Whaddaya mean it’s called a Boyfriend Pillow?

Boyfriend pillow for Japan singles

Japan’s single women are being offered the ultimate sleeping partner - a comfort to cuddle up to, but one which does not snore or make demands.

The Boyfriend’s Arm Pillow, shaped like a man’s torso with one sturdy arm, has been on sale since December and has so far been snapped up by 1,000 singles.

Janet Maslin feasts on Newt Gingrich’s latest book:

Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Some of these glitches are brief, while some are windier. The long ones are particularly dangerous. Here is what happens when James Watson, an academic and a decoding expert who is one of the book’s cardboard Americans (as opposed to its cardboard British and Japanese figures), has lunch:

“James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.”

Never mind what’s going to happen to books during the digital explosion of all media.

What’s going to happen to my beloved English language?

Moralizing anti-Israel “realist” Stephen Walt is on the road trying to pre-sell his upcoming screed to Jews:

Walt — who penned the ["Israel Lobby"] paper with co-author John Mearsheimer — had come to hawk the book-length version of their findings to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in September.

“Both I and my co-author are pro-Israel,” [uh-huh --ed.] he said on Tuesday evening, in front of the audience gathered at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. “Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist [how decent of you  --ed.], and we make clear that lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie.”

Really? Here’s what I wrote about that in March 2006, when I first mentioned these two poisonous flame-throwers, whose conspiratorially copy-styled “Israel Lobby”-with-a-capital-L tells you all you need to know about their not-so-subtle insinuations:

Let others give this the fisking it deserves. I will simply note that the professors’ logic skills are called into question by the first assertion they choose to footnote and the text of that citation:

…Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essential identical. (1)

Here’s the opener of footnote 1:

Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about [emphasis added]. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact.

Now, in May 2007, Walt says that “lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie,” but in their paper, Walt and Mearsheimer suggested that the mere existence of the “Lobby” indicates that it’s not in the American interest.

Can I have some extra scoops of vanilla with that pie? And hold the cinnamon!

Walt seems to be trying to soften his paper’s grotesque scapegoating of Israel as the source of all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world.

Walt made his remarks at the Jewish Book Council’s “Meet the Authors” program, a sort of speed-dating for the literary set, in which each presenter is given two minutes to expound on his or her book before an audience of event coordinators from around the country.

Well, the joke is on Walt, because Jewish book groups are notorious in the book world for inviting tons of speakers and bringing in big audiences, who consistently fail to buy books at the event.

May that embarrassing tradition continue.

Ido Hevroni bucks up his Israeli colleagues who are upset by the British teachers’ union vote to boycott Israeli academicians:

[N]o need to worry, my friends - after all, the weather in England is not the best, and they are rather tightfisted when it comes to scholarships.  …

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate some overjoyed far-left Israeli academicians … You managed to make the world hate us, you managed to completely twist the truth regarding our difficult battle with Palestinian murderers, and you managed to find a scapegoat for a world that sees fit to ignore the genocide in Darfur, the cutting off of hands in Saudi Arabia, and executions in the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps now you will even get a tempting offer from a leading Islamic college. …

[P]ersonally I’m not moved by the by the boycott call. I do not mean to underestimate the value or achievements of British academia, but I don’t care about it. When those entrusted with freedom of thought and human research fail to grasp how distorted their ideas are as a result of a mental illness, known as anti-Semitism, there is nothing left to do but feel sorry for them.

And for our modern world and what it has come to.

I first posted about BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in mid-March, when he was kidnapped in the streets of Gaza. I had expected his abduction to catch the attention of the MSM, since he was one of their own. Instead, except for many, prolonged protests held by Palestinian and British journalists, there has been a troubling silence. (You can follow all my posts about Johnston here. You can read a few posts about kidnapping as the terrorist tactic du jour here, here, and here.)
Until today. The group holding Johnston released a propaganda video:

He is wearing a red sweatshirt and reading out what appears to be Palestinian propaganda denouncing Israel and the Middle East policies of Britain and America. He appears calm and without any visible injuries.

His voice, familiar to many BBC listeners and viewers from his 16-year career with the corporation, is measured. He says he is “in Gaza”. …

During a three-minute speech, Mr Johnston accuses Britain and the US of causing suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and for “occupying Muslim lands against the will of the people in those places”.

He starts to give a message to his family but is cut off. Subtitles then appear on the video, saying: “The BBC refused to take this message to his family”.

Naturally, the family is relieved to have this sign of life from Johnston, although no one can say when the video was shot. But this isn’t anything like relief for the family—it’s extended agony:

Norman Kember, 76, a British peace campaigner held hostage for more than four months in Baghdad in 2005, said the video was designed to cause “maximum stress” to Mr Johnston’s family and the Government.

He drew comparisons between the orange suit he was given to wear during videos and Mr Johnston’s red sweatshirt. He said: “I think the idea was to show the parallel to Guantanamo Bay and put the maximum stress on the Government and relatives.”

The British government is well aware of that:

The video was condemned by the Foreign Office for the distress it caused the family and Tony Blair used a press conference at the end of his African tour to call for the kidnappers to release Mr Johnston, who passed his 45th birthday in captivity.

Also calling for the release of Johnston is Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian “prime minister” of Chaos and In-fighting.

