Daze Reader

Monday, August 11, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001099.htm Who was the black private dick that was a sex machine to all the chicks? OK, technically that was Richard Roundtree. But the iconic song was written and sung by the late, great Isaac Hayes, a pioneer of wildly sensual and unapologetically lusty 70s soul/funk. Here's a classic clip of Hayes performing "Theme from Shaft" at Wattstax (as soon as Jesse Jackson stops hogging the mic and gets off the stage).

Did you know that Hayes had a royal title in Ghana? His departure from South Park over anti-Scientology "bigotry" was an embarrassing career ender, but let's remember the good times. Put on the 12-minute album version of "Walk On By" for your next makeout session, you won't be sorry.


Friday, August 8, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001098.htm I had no idea Cracked magazine was still around, much less that it had morphed into a College Humor/Something Awful-type humor site. This piece was surprisingly funny and well-researched: 5 Sex Experts Who Made the World a Worse Place. Did you know that Samuel Auguste Tissot is "the source of nearly every untrue, hyper-conservative and ignorant rumor about masturbation you and everyone else has heard since the 1700s"? Me neither.


http://www.dazereader.com/24001097.htm Another Wai Wai classic, reprinted in full at syberpunk: Insurance sales gals-cum hookers swallow more than pride.

"Recently, we've had all these women who look like office workers turn up for interviews. Ask 'em what they do for work and, sure enough, they'll tell you they're in the insurance business. But they're good at looking after the customers, and we've taken plenty on," says the operator of a sex shop in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo's Toshima-ku.

Hopefully more of these insights into Japanese culture and mores have been preserved.


Wednesday, August 6, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001096.htm One of my all-time favorite sites has disappeared from the web, likely never to return. Wai Wai translated and summarized articles from Japanese tabloids, many dealing with freaky cultural trends and sexual practices. Not surprisingly, parent company Mainichi Newspapers received occasional complaints from the usual prudes and scolds. Sometime this spring, however, isolated complaints grew into an organized protest campaign. In June, the company abruptly shut down Wai Wai, suspended its writers and editors, and posted a series of grovelling apologies for "extremely inappropriate articles".

The articles had inappropriate content that should not have been dispatched in Japan or to the world, such as incorrect information about Japan and indecent sexual topics. We apologize deeply for making many people feel uncomfortable, damaging many people's reputations, causing great trouble and at the same time, betraying the public's trust in the Mainichi Shimbun. We are deeply sorry.

Publishing articles that a few people found offensive was not betraying the public's trust. Shutting down the site because a few people found its content offensive is a profound betrayal of the public trust.

So what caused the self-censorship and lawyerly ass-covering? Japundit covered the shutdown in late June — "Why, oh Wai Wai" — and took partial credit. Seems that a few months earlier, Japundit had summarized an especially outlandish Wai Wai article, itself a summary of some Japanese tabloid article, offering advice to older men patronizing schoolgirl prostitutes. A Japanese news site linked to the Japundit piece and harrumphed about Wai Wai promoting negative stereotypes about Japan to its overseas readers.

Mainichi eventually shut down its entire English-language news site and announced:

We have decided to reform the MDN in order to rehabilitate it into a site that can dispatch information to the world that can help people properly understand Japan.

We will appoint a female employee as the new chief editor, based on our realization that the lack of a woman's point of view, in addition to the lack of a checking system, helped to create a situation in which inappropriate articles continued to be published in the column.

What sexist tripe! No female writer would ever stoop to raunch and sensationalism? Only a female editor can be trusted to publish something so bland and inoffensive that no one will ever bother to read it? The president of Harvard got fired for spouting similar nonsense, but sadly such unfounded prejudices persist.

Here's hoping some bilingual entrepreneur starts an independent website filling the Wai Wai niche. Until then, here are some gloriously inappropriate blasts from the past (the actual mainichi.co.jp links in these posts will all be dead, of course):

Wine bath for the nads, mud pack for the sack
Handjobs for homeless men in Japan
Japanese butter dog videos
Japanese women wearing David Beckham pubic hair
"Everybody says the ejaculation industry is immune to bad times, but that's a myth"
New Japanese fetish porn genre: Tamakeri
Reek rises as gals stick with stinky panties


Monday, July 21, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001095.htm Good news for the resistance in the war on indecency. Court tosses FCC 'wardrobe malfunction' fine.

A federal appeals court on Monday threw out a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction."

Janet Jackson Super Bowl

The three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Communications Commission "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in issuing the fine for the fleeting image of nudity.

The sunshine medallion titty flash may have been a lame stunt, whether intentional or not, but the FCC's overkill response set a dangerous precedent. This ruling restores some balance to the relation between broadcasters and censors.

The 90 million people watching the Super Bowl, many of them children, heard Justin Timberlake sing, "Gonna have you naked by the end of this song," as he reached for Jackson's bustier.

Factual quibble: 90 million people may have tuned into the Super Bowl at some point, but that doesn't mean 90 million people were actually watching and listening to the halftime show.

