time ever after knowing each other for 11 years, I farted in front of my new wife, just a few days after our wedding. (Sorry, honey!)

Now I wonder what else I have in common with Japanese brides. It's probably not my petite figure.

A message from Herbie

Free museum admission

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, a bunch of local museums have free admission next Sunday, May 9, including Asian Art Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Exploratorium, Palace of the Legion of Honor, SF MOMA, and others.

Thumbs up on thumbs down

As American forces arrived in Iraq a year ago, they were greeted by many Iraqis with a "thumbs up" gesture. Did they use this gesture in the traditional local sense of "up yours" or in the Western sense, perhaps glommed from mass media, of approval?

Roman gladiatoral contests were accompanied also by famous uses of the thumbs. Contrary to current popular opinion, the thumb up gesture called for death; thumb pressed down on the index finger called for mercy.

[via Language Log]

QWERTY myth

We've all heard that the QWERTY keyboard is inefficient and inferior to the Dvorak keyboard layout but that the market fails to switch due to lock-in. Wrong.

Christmas in Japan

Christmas in Japan is a secular, commercialized, romantic occasion. I'm not sure their version isn't an improvement. [via MetaFilter]

Furries

Houston Press has a reasonably compassionate article about furries, one of the best general media furry articles I've seen. The focus of the article is on fursuiting, but it manages to avoid getting too sensationalistic over the sexual fetish aspects. For a very well-informed, and mostly sympathetic, dissenting set of viewpoints about furries, see the numerous essays at the Pressed Fur website.

Questions about Japan?

It's an SAQ: seldom asked questions about Japan. [via memepool]

European history

At The History Guide, there are nearly a hundred excellent articles on European history. Secondary and college students are the target audience, but I found these very interesting. Even on topics I thought I was pretty much up on, the articles were interesting and enlightening. I especially enjoyed the three Nietzsche articles (1, 2, and 3).

Love for sale

Two very different perspectives on sex and money:

In "The Rabbi and the Centerfold" on Beliefnet, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Kosher Sex, conducts a frank and compassionate, but combative, interview with Playboy centerfold model Lindsey Vuolo. [via 2blowhards]

From a completely different point of view, Hook provides a wealth of information to men in the sex industry, including the Male Sexwork Handbook, a detailed how-to for men getting started as escorts.