"Until about 30 years ago, the typical 'Dutch Wife' (love doll) sold at sex shops in Japan was of the inflatable type..."

"... and of shoddy quality that was easily subject to deflation at the slightest, er, prick."

That's just offensive. Not just the terrible pun, but the abuse of the Dutch.

“When customers brought the dolls in for repairs, vendors would stick on hot patches, like on tire inner tubes,” [said Hideo Tsuchiya, president of Orient Kogyo K.K., a manufacturer of state-of-the-art love dolls].

Some of these buyers, however, had their own reasons for preferring rubber joy mates to real women. Some weren’t satisfied with going to brothels. Others, jilted by their mates, had become eternally suspicious of females....

Orient Kogyo also provides after-service. When and if the time comes for the dolls to part with their owner, the company will conduct a kuyo (Buddhist memorial service) for the doll, complete with floral offerings....

American Girl dolls in stop-motion video.

A YouTube phenomenon.



Those American Girl dolls are expensive, but if a kid is interested in stop-motion animation, she (or he) doesn't need any particular kind of expensive doll. Here's "The Klutz Book of Animation: How to Make Your Own Stop Motion Movies." And here's "Stopmotion Explosion: Animate Anything and Make Movies - Epic Films for $20 or Less."

Obama 46%, Romney 46%.

In the Rasmussen daily presidential tracking poll. If you push undecideds and get an answer — that is, you include "leaners" — the Obama number stays the same, and Romney goes up to 48%.

It's amazing that with all the events of the last couple weeks, especially the shift of focus to terrorism but also the media's constant pounding on Romney, that that candidates stay locked in a tie. Is there some inherent balancing mechanism in the American electorate? It must drive the politicos bonkers. It relaxes and amuses me — me, one of the undecideds.

I won't even lean. Go ahead push me. I won't turn into a "leaner" that can be included on one side or the other. I have the American inherent balancing mechanism.

Why the 5th Avenue co-op board rejected Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, prime minister of Qatar.

Despite his $31.5 million bid:

A big part of the sheik’s problem was his 15 kids, not to mention his two wives and boatload of staffers who accompanied him everywhere, sources said.

There wasn’t “a chance in hell’’ of his offer being accepted, the source added.

The sudden influx of potential foreign residents — young and old — to the storied address would have been in stark contrast to the previous tenant. 

The previous tenants were the doll collection of Huguette Clark, who lived in a hospital for the last 20 years of her life.

Board members were also concerned because, as a foreign head of state, the 52-year-old sheik couldn’t be held accountable for anything that might happen there, they said.

“He had diplomatic immunity,’’ one source noted.

"John Wilkes Booth Bobbleheads Pulled From Gettysburg Giftshop."

"The $20 dolls come in boxes depicting the inside of Washington D.C.’s Ford's Theatre, where confederate sympathizer Booth shot and killed Lincoln in 1865."

(Via Drudge.)

"If a child identifies as a girl and the child's family presents her as a girl..."

"... Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout."

But what if a child is presented as a boy who has a strong identification with things that are traditionally female? Here's Bobby Montoya, whose mother tried to get him into the Girl Scouts, but didn't claim he was female:



My problem with this is that the argument that he belongs in the Girl Scouts is premised on stereotyping girls. I think the better argument for kids like Bobby is: Let children choose their own toys, hairstyles, clothes and don't make a big deal about whether he or she has chosen things that are more often chosen by members of the opposite sex. Emphasize individual freedom!

Bobby's family put him in a situation where he was excluded because — as the troop leader allegedly put it — he has "boy parts." He has a real physical difference from the girls, and he was classified based on that, not his personal preferences and interests. Now, he's focused on genitalia-based limitations, as if his natural body parts are his problem!

AND: When is it appropriate to make your child a gender celebrity?

The Seated Lynching Effigies of Madison, Wisconsin.

A couple days ago, we were talking about the way no one at the anti-Justice Prosser rally "seemed to be bothered by the symbolism of a large balloon representing Justice Prosser hanging in effigy with its neck tied to a lamppost." I linked to this comments thread — featuring our own Meade — over at the Isthmus.

Let's revisit that thread, where you can see that a man named Kenneth Burns is making a big deal out the fact that the Prosser dummy is in the seated position:

Ladies and gentlemen, the world's first seated hanging.

