The valley of the sex dolls

Isn’t technology wonderful? Back in the old days, sex deviants had to make due with inflatable sex dolls.  I’ve never seen one up close, but it is difficult to imagine anyone ever getting intimate with one (my apologies to any of my readers who have—I’m not judging you—OK, maybe I am). To most people, the inflatable doll has all the same sex appeal as a pool raft.  

Thanks to modern technology, sex dolls have become much more realistic. They look disturbingly like real women, but without the stretch marks and leg hair stubble. Some of them can speak and have eyes that move. Some of them even have removable parts for cleaning. Isn’t that convenient?

Is it just me or do all these female sex dolls look like they have had boob jobs?

The regular, non-speaking, dolls that don’t have internal heating elements can cost about $1,600. The robotic kind that can carry on a Stepford Wives conversation with you can cost $5,000 or more depending on just how many features you are willing to buy.  It’s still a pretty good bargain as a real trophy-wife would cost you millions, and the conversation probably wouldn’t be any better. 

Still, for the average, working-class sex deviant these prices are way beyond the typical entertainment budget.  Fortunately, entrepreneurs around the world have recognized this problem and have provided a solution. In various cities in Europe, most notably Paris, you can now find sex doll brothels. Now, for about the same price as an evening at the local Hooters, I guy can hook up with one of these plastic dolls.

The sex-doll brothels are set up in secret locations to avoid local laws against prostitution, and you must go online to make an appointment. Once the customer makes the appointment, the madam or pimp reveals the secret location. Once the client is in the brothel, he can select from several different dolls before retiring to a private room for an hour of recreational activities—whatever that may be. After each session, the dolls are cleaned and sanitized for the next customer’s protection.

POSSIBLE JOB ALERT! Sex doll sanitation engineer. The job requires rapid cleaning skills and total surrender of all personal dignity. Rubber gloves and turkey baster provided. May lead to eventual advancement to chief toilet bowl cleaner.

I can’t wait until one of these places gets raided by the police. Who wouldn’t enjoy seeing cops wearing rubber gloves carrying all the jiggling handcuffed sex dolls out of the building and loading them into a paddy wagon?

Naturally, the sex doll brothels are being protested by feminists and communists in France.  These groups claim that the brothels are a place where men pay to rape women. Well, to rape something that looks like a woman. OK, maybe just a big chunk of silicon with lipstick on it. Whatever. It still fuels the rape fantasy concept that directly leads to the raping of real women.

WHAT! Don’t these fiends know that fueling rape fantasies are the job of Hollywood producers and video game companies? The nerve.

I’m beginning to wonder where we are going with all this. Not only is it weird that people are opting to have intimate relations with rubber dolls, but that people are protesting this as if they were protecting the rights of real people. How long before these sex dolls start to form labor unions and earn the right to vote or claim that they once had an affair with Donald Trump?

It just keeps getting weirder.  Now, where did I put that inflatable pool raft?

Diamonds are forever

There is nothing more convincing of your love for your betrothed than buying an outrageously expensive engagement ring. Buying a big, gaudy sparkling piece of metal with enormous diamonds in it allows everyone to measure your love unequivocally in cold hard cash. As one young woman with such a ring once told me, “I’m worth it.” Thus, I determined she was worth about $5,800 or at least one good saddle-broke horse.

Nowadays people can’t afford such overt expressions of their love. Well, they probably could, but when a marriage is only expected to last until a year after the honeymoon, why spend a whole month’s pay on someone who is just going to hawk the ring in a few months to pay for a divorce lawyer. 

Still, it is nice to have that big diamond displayed on the second finger to the left of the nose-picking finger. Fortunately, people are smarter and more practical these days, and they have figured out how to have that big precious chunk of ice without springing for the full cost of a traditional engagement ring.

Bah! Who needs tradition when you can have all that bling on the cheap by just embedding that sucker directly into your beloved’s finger? It is cheaper AND more practical. Engagement rings tend to get lost in the sink or in the toilet or when left on a motel nightstand somewhere. But, once that thing is anchored firmly into someone’s skin, you never have to worry about losing it.

I’m not sure how you present an engagement ring piercing stud when you’re proposing. I guess you can fall to your knee and when your beloved presents his or her hand, you can just pin their arm under your armpit and then jam that sucker in with a rivet gun. Or maybe, when you open the ring box, it will include a coupon to have it installed at the local tattoo parlor. Totally romantic in either case.  

However, if having a precious gem embedded in your finger is still too traditional in your mind, you can opt to get matching ring finger tattoos. Ring tattoos are even more “forever” than engagement piercings. A piercing could arguably still be pulled free with the help of a bottle of Jack and a good pair of plyers, but ink is forever. Ring tatts aren’t at all tacky looking or make people think that you got married in prison. Plus, if you want to hide the fact that you’re married, you can just cover it up with a band-aid.

Unfortunately, in some cultures even ring tattoos are removable. Supposedly, the women of some Indian tribes used to have a tradition of removing a finger joint after they lost a husband. Then they would dangle the finger in a tree over the corpse. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “giving your ex-husband the finger.”

I guess this would be a good thing to do if you decide that the tattoo ink on your finger is more “forever” than the actual marriage. Just lop the finger off, and you’re a free man or woman. This trend would really cut down on the guessing game when you’re looking for a potential mate at the local saloon. Guys on the hunt would just have to look for the chicks with freshly amputated fingers. By the same criteria, a lady with a well-healed finger stump probably has something wrong with her.

