There are two things about this article that I'd dispute.

First, he seems to assume that the feelings of johns represent the feelings of men in general. Maybe they do, but I'm gonna need a hell of a lot of evidence before I believe it.

Secondly, does it ever occur to this guy that these feelings aren't exclusive to men? I don't see a lot of American products pandering to women in this fashion, but I know quite a few women who pay hefty fees to import male exploitation and guro comics from Japan.

I'm hearing a lot of responses along the lines of, "People's failure to recognize art like this in a situation like this has absolutely nothing to do with their knowledge of fine art." I don't buy that. Context is very important but it isn't everything. Art appreciation is a skill. It takes a lot of practice and experience, but you do end up internalizing concepts like form and composition and applying them unconciously to your surroundings. There is such a thing as being visually educated and most people, myself included, have not put in the effort.

@6: It's better at some languages than others (Japanese becomes nearly unintelligible), but I still can't imagine it would be good enough to fool a fluent speaker. It certainly can't make reasonable English out of German text.

@16: I can't speak for all women, but his ears look small and rounded enough that I would be very surprised if I felt them at all. Remarkably few nerves in there.

They're adorable and the video makes me happy (in a completely innocent and nonsexual way, y'all), but trying to parse this post's title nearly exploded my head.

I was in the class of '02. For fun my biology teacher read us our list. He gave us an opportunity to argue the statements. It turned out that thanks to the power of television reruns and old movies available for rent, we had a pretty solid mental image of how life had looked when bottle caps were not plastic screw-offs and before the day of music on CD. Thanks to Pink Floyd we were well aware that there had once been only "13 channels of shit on the TV to chose from." None of that had been lost with with us.

In other news, the photo illustrating this article looks like every photo taken of me or my friends during high school.

Since I'm not a Satanist, I guess I'm free to give unasked-for opinions.

I had a friend who was into Satanism. She loaned me a copy of The Satanic Witch. I thought it was flawed but charming and overall horrifying. I've met several sociopaths in the past and that book tripped every alarm I've got. (But seeing as I'm not a psychologist, you should take that with a grain of salt. Just, as I told my friend, please don't stop thinking while you read.)

Anyway, it's a shame about the house.

@2: I don't know about ebay, but it looks like it's possible to buy banana milk popcorn on the internet from Japanese sites. Just doing a quick google search, here's a page. Looks like they only sell it by the case though, and that's pretty expensive. Not to mention the bother of trying figure out whether they ship overseas. And it's not in a Snoopy bag anyway. Maybe Wal-mart is the better option.