That brought in David Blaska (who is a regular blogger at the Isthmus):

Actually, not. Mary Suratt was given a chair to sit on and an umbrella held over her head before the trap was sprung and she was sent to eternity along with the male co-conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. A touching example of chivalry in a gentler age. But then, she and her co-conspirators did have a trial and were found guilty.

(Fascinating!) Burns returned:

I stand corrected! Nevertheless, seems to me a baseline requirement for a hanging in effigy is that it ought to look like a hanging, as opposed to a guy sitting and leaning against a post.

Hey! Fellow Madisonians! Is your memory so short that you don't remember the Great Spiderman Lynching Controversy of 1 month ago?

The sight of a life-size Spider-Man doll [known as Venom] hanged by its neck from a balcony of a Langdon Street home near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is prompting a stern response from school officials.

Students who live on Langdon Street said the doll that some believe represented a black man had been hanging for two or three days last week before it was taken down. But many said it never should have been put there at all.

You can see in the picture that the doll was seated.

"I see the visualization of imagery that looks powerfully, iconically of the imagery of a lynching," [said Damon Williams, vice provost for diversity]... "It's an incredibly serious and egregious thing that we do condemn at the highest levels, and we don't trivialize it"....

So does the seated position of an effigy eliminate the lynching symbolism? Apparently not! Let's get on the same page about what we can do with our giant blow-up dolls in public.



(Thanks to Chuck66 for connecting the Proszilla with the Venom.)

AND: Let's remember this lovely sign from a few months ago, originally featured in this post on February 16th:



ADDED: Here's video of the Prosser effigy ("Proszilla") getting blown up and tied to the lamppost:



Also, based on discussion and links in the comments, I don't think Mary Suratt was sitting on the chair as the noose was tied around her neck and the trap door sprung. She seems to have been seated before she was called upon to rise and accept her grisly fate.

The "meticulous iconography" of the Clarence Thomas bobblehead doll.

Supreme Court bobblehead dolls are a Green Bag (law journal) tradition, and each one depicts a Justice along with various items that reflect things from decision he or she has authored:

For example, Thomas is shown standing on two pizza boxes, a reference to Thomas's statement in the 2005 case National Cable & Telecomm. Association v. Brand X Internet Services, "One can pick up a pizza rather than having it delivered, and one can own a dog without buying a leash. By contrast, the [Federal Communications] Commission reasonably concluded, a consumer cannot purchase Internet service without also purchasing a connection to the Internet."

Likewise, Thomas is holding an American flag which has on the reverse side the text of the 1954 federal law that added the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. The law was at issue in the 2004 case Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, in which Thomas wrote a concurrence asserting the unusual view that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause does not protect an individual right or apply against state laws. 

More details here,

Best paragraph in the obituary of the 104-year-old heiress Huguette Clark.

"For the quarter-century that followed [her mother's death], Mrs. Clark lived in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches of crackers and sardines and watched television, most avidly 'The Flintstones.' A housekeeper kept the dolls’ dresses impeccably ironed."

Bratz wins $88.4 million from Mattel... and Mattel started the legal battle.

Let this be a lesson to all you litigious people!

Mattel had argued that the dolls' designer Carter Bryant developed the Bratz concept while working for it in the late 1990s and secretly took the idea to MGA. MGA denied the claims and countersued, accusing Mattel of corporate espionage, using spies with fake business cards and dummy invoices to gain access to MGA's ideas. MGA also accused Mattel of threatening to scupper business deals with retailers and media firms if they did business with Bratz....

Hail, the countersuit! Let those who start lawsuits cringe!

Oh, Barbie! How far you have fallen:



(That's my original Barbie doll, people. Bow down to the awesome Barbie!)

"The Scary Reality of a Real-Life Barbie Doll."

I don't know what's scarier funnier, a 6-foot Barbie or this image of a young woman sculpting it:

Taking stacks of newspaper, glue and water, I skipped my high school semi-formal dance to give my girl some skin. Oddly, I started to feel my fondness for Barbie return, now not as a plaything but as a tool to reveal the negative body image that she promotes. As I papier machéd, I couldn't forget Barbie's impressive bust and blew up balloons over and over again to achieve a perfect 39" measurement. Once her chest was secured, I spent hours dipping and smoothing the paper, and later mixed paints to replicate her seemingly perfect white skin tone. With a little hard work and a lot of time, a headless, footless and handless body soon stood in my apartment.

