The test of true love

So, because it’s Valentine’s Day, and I always try to help you out with your romantic endeavours, and because it’s one of the premiere merchandising holidays in the calendar, I’ve got something cutting-edge for you.

Evidently there’s a high-end Japanese lingerie company called Ravijour, and they’ve put all their high-tech ingenuity into developing a bra that only opens when its wearer experiences true love. I heard about it on Twitter, so there!

No, I am not making this up. They’ve called it the True Love Tester bra, and they’ve made this helpful video to ‘splain how it, uh, operates. Naturally, it involves a smartphone app; pretty much everything worth having does these days, apparently.

Now Ravijour’s reps claim that this thing can tell the difference between elevated heart rate due to a cardio workout or a sudden shock of the Alien popping out of John Hurt’s chest or the stress of, say, a job interview, and elevated heart rate on account of lurv. They don’t mention distinguishing between love and lust, which I think is rather an important point. You definitely want to be able to get it off in the case of lust. They might have that in the roadmap for v2 or so.

(I also hope they have plans to make it not look so, uh, industrially ugly. Just sayin’…)

Neither do they address how you get it off if, at the end of the night, you still haven’t met Mr. Right. Is there some sort of no-luck override code you can enter via your smartphone? (And how creepy is it that you need a smartphone to get your bra off?)

Or what if you meet Mr. Right at your brother’s wedding reception and it pops open right in front of God, granny and your actual wedding date? I mean, you really want some sort of basic-decency delay function on this sucker.

(It occurred to me to wonder why no one's working on the male equivalent of this: underpants that pop open when the sensor senses an elevated rate of blood flow. But I realized that's not feasible at all, because the average guy would be dropping his drawers at least eight times an hour, so, never mind.)

I suppose it’s good to know that someone is working on this sort of thing. Possibly. Because who knows what they’d be up to otherwise?

Vale, Caesar

I had a little root around the interwebs to learn something about Sid Caesar, who died yesterday, aged 91. He was a little before my time, and I might have got my greatest idea about him from the TV comedian portrayed by Joseph Bologna in My Favorite Year.

So I delved into some of his routines, and was quite taken by this one—of a Bavarian town hall clock gone, well, cuckoo:

A couple of thoughts on this: it’s astonishing to me that he spent so long (more than seven minutes) on a single schtick, building up to a completely non-verbal punchline. You wouldn’t be able to go that long without a couple of commercial breaks these days.

And I don’t think I’ll be able to look a civic clock in the eye with a straight face ever again.

Animal crackers out of the soup

Well, there’s another childhood icon gone—Shirley Temple Black died Monday night, aged 85.

I experienced Shirley Temple strictly through television. Her movies must have been really cheap for local TV stations to broadcast, because they seemed to run them right much when I was growing up. She had to be one of the first stars to be merchandised; and Shirley Temple dolls are still manufactured today.

Later, while studying history, I came to understand how she could be such a phenomenon, because people in the thirties really wanted to escape from reality, and her movies delivered the biggest doses of sweetness and light you could get for the price of admission. They never seemed that remarkable to me as a child, but I can see why folks would line up and pay their $.15 to watch her overcome all manner of problems with a few songs and a dance.

Black’s movie career didn’t go beyond childhood, but she went on to marry (badly the first time round; for life the second), raise a family and build a creditable public service career under the Ford administration.

The quintessential Shirley Temple moment for me is her dance with Bill Robinson up and down the plantation house staircase in The Little Colonel. I don’t remember one damned thing about the plot or anyone else in the film, but that sequence is just terrific. So here it is:

Farvel, Marius

If you were alive at all on Twitter yesterday, you could not escape photos of Marius, the young giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo.

Zoo management considered Marius surplus to requirements in terms of his genetic structure (already represented in the zoo’s population) and space at the facility. So on Sunday, they did as they’d announced earlier: they killed Marius, dismembered his corpse and fed him to the lions.

Oh—they did it publicly, in front of zoo visitors. Just like an old-fashioned public execution.

(No, I'm not showing or linking to them. You want to see them, you can Google for yourself.)

I’ve got to say that I stick at some of the images; zoo officials called it educational, but I’m not sure that the kids got the lesson they intended.

Marius was apparently a victim of EU regulations—the laws under which the Copenhagen Zoo operates prohibit transfer of animals outside of the organization of zoos it belongs to. So even though other zoos offered to take him, Copenhagen turned them down.

There were apparently private would-be buyers, too; but I don’t want to think about what some of those people wanted with a beautiful young animal already written off by those who are supposed to look out for him. Copenhagen refused them as well.

Both NPR and CNN refer to Marius’ end as “euthanizing”, which is bizarre. Euthanasia is the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering. Marius was 18 months old, perfectly healthy and could have lived a long and happy giraffe life for another 24 years or so. The pain that was being ended was to Copenhagen Zoo’s finances and their breeding program.

I’ll confess that zoos make me uneasy. I outright loathe circuses—the idea of wild animals capering about to entertain humans makes me retch. But when I think about zoos I can’t help but feel that the wrong species are behind the bars.

A few months ago I exchanged such thoughts with a guy on Twitter. (And, BTW—steeplechase? No.) I had mild reservations about zoos being completely pernicious precisely because of their animal conservation programs. You know, they were ensuring the continuation of animals under assault from human civilization.

And then came Marius.

it’s interesting to me that the Copenhagen Zoo didn’t foresee the vehement reaction from around the world. I also think it’s passing strange that, with the population of giraffes in Africa declining, zoo breeding programs aren’t capable of offloading their “surplus” back into the wild instead of slaughtering them for a Sunday outing.

Gratitude Monday: I get by with a little help

As the Divine Miss M says, you got to have friends. And I really appreciate mine.

Last week was not the best I’ve ever had. Actually, it was pretty much crap. And one of the lowlights was pinging one of my job prospects—first one I’ve really, really wanted in a good long while—and being told they’ve “filled it with an internal candidate.”

This after stringing me along since October.

I don’t often vent on Facebook, but it just kind of spilled out of me. I relayed the news and asked if it was too early to drink. The first two responses really helped lighten my spirits.

One consisted of a single photo, without comment:

To understand this fully, you’d have to be familiar with the film Start the Revolution without Me, which I recommend highly. I’m not going to explain it here, but I have often felt like this, and my friend LQ was exactly right to post it.

Second response was from another friend—also engaged in the absurdity of the job search. I’ll just quote her: “Baby girl it's NEVER too early to drink. That sucks pig poop.”

And so it does.

But having friends who can help put crap like this into perspective is what keeps me going, even when I feel like an escapee from a Dalí painting.

So big up to my friends. And it’s definitely not too early to drink.