CVS Sells Cockrings

It turns out that I work with a rock star. Not only is he part of the math club, he went to Burning Man, builds his own bicycles and is mentioned on the xkcd blag.

The mention on the blag is related to Mike’s implementation of this comic. Apparently, Mike was inspired by this comic, ’cause check this the fuck out! It turns out Mike’s implementation inspired Randall, the original artist, to make his own, which is pretty fucking rad.

Last night, after attending a fairly decent party, Mike and Nicolle and I headed back to Mike’s place to watch some It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in Mike’s ball pit. We were all fairly drunk at this point, so there was very little hope of me actually making it home. The ball pit was super-comfy, so I just fell right asleep, hardly noticing the awesome sitcom unfold before me at all.

As comy as the ball pit was as I was falling asleep, it turns out to not be a very comfy place to be asleep. I awoke in the middle of the night in what can only be described as incredible pain. My neck and back were screaming in agony, so I moved from the pit to the slightly-more-comfortable couch.

All in all, it was a succesful evening.

I’m a big fan of Japanese director Juzo Itami,. His movie Tampopo is one of my all time favorites. I own a copy and I watch it fairly frequently.

But there are still several of his movies that I haven’t seen, so I fired up Netflix and took a look. But almost none of his films are available there. I did manage to find this one, which he stars in, but does not direct. I thought I would give it a try, since it is, technically, a Juzo Itami movie.

It turns out that the movie is, as the title sort of implies, soft-core pornography. My best guess is that it is based on The Plum in the Golden Vase, a 17th-century Chinese novel about the decline of the Ximen household which achieved notoriety in China because of its sexually explicit nature.

I don’t know about the novel, but the movie is terrible. It’s got all of the bad of a porno, and very little of the good. The acting, production quality, dialogue and story are at the level of porn, but the depiction of graphic sex scenes is relatively tame.

On the plus side, it is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. And, it led me to discover the pink film genre. I think I’ll probably be avoiding that genre in the future, but it’s good to know that softcore porn, “dominated the Japanese domestic cinema from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s.” [wikipedia]

I’m not exactly looking forward to the other movie in my queue featuring Itami…