So ...you spent hours smoothing sopping paper over gigantic breasts and felt your "fondness for Barbie return." You didn't even bother to give the thing hands, but you sure got those breasts yooge. Supposedly, this project is intended to further the cause of "eating disorders" awareness, but what it's making me more aware of is the author's atrocious humor deficit.

My Barbie's role is simple. She grabs the attention of apathetic onlookers and makes them think and talk about an issue that thrives in silence. 

Giant breasts?

In the last four years, Barbie has surpassed my expectations, attracting attention and sparking conversation among listeners and readers across the nation.

Have you analyzed those conversations? What percent of the talk sparked is about the problem of radical undereating by young girls who are superachieving in a poorly chosen category?

Anyway, scale matters. The reason the Barbie doll has to have such a small waist relative to the size of the breasts is that Barbie is designed to look good in doll clothes, and when you make doll clothes, you have to use normal fabrics, and you have to make seams and double the fabric over in a way that gets very bulky, especially around the waist. The doll's unreal proportions become much more real if you put the clothes on.

"FBI issues warning over Barbie 'Video Girl' which could be used by paedophiles to make child pornography."

The doll has a camera built into it.

Pee-Wee Herman at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.

"It's pretty surprising how popular Pee-wee is. I saw a great big burly biker with a Pee-wee doll."

Well, if he likes that doll so much, why doesn't he marry him?

"The concept of depicting a young, fashion-forward female with exaggerated features, including an oversized head and feet, is... unoriginal as well as an unprotectable idea."

Writes 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, giving the victory to Bratz over Barbie.

Mattel argues that the sculpt was entitled to broad protection because there are many ways one can depict an exaggerated human figure. It’s true that there’s a broad range of expression for bodies with exaggerated features: One could make a fashion doll with a large nose instead of a small one, or a potbelly instead of a narrow waist. But there’s not a big market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier. Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions —which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature. But these features can be exaggerated only so much: Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish, not idealized.

(PDF of opinion here. Short news article here.)

Have Patty and Selma Bouvier ever been mentioned in a court case before?

Blogging's not easy.

I've got to fortify myself.



There now, you've getting an intimate look at the Meadhouse blogspace.

What are the best tools of fortification pictured here?
	Coffee, dumbbells, wireless keyboard and mouse.
	Pancakes, small robot figure, "Rules for Radicals."
	Giant monitor, many pairs of glasses, 2 kinds of fruit.
	Trees visible through big windows, noise cancellation headphones, Wacom Intuos.
	Time Capsule, extra camera and lenses, nail file and buffer.
	Moleskine notebook, iPhone, watch.
	Handmade wooden bowl, Berenice lamp, Sharpie.
pollcode.com free polls

"We are not very judgmental people, generally, and probably these kids are having a blast dancing their scary little hearts out."

Gawker primed me to disapprove of this video with young girls dancing to "Single Ladies," but I thought they were just fine and even kind of great.

Isn't there a song that is not about, you know, marriage, that they could dance to?

Pro-marriage is a bad message for young girls? When did that happen? When I was a kid, in the 1950s, we played "house," in which you pretended to be a married woman. With children, of course. Adults loved to give us baby dolls to play with. Imagine that. It was all perfectly okay. As for the costumes the girls are wearing in that video — again, in the 1950s "dress up" was a perfectly conventional and encouraged form of play. When did that become wrong?

If you don't think girls should dance like Beyonce in "Single Ladies," you shouldn't let them see the video at all. When I was a kid, I learned to dance listening to "The Mexican Hat Dance." I think I'd be a lot better off or at least a lot better dancer if I could have learned how to dance from "Single Ladies."

"Here's the famous banned butcher cover. You can sell it for $11m dollars."

So wrote John Lennon. And now, the item is offered for sale, at $11 million, naturally.

(If John Lennon really wrote "$11m dollars," he made a common redundancy error.)

The photograph — which, btw, is offal — may top the list of the most expensive Beatles memorabilia, which currently looks like this:

#5, John Lennon's talisman necklace...

#4, Gibson SG guitar played by George Harrison and John Lennon...

#3, A hand painted Beatles Sgt. Pepper's drum skin...

