Due to censorship, Japan is infamous for using a wide variety of stand-ins for the phallus. The use of tentacles for example has a long history, dating back to the 19th century when Edo period artist Hokusai was one of the first to depict tentacle erotica with The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, and the following sub-genre of women engaging in sexual activity with sea creatures.

In what appears to be porn that only a locksmith can appreciate Door Knob Girl has appeared on the scene, and bless her E. coli licking heart. Door Knob Girl is a website gone viral that features, you guessed it, a collection of photos of girls licking doorknobs.

It begs the question – has Door Knob Girl been spawned by all of the pixelation and mosaicing required by the Japanese censorship laws to obscure genitalia in Japanese pornography or is she just another one of those “Only in Japan” fetishes? According to it’s creators – artist Ryuko Azuma and photographer Ai Ehara – Door Knob Girl is simply psychosexual art.

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Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing /l/ and /r/ accurately. The advertisement below for the book On The Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System is an example of the difficulty that native Japanese speakers have in perceiving the acoustic differences between English /r/ and /l/.

Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was at the absolute epicentre of the recent economic storm, and his account of how he dealt with the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was quite appropriately translated into Engrish: “On The Blink”: an idiom for malfunctioning, out of order or broken. As opposed to “brink”: verge, the limit beyond which something happens or changes, the edge of a steep place.

The book title ‘On The Brink’ suggests that we were on the verge of disaster hanging on the edge of collapse whereas ‘On The Blink’ softens it somewhat to mean a slight malfunction that can be fixed like one of those vintage televisions where you just gave it a hit on it’s side to get it working again.

Back when my first child Ash-kun was born I remember how helpless I felt being there as my missus zoomz underwent a prolonged and painful labour. zoomz had insisted on giving birth naturally and she was a damn hell of a trooper about it as well. Unfortunately the Gods were not on her side that day. Ash-kun had failed to progress after 12 torturous hours and he had started to show signs of distress. It was therefore decided that he would be delivered by Caesarean section.

I accompanied zoomz to the operating theater where a team of obstetricians prepared to perform the C-section. To obstruct our view of the action that was about to occur they placed a screen over zoomz’s chest. On the ‘business end’ side of the screen the doctor made an incision in her abdominal wall and uterus and pulled Ash-kun from the womb and into the world.

The doctor held Ash-kun up and proudly announced “Congratulations! It’s a boy!” I popped my head above the screen for a look and remember thinking “Oh My God! It’s a frog! No, it’s an alien frog!” To be brutally honest, there was a fleeting moment where I had wondered if he was a science experiment gone wrong. In Ash-kun’s defence the poor kid was overdue and a Caesar which I guess meant that, without a vaginal delivery, he didn’t have the chance to get the juices squeezed from him on the way out giving him a bloated ‘alien frog’ look and a pair of Simpson-esque eyes.

Crazy Frog

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