If you value your life, you better drink this. I don't care if it isn't being sold anymore, improvise. I've been using dirt from my garden along with an old Wilkins can that I got on ebay. I've been okay thus far...

Don't say you haven't been warned!

A piece in the Times today by Timothy Egan paints a depressing picture of the trial against Amanda Knox in Italy. For the uninitiated, Amanda Knox is an American exchange student who has been accused of murdering her roommate as part of a satanic ritual.

This led me to two conclusion:
1) Italians living in small towns are crazy
2) Scratch that, maybe we're all crazy

As per the first point, at the time of the murder Amanda Knox was living in a small village in central Italy. I know a thing or two about small, insular villages in Italy: it just so happens that my mother, when she was twenty, lived in one as well.

She was young and naive at the time, having moved to Italy for a man, only to have him dump her once she arrived. With no money and nowhere to go, she ended up working for his family as an aupair. Initially, she rented her own room in the village, but this didn't go down too well. A man in the village used binoculars to watch my mother as she walked around her room in her pajamas. When the man's wife found out, she called the police accusing my mother of being a prostitute bent on luring the men of the village to her bordello--a sexual pied piper of hamlin as it were. My mother was almost thrown in jail, but the family of her ex-boyfriend intervened and let her stay with them.

A year later, when my mother had picked up some Italian, she went on a vacation around northern Italy for a few weeks. During this trip, she stayed in many similarly small and insular towns. On one occasion she ended up in a particularly remote village with no hostels or boarding houses. After asking around, a farming family offered to let her stay at their place for the night. Upon entering the gates of the farm, my mother was taken aback by the sheer number of cats wandering about the grounds. There must have been a hundred or more, and when she asked about it, they assured her it was because they just really loved cats. Being very gracious hosts, they prepared a feast for her that night featuring a rich, hearty stew made from "roof rabbits". My mother noticed that they all started looking at her peculiarly when the stew came out. Not wanting to be rude, she finished her bowl and complemented the wife on her cooking. To which she was answered by a roar of laughter. "We fooled you English girl", they said, "You just ate cat. This is a cat farm." My mother--who to this day maintains that the only thing she won't eat is creamed corn--shrugged and asked for a second helping.

So what's the point? The point is that rural Italians were crazy forty years ago and they're still crazy today.

As per my second conclusion, you'll have to wait until tomorrow...

I was skeptical at first, but this is actually funny.

From Japan Today:

A 34-year-old man was charged with assault on Wednesday, accused of wiping saliva on a woman’s coat while she was sleeping on a Keihin Tohoku line train.

Police said Nobufumi Kamigaki, a resident of Yokohama City, wiped saliva he had put in his hand on the left shoulder of the 23-year-old woman sitting next to him, at around 7.10 a.m. Wednesday. Train security personnel on board happened to see the incident and escorted the man off the train at Tsurumi station, handing him over to police.

Kamigaki has admitted to wiping saliva on the woman’s clothes and told police he had done it to about 20 women since the end of last year, telling police: “I wanted to make beautiful women dirty.”

I wonder if he's named Gimpei too...

Once more I have stolen a delightful clip from boing boing for your viewing pleasure.

From an anonymous coward comment in a slashdot post, I bring you Jaiku:

Is this a flying sausage or flying balls. I can't decide...

P.S. Flying buttocks?

Nobody puts baby in a corner... Unless it's with a synthesizer!

So Blow really freaked me out yesterday. Apparently even though I voted for Obama, watched the Wire, and support affirmative action (in France), I'm probably still a racist!

See there's a study at Harvard that can tell you whether you're a secret racist using next generation super duper science techniques. But fret not, dear reader, not only did I pass, I demonstrated a "slight automatic preference for dark skin over light skin." According to the website only 9% of all white people are in this group, whereas a whopping 76% are racists. I guess those hundreds of hours spent on hotornot were not in vain...

Can I get a certificate for this because I think it would really help my white-liberal street cred. This seems like a far better liberal status-symbol than, a prius or a mod haircut. The idea of walking down Bedford avenue in Williamsburg and shaming 76% of all hipsters is golden.

Cease your protests, the deal is done! You are to make a fine wife for uncouth American businessman!

Words can't explain how much I've been enjoying Danny Choo's guest blogging on Boing Boing. He's the guy who did the storm trooper earth wind and fire dance.

I just can't get enough of this clip that he found. Especially the guy coming out of the turnstile.

Aha. Here's the science behind the goodyear advertisement. Seems pretty ironclad to me, no?

Maybe sexism really is worse than racism. This ad doesn't even look like it's that old. Too late now... I already voted for Obama.

I always heard that Fidel Castro loved to give four hour long speeches, but I never really stopped to think what he actually talked about. Is this what it's like? It's worse than the Film Noir professor I had in college whose lectures were a hopeless mash of: recollections about his battle with alcoholism ("alcoholics like to think they can get better just by switching from hard liquor to beer, but believe me it doesn't work") , speculations on the sexuality of actors in the 1940s, and panegyrics to his dog (who was admittedly very cute).

Here are some of Castro's thoughts on Rham Emanuel's name:

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Another recent possibility led me to reflect on the strange surname, the book of Germán Sánchez, the Cuban ambassador in Bolivarian Venezuela: The transparence of Enmanuel, this time without the “I” with which the German philosopher’s name begins.

Enmanuel is the name of the child conceived and born in the dense guerrilla jungle, where his extremely honorable mother, Colombian vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas González, was taken prisoner on February 23, 2002, together with Ingrid Betancourt, who was a presidential candidate in that sister country’s elections that year...