According to the [UK] Daily Mail Online:

A hardline Islamist group in Somalia has begun publicly whipping women for wearing bras that they claim violate Islam as they are 'deceptive'.

The insurgent group Al Shabaab has sent gunmen into the streets of Mogadishu to round up any women who appear to have a firm bust, residents claimed yesterday.

The women are then inspected to see if the firmness is natural, or if it is the result of wearing a bra.

If they are found wearing a bra, they are ordered to remove it and shake their breasts, residents said....

'Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of full veil and now they order us to shake our breasts,' a resident, Halima, told Reuters, adding that her daughters had been whipped on Thursday.

'They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat.'...

The above is the headline from a real New York Post article (assuming that it's not a contradiction in terms).

On a less grisly note, I liked when Tina Turner was a guest on Letterman, and he gave her a tuna turner.

Via Consumerist

Happy Hannukah!

From The Houston Chronicle via The Consumerist:

The missing clock didn't stop postal customer Al Cunningham from noticing the amount of time spent waiting for service.

"It's always long here," said Cunningham, 49, an insurance adjuster and former postal employee who was standing in line at the Watson Post Office in Fort Worth.

The Watson Post Office is one of the nation's 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a "retail standardization program" launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.

"We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock," said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

At the Fort Worth post office, the hook that once held up the small battery-powered clock now protrudes from a plaster wall. The clock was taken down months ago.

A customer-service expert at Texas A&M University was not impressed with the decision to take down the timepieces.

"It's silly," said Leonard Berry, holder of the M.B. Zale Chair in Retail and Marketing Leadership. "I guess they think people don't have watches."

I was amused and appalled by George Vaccaro's blog entry Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents, in which he describes the inability of Verizon workers to understand that there is a difference between ".002 dollars" and ".002 cents". Keith and I listened to the audio of his customer service phone calls. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

George: [big sigh] Okay, I think I have to do this again. Do you recognize that there's a difference between one dollar and one cent?

Andrea (customer support representative): Definitely.

G: Do you recognize there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?

A: Definitely

G: Then, do you therefore recognize there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents

A: No.

G: No?

A: I mean there's... there's no .002 dollars.

My favorite comment was from a Slashdotter who wished that Verizon off-shored their call center to India.

Verizon eventually agreed to refund the overcharge, but there's no word yet on whether they'll do so for the uncounted other people who received a misquote.

Women have become the majority of college students, but this hasn't resulted in a more female-friendly environment, at least socially. Via Chronicle of Higher Education, I found the Commonweal column "Role Reversals" by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead:

In the wake of last spring’s sex scandal involving the Duke University men’s lacrosse team, a Rolling Stone reporter named Janet Reitman went to Durham to interview current students. She returned with a revealing portrait of social life at Duke, and particularly of what it is like to be a female student at the school that ranks eighth on the latest U.S. News and World Report list of the nation’s top universities.

The women she met were hard-working superachievers. They had impressive GPAs, letters in sports, double majors, and high career ambitions. Almost to a one, they were fit, attractive, and stylish. They stood out as the very model of the independent-minded young woman of the twenty-first century. Yet in their social lives, Reitman discovered, they were abjectly dependent on winning the approval of the male students at Duke. This required going to bashes organized by men, matching them drink for drink, hooking up for sex and acting out men’s pornographic fantasies at theme parties like “Dress to Get Lei’d” and “Sex and Execs.” Moreover, these elite women couldn’t think of anything that might be wrong with this kind of behavior. To them, it was just the normal way that men and women socialized....

As recently as the early 1960s, there was a familiar gender divide on coed college campuses. Men dominated the classroom. They outnumbered women, were taught by male professors, and enjoyed the privileges of male sponsorship in their academic pursuits and future careers. Women dominated campus social life. They set and enforced the rules for dating and parties. They organized the rites and rituals of coed socializing-including such now-arcane courtship rituals as pinning ceremonies, formal dances, and male serenades-where men were obliged to defer to women’s fantasies and desires....

The Duke coeds don’t see their social condition as a form of servility, but they do experience it as a source of perplexity. On the one hand, they believe that their generation of women has achieved sexual equality. To them, that means that girls can get hammered and have sex with as much freedom and abandon as the guys. They’ve been taught that this represents progress from the old double standard and from the burden of female modesty. On the other hand, they don’t always feel good about themselves. Their participation in the booze-drenched party culture, they admit, is at odds with their own sense of dignity and self-worth. One Duke woman, who confessed to having sex with a popular guy in order not to lose him, said wistfully: “I have done things that are completely inconsistent with the type of person I am, and what I value.”

(Reading the full column requires free registration.)

I've been sheltered from these environments. I was a student at MIT, where the focus was on studying and there were few enough women (especially in computer science) that we didn't have to go out of our way to attract men. I'm a professor at Mills, a women's college, which has different social problems.

I was recently at a meeting representing Mills College to a large corporate foundation considering a proposal for a summer science camp for high schools girls at Mills.

Funder: And how would you track the girls after the program was complete?

Ellen: We were hoping you could provide us with RFID chips.

I offered to be a reference for a student applying to the graduate program I direct. Basically, I'm writing a letter to myself. The form includes:

Check One: I would/would not be willing to respond to additional questions by telephone.

I checked that I would be willing, adding "but you may get a busy signal".

Today (the day after Thanksgiving) is Buy Nothing Day. Wouldn't it be more successful if they held it on Thanksgiving, when most stores are shut anyway?

I like saying something slightly different from what people ordinarily expect and seeing if they notice the difference. A sort-of example is when, as a kid, I asked my mother if chocolate milk came from brown chickens, and she replied, no, they come from regular chickens.

Here are some sayings from my (nominally) adult household:

• Cleaner than a baby's bottom
• I feel like a needle between two haystacks.
• More fun than a bowel full of monkeys

I welcome additions.