The court found that the FCC deviated from its nearly 30-year practice of fining indecent broadcast programming only when it was so "pervasive as to amount to 'shock treatment' for the audience."

So apparently there really is a shock doctrine. Who knew?

In other news, RIP George Carlin.


Thursday, July 17, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001094.htm Didn't this use to be an urban legend? Back seat lovers survive cliff plunge.

Two lovers ended up in hospital in Taiwan after their car plunged 150ft down a cliff face as they made love in the back seat.

A spokesman for police who were called by witnesses said: "They had parked up close to the edge of the mountain and had left the handbrake off.

"When they started having sex the rocking motion started the car moving and it rolled off the hill. They were lucky they were not more seriously hurt."

Except in the version I heard, they were kids from a nearby high school and they didn't survive.


Wednesday, July 16, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001093.htm From earlier this year: Secrets of Cambridge 'porn' library revealed.

For decades generations of Cambridge undergraduates have fantasised about a secret stash of Victorian pornography in the university's library tower.

Many have tried to gain access to the chamber to uncover its illicit secrets.

However, university officials insist that the pornography collection doesn't exist and that the tower contains nothing racier than "distinctly restrained guides on the finer points of Victorian romantic etiquette" with titles like Flirting Made Easy and Courtship And Marriage.

Vanessa Lacey, the manager of the Cambridge University Library Tower Project, said: "The traditional student rumour is that the contents of the tower are pornographic.

"In fact we now know it to be a treasure trove for people who want to know more about Victorian society, and among the books are these late 19th and early 20th century lifestyle guides designed to teach young couples the art of courting. At the time they were acquired, they were not considered the sort of thing that serious students should be reading, so they were put away."

Well of course the overseers of a secret porn library are gonna claim it doesn't exist. Keep looking, sneaky undergrads, it's there somewhere.


http://www.dazereader.com/24001092.htm Yahoo Answers always struck me as a useless site, a remnant of the pre-Google/pre-blog era when "portals" were desperately seeking "sticky" features. But apparently I just wasn't asking the right questions. For example, the "men's health" department features this recently "resolved question" — Does a guys penis look smaller on webcam?

There was this girl on msn that was begging to see my dick so I showed her on webcam. I know who the girl was it wasn't cyber or anything. She was an old friend
Anyway I think i'm probably about average in penis length six and a half inches. She sent me a message saying nice penis afer she said it was a little small
Anyway she said my penis was a little small I was wondering if she was doing that to annoy me or if it really is or maybe the webcam made it look smaller . I'm seventeen if that helps and if you're wondering no I wasn't fully errect

Other questions being answered by the internet's collective wisdom: Is it abnormal to be able to feel your pulse in your dick?, Why do my front teeth hurt when I wash my penis?, Whats the most amount of times you've ever masturbated in one day?, and (on the women's health side) What to expect when going to a gin ecologist?


Friday, February 22, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001090.htm Gene Simmons is a pig. Daze Reader usually adores flamboyant, cocky rockstars who flaunt their superhuman libidos, but Simmons' boorish, joyless demeanor ruins the effect. He's the Mike Ditka of rock and roll.

And he's an unoriginal pig. He has spent the last decade latching onto lame pop culture trends, hoping to cash in with crass knockoffs. He joined the lads-mag craze with a Maxim clone called Gene Simmons' Tongue, which lasted five issues. After boasting that he'd slept with thousands of women and would never get married because women just wanted his money, he signed on for an Osbornes clone "home life of aging rock star and his family" reality show.

And now he's jumped on the ultimate 00s pop culture bandwagon with his own unauthorized celebrity sex tape. There's a website based in Panama where you can pay $10 to watch it, or you can scour the bittorrent sites where it's bound to show up for free, or you can watch three minutes of excerpts at Valleywag. Highlight: classy Gene doesn't even take his shoes or pants off for the quickie; he climbs onto the bed with his pants bunched around his ankles.

Simmons' lawyers have sent cease-and-desist letters to assorted sites, arguing that the tape was made surreptitiously and illegally, that Simmons bought the copyright to the tape years ago, and that humorous use of Kiss face-painting imagery and "stylized printing" infringes the band's trademarks.


Thursday, February 21, 2008

http://www.dazereader.com/24001089.htm Unzipped historian Tony Perrottet offers a short history of castrati, including their surprisingly scandalous sex lives.

For Europe’s high society women, the obvious benefit of built-in contraception made castrati ideal targets for discreet affairs. Soon popular songs and pamphlets began suggesting that castration actually enhanced a man’s sexual performance, as the lack of sensation ensured extra endurance; stories spread of the castrati as considerate lovers, whose attention was entirely focused on the woman. As one groupie eagerly put it, the best of the singers enjoyed “a spirit in no wise dulled, and a growth of hair that differs not from other men.” When the most handsome castrato of all, Farinelli, visited London in 1734, a poem written by an anonymous female admirer derided local men as “Bragging Boasters” whose enthusiasm “expires too fast, While F-----lli stands it to the last.”

Don't miss the mp3 of a 1902 recording of the last prominent castrato, Alessandro Moreschi.