Groping pregnant women shouldn’t be what’s it about
Groping pregnant women shouldn’t be what’s it about
On Jan. 14, 36-year-old comedian Sayaka Aoki made her last TV appearance before taking some time off to have a baby. The appearance was on Fuji TV’s noontime variety show “Waratte Ii to mo” (“It’s OK to laugh”), where she was a semiregular. The show’s host, Tamori, placed his hands on Aoki’s belly as a way of “praying for an auspicious birth,” but it wasn’t the first time contact had been made with her bulge. For more than a month prior to her “maternity leave,” Aoki was letting everybody cop a feel. On another Fuji TV variety show, “Uchi Kuru,” where she herself was the cohost, she even got young kabuki star Kantaro to lay his hands on her after she had pulled her pants down so that the baby bump would be more accessible. Kantaro didn’t seem to know what to do so he simply did as he was told.
A pin (solo) comedian, Aoki made it on TV with an extroverted personality and looks that are considered not conventionally pretty. As such she is given license for crude exhibitions that include baring her butt when the occasion calls for it. And since such female stars are deemed unmarriagable in the peculiar world of television, her union with a notably unfamous dancer was topical for a time, but not as topical as her subsequent pregnancy, which she made the most of for as long as she could.
Checkmates and imbalances are derailing Obama’s bid for change
When historians look back on the Obama administration, they may deem the senatorial election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, 2010, to have been the pivotal event determining its destiny.
That day, conservative Republican Scott Brown handsomely defeated liberal Democrat Martha Coakley to become the state’s first republican senator in almost 40 years — and that despite the president’s personal intervention in Coakley’s campaign. This event will, I believe, impact not only this year’s midterm congressional elections but also the 2012 presidential election.
Sorge’s spy is brought in from the cold
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Miyagi’s niece never wavered in her support for her uncle. “We didn’t even know what a spy was when we first heard the story,” Tokuyama said. “It didn’t matter what people said. To me, he was always my uncle and I never doubted him.”