Brouhaha over Hoohaa.

A theater in Atlantic Beach, Florida, was recently the subject of much noise after it briefly changed the name of the film "The Vagina Monologues" to "The Hoohaa Monologues." Apparently, a slangy, degrading term is better than the technical term.

The name change was provoked by a woman who had to field a question from her niece as they drove past the theater: "What's a vagina?" (Keith Olbermann: "It's a common item you find lying around the house.")

Maybe it's just me, but I'm rather sure that Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan had the names for all their body parts by the time they were literate, and they were literate by the time they passed four.

Which means I would have had to deal with the question, "What's a monologue?" I would probably have had to deal with questions about why anyone would want to talk at length without interruption about their vaginas, and could have easily distracted the question by bringing up other body parts such as noses and toes and asking them to make up long, boring monologues about those body parts. Really, to kids at that age, all body parts seem to have more or less the same level of interest. And telling them they have to come up with a long, boring monologue means that, usually, they won't!

Still, the theater has had great publicity, and some woman is living in a huff, outraged in the knowledge that not only did she fail to "protect" her child, but she failed spectacularly.

Meme Bingo!

Which supervillain am I?

( You got that right! )

Learn something new every day.

I'm reading a very silly catgirl hentai manga, and one of the characters uses the expression "色々". I'm totally bewildered by this. First, it takes me ten minutes to realize that the first kanji isn't a solid but a top-bottom (I'm a SKIP, System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns learner; it's a top-bottom 2-2-4). Then, I start digging through my own dictionaries looking for meaning for the second symbol, which I can find nowhere in SKIP. Now, given that this is a hentai, I'm led down the red-herring road that the first symbol is iro, meaning "color," although in combinations it is sometimes pronounced shiki, a root term for "lust or sexual passion." As it turns out, the second symbol has no pronounciation, although it's called a kurikaeshi, and it repeats the sound of the first kanji. Oh, good, so I look up shikishiki. It's an adjective, "various." Whee.

Then, curious, I go to the standalone pronounciation of color, doubled, iroiro. And sure enough, it too means "various."

Damn, I was hoping for something more exciting. Well, I'm not likely to forget the kanji for "color" anytime soon, I hope.