From the people who brought you fugu, Godzilla and Pokemon...

Years ago for Christmas my sister gave me a cardboard stand-up of Princess Leia from Return Of The Jedi, wearing the infamous "metal bikini". It soon found a place of honor in my bedroom at our apartment. The "slave metal bikini" seems to be most fanboys' dream: I've a friend whose first glimpse of his future wife was when she was wearing one of these things (though he was in Stormtrooper armor at the time. And I heard this getup even made for an episode of Friends) but I never found it all that appealing or even attractive. The "simple, modest look" is what I've always gone for... though that didn't stop my college buddies from coming over to oggle at the carboard idol of their dreams standing next to my closet. Some even tried to buy it. I wouldn't sell because I love my sister and this thing represented her twisted sense of humor: "Now you get to wake up to a beautiful woman in the mornings!" she told me after I got it out of the box she'd wrapped it in.

Funny.

But NOT as funny as THIS thing. Leave it to the Japanese - those wonderful people who take EVERYTHING to the extreme - to come up with something like this. Now a single person doesn't just have to pretend waking up to someone... but can pretend SLEEPING with them too!




The Boyfriend's Arm Pillow! From Kameo Corporation, nestled away somewhere in Fukuoka Prefecture in the southern stretch of the Land of the Rising Sun. For $106 American a girl can have a contoured pillow with artificial man's arm (complete with pajama sleeve) to wrap around her as she sleeps. The Courier-Mail has an article about this lil' gimmick and the people that have come to appreciate it...

For Ms Suzuki, who is estranged from her husband, the pillow has definite advantages: It doesn't squirm or thrash in the night, and you know it'll be there in the morning.

"It keeps holding me all the way through," she said in her home outside of Tokyo. "I think this is great because this does not betray me."

Slam here for the rest of the story. A hundred-plus bucks for a pillow with an arm.. unbelievable. Then again, what else could we expect from a people who regularly spend two hundred bucks to devour narrow slices of a deadly neurotoxic pufferfish? Crazy I tells ya... which may explain why I want to visit there someday :-)