A fun music video.

Sweden woman’s ‘murder’ committed by elk not husband
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8384143.stm

Man in Japan weds anime game character
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/24/footage-from-the-fir.html

Why Don’t Vampires Act Like Old People?
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/11/23/the-virtues-of-vampires/

Abstinence-only rappers sing about the “Christian Side Hug”
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/25/abstinence-only-rapp.html

Where No Travel Writer Has Gone Before
http://www.worldhum.com/print/item/features/star-trek-where-no-travel-writer-has-gone-before-20091103/

Rare Charles Darwin book found on toilet bookshelf
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_britain_darwin

Shatnerquake: bizarro novel about every Shatner character sucked into reality to hunt down William Shatner
http://boingboing.net/2009/04/30/shatnerquake-bizarro.html

Every backpacker conversation, ever
http://blogs.theage.com.au/travel/archives/2009/11/every_backpacker_conversation_ever.html

What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn

You might think this is an ad for a Japanese cartoon, comic book or toy.  It’s actually an ad for a Buddhist temple that had a special “maid” day.

To try and interest young men in the temple, the priest has decorated the temple with manga characters.

Buddhist Temple in Japan Woos Visitors With Manga Babes

Via JapanProbe

NPR story on Japan’s Herbivore Men:

The sensitive New Age man has finally arrived in the land of the salaryman. But there is a catch – a particularly important one in Japan, where the declining birthrate has caused alarm: The new Japanese man doesn’t appear to be interested in women or sex.

In Japan, ‘Herbivore’ Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood

One of the fun things about having your own web site is that you can have a look at the logs that record the search terms that people used to find your web page.

Unsurprisingly the most common search term used to reach my web site is “Aidan Doyle”.  I also get a lot of visitors who are looking for maps of Eastern Europe.  My travel entries mean that I get people searching for some odd information about Eastern Europe.  My spam filter also blocks a lot of Russian spam.

Here is a selection of some of the more unusual topics that Google & Co apparently consider me a reliable source of information on:

immortal solarizing boots (if you put this into google, I’m the number one search result)
mongolian wrestling
stone museum of ekaterinburg
pacman porn edition
markets for teen novelettes
oriental pearl tv tower ragamuffins
czars crowns photos
forbidden kung fu
russian gravestones
estonian sword
monkey bookcase
fiction stories about pandas
anime pirate dog
the economics of drug dealing
world’s drunkest person
jonathan dimbleby russia meteor

transnistria travel advice
photos of people of moldova
pirate estonia restaurant
mongolian+wedding rituals
walls of palace of versailles
lunacy of werewolves
“from milan to minsk” “get out of my face”

the last surviving – magritte
collective noun yeti
a name of a country that doesnt exist
stone monkey of south america
stone monkey t-shirt
forget everything you’ve read about vampires
nouns to describe werewolves
why do samurai blacken their teeth?
form rejection letter fiction examples
atm greenland

ukraine’s annual budgets for people
japanese pornographic video games
llama express, bolivia
sweet women minsk
estonian independence day
moldova army onion
supernatural beasties

the negligible effects of good parenting on education
shimajiro toilet training system
transsiberian january train -orchestra