Hmmmm. There seems to be something wrong with this new engagement ring idea, but I just can’t seem to put my finger on it. 

Movie madness

It is no longer safe to go out to the movies. As a kid, I would go with my friends to the local cinema on Saturday to watch the latest movies. Back in those days, two movies would be shown, and there would be a cartoon in between. You could kill an entire afternoon at the movie house.

I don’t think we really watched the movies. It was more of a social outing that involved lots of walking back and forth from our seats to the lobby. We would order a big greasy tub of buttered popcorn and engorge ourselves on it while washing it down with gallons of soda pop that had enough sugar and caffeine in it to stagger a moose. Back then your standard American kid would burn these calories off in about 30 minutes, so no one ever got fat.

So, there we sat. A bunch of sugar-buzzed adolescents sitting in a darkened theater for four hours. We didn’t care what was showing on the screen. We probably weren’t very quiet. I remember once sitting through a showing of Wuthering Heights—probably the last thing in the world that young boys would want to watch—and we got a little loud with our conversation. A young man came up to us during the intermission and asked us in the nicest way possible to be quiet. We complied because kids still respected adults back then.

People are different nowadays. No one deals with social problems in a measured, mature manner anymore. Today, we’d probably be assaulted by someone. A young woman named Celia Riggs from Long Island, New York, for some reason decided to take her two-year-old daughter to a screening of, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” last January. Unfortunately for her, she ended up sitting next to a couple of lunatics with no self-restraint.

Now, I’m not sure why anyone would take a two-year-old to a movie. I’m guessing that she couldn’t get a babysitter that day, but was such a huge Star Wars fan, that she couldn’t wait until another day to go. In any case, she took her small child with the attention span of a hamster to sit through a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Seated next to them, were a pair of individuals who must have missed their latest anger management class.  They were eating popcorn, so the child asked her mother for popcorn, too.

She got some, although probably not in the manner she expected. The young woman, named Keri Karman, started screaming at the little girl and then dumped her bucket of popcorn on top of her head and then proceeded to hit her on the head with the empty bucket.

Nice.

The assailant and her father bolted from the theater but a month later were tracked down and arrested for “child endangerment.” The child was treated for contusions on her head from the popcorn bucket. Her mother took to social media to help find the two popcorn abusers to justice.

The mother claimed her child did nothing more than ask for popcorn. In fact, since she has such a limited vocabulary, she was only able to say, “popcorn.” While I’m no longer surprised with extreme behavior exhibited by people these days, I’m guessing the incident involved more than just a single, quiet, one-word request from a small child. Kids learn early that the best way to get something is to be as annoying as possible when requesting it.

Something like, “popcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcorn…” delivered in a high pitched and demanding tone.

And that is how you end up getting assaulted with a popcorn bucket. 

Dirty laundry

Back in prehistoric times, when I was a boy, it wasn’t uncommon for people to dry their clothes outside.  It made sense from a Green Peace, save-the-earth, renewable energy point of view.  Drying clothes outdoors especially made a lot of sense for people living in Arizona where it would take all of 30 seconds to dry an entire load of laundry.

The other advantage of drying your clothes on a clothesline was that everyone in the neighborhood could see your undergarments. There was a lot less pretentiousness back then. It was hard to be conceited when everyone had seen your pee-stained tighty-whities hanging on the clothesline. You were airing your dirty laundry in public in the literal sense. 

The only problem with drying clothes outside was that Arizona also has dust storms. Not only would your clothes get coated in dirt again, but they would also probably end up in the next county. So, eventually, my parents gave in and bought one of those newfangled, sock-stealing, electric dryers.

Of course, we still washed our clothes by beating them on rocks in the river.

Haha. Just kidding. There was no water in Arizona so it there was no way to wash our clothes in the river--except during monsoon season.

Well, it seems someone has determined an even more interesting way to air their dirty laundry in public. A woman on a Ural Airlines flight from Antalya, Turkey to Moscow, was seen using an overhead air vent to dry a pair of panties. This behavior reportedly went on for about 20 minutes. Another passenger filmed it, of course. 

I’m impressed. I don’t think I could have kept my arms over my head for that long.

You can watch the video online. Watching the video reminds me of the scene in the movie, “Mr. Bean.” In which Rowan Atkinson tries to dry a wet spot on his pants with a wall-mounted hand dryer. At least Mr. Bean was embarrassed when caught doing this. The woman drying her undies on the plane had no shame whatsoever.

The problem with these stories about bizarre behavior on public airlines is that they leave so many questioned unanswered. The question on everyone’s mind is, whose panties were they? Was she drying her panties or drying them for a friend? And, more importantly, why were they wet?

The panties appear to be clean in the video which eliminates some of the grosser possibilities. I mean, if someone held up a pair of yellow-stained panties, the entire row would have attacked this woman like what happened to the flatulent man on the Transavia flight to Amsterdam last week.

I’m assuming the woman merely spilled some water in her lap and, not wanting to spend the rest of the flight in soggy shorts, decided to skin them off and dry them with the overhead vent. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not.

There were several snarky comments made by other passengers on the flight about what the woman was doing and why. We can’t see much of the woman in the video except the back of her head and her arms. If it turned out the woman was Milla Jovovich, the Ukranian actress from the “Resident Evil” movies, no one would have minded. In fact, there probably would have been applause and cries for an encore.

It just goes to show you that one person’s dirty laundry is another person’s secret fantasy.

Whatever was going on, it is just another airplane incident that makes me even more inclined to do all my traveling by bus in the future.