“We are renewing our demands of the men, the abductors of the British journalist, to protect him and not to harm his life and to immediately release the journalist,” Haniyeh said after Friday prayers in Gaza City.

“This is an action that does not serve Islam, does not serve the Palestinian cause, and does not serve those who have abducted him.”

Johnston’s kidnappers would surely disagree. It serves them just fine as a recruitment tool for the wretched, dispirited youth of Gaza, who have been failed by two successive generations of their “leaders” (and failed, too, by two successive generations of Israelis, who have been unable to collectively rise above the massive hatred and violence engendered by their reclaiming the Jews’ ancestral homeland). These young men were once ripe for the picking by Hamas. Now that Hamas has also failed them, they’re ripe for the picking of by Qaeda.

You can read all about it here in the NYT. Read it and weep.

This recent wave of abductions of Westerners in the region began with the June 2006 kidnapping by Palestinians of the Israel soldier Gilad Shalit. (At the time, I held Hamas responsible for an act of war; now we know it was this shady Army of Islam group that was responsible, and that they’re not under Hamas’s, or Fatah’s, control—which is part of the problem in Gaza) It was followed a month later by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah—they’re not Palestinians, they’re Lebanese, and this happened in a different region: in the north of Israel. Second Lebanon War followed in August.

And now I feel like I belong on the Daily Show. Still with me? Good.

Anyway: The same Palestinian group (the al Qaeda-inspired Army of Islam) that snatched the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit last June snatched the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston this March.

In between, there was the abduction and release (after a forced conversion to Islam) of two Fox journalists in August 2006.

I think you get the picture: there’s chaos in Gaza—so much chaos that Hamas begins to look moderate compared to the al Qaeda-inspired nihilist thugs doing these freelance operations, from kidnapping to setting fire to Internet cafes. And the prospect of anyone on the Palestinian side following a “road map” to peace with the Israelis is brought into relief as the deeply cynical and totally ludicrous political theater it is. What negotiated agreements could hold up under chaos, and when no one group among the Palestinians has the monopoly on the use of force?

Also: remember that there have been no Western journalists in Gaza since Johnston was abducted. The Palestinian journalists operating there must be under tremendous pressure and risk in this deeply uncertain political climate. Freedom of the press is the last thing that al Qaeda-type thinking tolerates. These journalists are very brave people, but we cannot know the extent of what is happening.

Keep your eye on this situation. It’s very dangerous indeed.

And spare a thought not just for Alan Johnston but also for the American hostages being held in Iran.

At the trade show Book Expo 2007, Mike Shatzkin told publishers that books are exploding, that their world is gone, and that they had better get cracking:

This speech is called “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World.”

We are not saying that general trade bookstores will disappear,
although we think there will be fewer of them and the consolidation in that sector will continue.

We are not saying that everybody will read on screens and paper books will disappear, although we already know that certain kinds of information formerly best housed in books is now better delivered through electronic media.

We are not saying that novels will be replaced by multi-media interactive adventures, although we think those will continue to grow and thrive. They are more likely to cut into movies and today’s games than they are into books.

And we are definitely not saying that long form reading is doomed over the next two decades, although we don’t think anybody really knows how much it will be reduced by changes in attention spans and information absorption habits of the
generations that are kids today and those that will follow them.

We don’t see any indications that long form reading will increase, but, given the unpredictable ways that change works on the human psyche, we wouldn’t rule it out.

But we are definitely saying that every general trade publisher of 2007 must have a plan to change over the next decade or two if they want to survive.

As Jeff Jarvis, among others, has been saying (shouting about!) for years, the revolution in books, as in other media, is being driven by the people formerly known as the audience: consumers who want to use all cultural products in their own way, on their own time schedule, and on (multiple) devices of their own choosing.

Shatzkin sketches out how the process will work for books—the imprimatur of a Publishers Weekly or a New York Times Book Review will no longer be meaningful, because publishers will be selling to “communities of the interested”:

While the engineers will be building storage capacity and bandwidth faster than we can create intellectual property, our audiences are going to be organizing what we do create, and organizing themselves to discuss it, add to it, and mash it up in various ways. That’s the other thing that we can already see that is a critical change dynamic challenging general trade publishing: people moving from the
horizontal media we’ve always known to niche communities of the interested.

Then he gets a little utopian about the far-reaching implications of the information revolution:

Every obsession, no matter what it is, will be ultimately indulged. All of the books and movies and songs and more– many articles from periodicals and journals and people’s private notes and amateur and professional commentary on all of the above — will have been sorted through, or will be being sorted through
by the community. It will be gathered, rated, graded and hyperlinked. And it will all exist in such a way so that your own observations and insights can become part of the wealth of knowledge anytime you want them to be.

Getting back to reality, Shatzkin also gets to the heart of the issue—how publishers can serve the niches: through the credibility of their brands:

All of this has profound implications for “brand”. Credibility is
a critical component of brand. In a niched world, credibility, and therefore brand, will move to an increasingly granular level.

There are people trusted in the left- and rightwing blogosphere that aren’t at all known in the mainstream media. That’s true for every subject. We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it — nichiest subjects first — where web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.

Got that? Web-based branding will have more credibility than print.

I’m on board. Can I see a show of hands of others who get this? And will they please identify themselves so that we can work toward this brave new world together?

I’ll be waiting. You know where to find me.