We'll bet you think genies are great. Rub the lamp, get your wishes, la di da, everyone's happy. Shows what you know. Genies can be bastards just like anyone else. Even worse, they can be magical bastards, and thus get away with stuff that us normal bastards can only dream of, like sneaking into a home and circumcising a ten-month-old baby while he sleeps. A Javanese woman named Ineng claimed that this is precisely what happened to her son Riyan Abdullah on Thursday, when the formerly uncircumcised Riyan mysteriously awakened from a nap minus his foreskin. As most would in this situation, Ineng assumed that a genie had done the job, and the local expert on all things paranormal confirmed her superstitions. While Riyan was understandably upset and confused, don't feel too bad for him. Most Indonesian Muslim boys are circumcised around age six, when free will and cognitive ability make the whole experience much less pleasant.
Valentine's Day (Price) Massacre
Some men celebrate Valentine's Day by festooning their sweethearts with flowers, fancy chocolates and tickets to Riverdance. Others like to acknowledge the holiday passively, by not doing something they normally would, like sleeping with whores. Hard-up hookers in Slovakia claim they have been forced to slash their already competitive prices after February 14th caused a sharp drop in business. According to a local newspaper, many prostitutes had reduced their rates between twenty-five and fifty percent. Said nineteen-year-old Ina from Bratislava: "Slovak men are either being incredibly faithful, or they simply don't have any money left for a half-hour of pleasure after buying expensive Valentine's gifts." The newspaper also reported that some prostitutes have taken the week off — kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken shutting its doors during Thanksgiving weekend.
Tong Song
Plenty of grisly outcomes can await a circus performer. It almost seems like they're asking for it, what with tormenting lions at close range and stuffing themselves into canons. Then there are the trapeze artists hurtling through the air in sparkly singlets so camp they would make Liza Minnelli blush. All this danger can make a circus performer a bit edgy, as one factory worker in the German city of Düsseldorf discovered. This week a lovesick fifty-eight-year-old German trapeze artist was sentenced to seven years in jail for trying to emasculate the factory worker with a pair of bull castration tongs. The victim, whose testicles remain intact, had been having an affair with the trapeze artist's former girlfriend, a forty-six-year-old belly dancer who performed in the same circus. Apparently the factory worker had never heard that old adage, "You can date a belly dancer with a violent trapeze artist in her past, but you can't keep the trapeze artist from coming after your nuts with metal tongs" — or something like that.
Desperately Seeking Daddy
In a victory for women everywhere, it looks as though Florida's "Scarlet Letter Law" will be struck down this week. The law requires mothers who don't know who fathered their children to advertise their sexual history in local newspapers before placing the children up for adoption. Created in 2001, the law was designed to locate missing dads (and perhaps to increase newspaper circulation). Instead, critics charge, it threatens to increase the rate of abortion and child abandonment among women ashamed to place the ads. TWIS is happy to see this law go but continues to support the practice of voluntarily taking out ads with lists of your sexual encounters.