#2, John Lennon's Steinway piano...

#1, John Lennon's hand painted Rolls Royce Phantom V...

Heavy on the John Lennon. Light on the Paul McCartney.

Christian Louboutin reportedly "found Barbie's ankles too fat."

"Never mind that Louboutin's people now insist it's not the ankles, but the arches, that the designer is making Mattel change on his new stick-legged Barbie. This could be the biggest scandal for the toymaker since Pregnant Midge."

Pregnant Midge? I had to look that up. Back in 2002:

The pregnant version of Midge, which pops out a curled-up baby when her belly is opened — has been pulled from Wal-Mart shelves across the country following complaints from customers, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"It was just that customers had a concern about having a pregnant doll," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Cynthia Illick said.

She said the entire "Happy Family" set, which includes pregnant Midge, husband Alan and 3-year-old son Ryan, had been pulled from shelves of the world's largest retailer, which has about 2,800 stores and 500 warehouse club stores....

The pregnant Midge, who wears a tiny white wedding ring, has a detachable magnetic stomach that allows easy "delivery" of the baby, and comes with tiny crib, cradle, changing table, baby toys and even a tiny baby monitor. Alan and Ryan are sold separately. The baby also can get a first checkup from "Dr. Barbie," also sold separately.

How very much more shocking that the perception of nonexistent cankles!

Good lord, they beat you over the head with her marriedness. I should think that if you're concerned about girls having babies too young, Pregnant Midge sends a much better message than a plain old-fashioned baby doll. Holding a baby doll, your little girl is acting like an unwed mother. But new things upset us in a way that old things do not.

Let's talk about that "breastfeeding doll."

Lisa Belkin writes about "Bebe Gloton," the doll that makes a sucky noise and mouth movement when placed next to plastic flower-shapes that are positioned at nipple level on a shirt to be worn by a little girl (or — I might add — boy):

Dr. Ronald Cohen, medical director for the Mother’s Milk Bank in San Jose as well as director of the intermediate intensive care nursery at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University, told ABC News, “My take is that anything which reminds young girls that their bodies are something other, and more, than sex objects, is a very good thing.” In the next sentence he added: “On the other hand, encouraging young girls to want to have babies at a very young age may not be so great.”

Don't all baby dolls do that?!

Here's video showing the doll — and The Today Show's Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford — in action:



I think it's pretty tame, actually. In any case, little girls (and boys!) who see their mothers breastfeeding younger siblings are likely to put their dolls up to their nipples and pretend to breastfeed. You don't need the additional technology to get that effect. My main objection to the doll is that it is annoying. I'd try not to buy kids toys that make irritating sounds. Leave more to the imagination.

And speaking of annoying sounds... Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford... yeesh!

"I have that exact doll in my house. As soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a scam."

April's Mom was a hoaxer.

Every night for the last two months, thousands of abortion opponents across the nation logged on to a blog run by the suburban Chicago woman who identified herself only as "B" or "April's Mom."

People said they prayed that God would save her pregnancy. They e-mailed her photos of their children dressed in pink, bought campaign T-shirts, shared tales of personal heartache and redemption, and sent letters and gifts to an Oak Lawn P.O. box in support.

As more and more people were drawn to her compelling tale, eager advertisers were lining up. And established parenting Web sites that oppose abortion were promoting her blog -- which included biblical quotes, anti-abortion messages and a soundtrack of inspirational Christian pop songs.

By Sunday night, when "April's Mom" claimed to have given birth to her "miracle baby" -- blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later -- her Web site had nearly a million hits.

But the doll — the doll — was too much. She should have figured that some of those readers know their dolls.

Why can't we see the blogger — Beccah Beushausen — as a fiction writer?

She didn't set out to trick or cheat thousands of readers. She got people emotionally involved in a story that they believed was true, but she didn't solicit money from them — only sympathy and prayers — and she didn't cause them to panic in any sort of a "War of the Worlds" kind of a way. She didn't even rope in Oprah, in that "Million Little Pieces" way.

I say: leave Beccah alone.

AND: Lest you think I engage in such fictions, let me recommend one of my favorite songs:

The Dresden Dolls - Coin Operated Boy
Uploaded by Michel_Pougnou. - Independent web videos.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade responds to coin-operated boy with beer-activated girl: