Girls Can Pee Standing Up!

A while back I wrote an article discussing the less-than-finer points of an invention known as the “shenis”. The inventor happened by here just yesterday and decided to let me know that she wasn’t terribly enthused by my rather negative first impression.

Well, once the subject of “what’s a girl to do when there’s no sit-down toilet services available?” was broached, someone was kind enough to mention a similar invention they’d heard of in years past.

The invention in question was developed in 1988 by a Dutch woman named Moon Zijp and is called the P-mate. It’s a simple cardboard funnel, really. It can be folded for discreet and space-saving storage. It comes with a baggie for disposal (or sanitary storage if immediate disposal isn’t available). Most importantly, it allows women the alternative of peeing standing up when conditions merit it.

Now maybe it won’t let you pee off the side of a boat as perfectly as a twelve inch golden dong, but at least I won’t have to worry about urine in my purse afterward. For purchase of the P-mate in the US, please see their US-based order-and-info site.

Comments (4)

From the What The Fuck Files: The “Shenis”

If I may be so bold as to quote Animaniacs…

“It’s time for another good idea, bad idea”

Good idea:
A device that allows folks with female sex organs to pee standing up.
Bad idea:
Fashioning said device to look something akin to a giant golden dildo.

It’s certainly a device that’s an invention of necessity. Yet I fail to see the need for it to be - as the site describes it - 12 inches long, and golden. And as it’s stated on the site “The Ebony model is due out soon. It will be significantly larger than the gold model, come with wheels and is…priceless.”

I’m absolutely positive that concept of this device could be executed with a LOT more discretion. I can’t picture wasting that much space in a hiking or camping pack, much less a purse with something that huge. A plastic funnel would probably serve the same purpose, at that.

Plus, I’d bet a nickel they’ve done SOME kind of keyword research, too. On the “Blog On” page, I couldn’t help but notice the sub-header stating: “The Shenis fits all designer vaginas”. The designer vagina issue seems to be coming up a lot more lately, probably due to changes in surgical proceedures and promotion. (I distinctly recall complaining about the very idea, in fact.) They could probably do more to optimize for that particular keyword, but I find it’s placement and presence in general to be highly suspect.

Conclusion: This is a pure novelty item and I’m not terribly impressed, to be honest. Campers, hikers, and road-trip travelling ladies, just make sure you have a plastic funnel (or good directions). You’ll be fine. Don’t throw money at this silly attempt to provoke in the name of convenience.

Comments (5)

Hey MOFOS! Time to De-lurk Already!

The Great Mofo Delurk 2007
Hey kids! In conjunction with my desire to generate more user feedback here at the RKNet, I wish to take a moment to voice my support for The Great Mofo Delurk 2007.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some RSS. It allows me to read far more interesting articles per day than visiting individual blogs ever could. Yet without feedback and conversation, there’s nothing to separate someone’s blog from some kind of diary or masturbatory pontification. (Not that there aren’t some elements of both in a lot of blogs anyway, this one included.)

So let us all take a moment to break out from the comfort of our cozy feed readers, visit some of our favorite blogs, and let those jerks people know just how we feel! If there’s nothing recent that really inspires you, go back to old entries that got you really fired up and sound off. Stumble your way through tags and categories and find things that really pique your interests and speak away! Share your favorite entries with friends and get them to comment, too.

We the authors know you’re out there, and we love hearing from you. It lets us know we’re doing our job: entertaining, informing, and/or inspiring*. (*Trolling is a form of inspiration too!) Gentle readers, we love you! Share the love and leave a comment.

Comments (3)

Halloween Indecision 2007

Gentle Readers,
I am torn. Every year I say I am going to do something so unbelievably wicked awesome for halloween. Every year I flake out.

This year should be different. I have 2 ideas in mind. One involves a lot of money and would need to be done soon, one involves a lot of time and maybe a little less money and skills I don’t necessarily have.
Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

RKNet upgrade

Tonight or tomorrow I will be upgrading to Wordpress 2.3. What this means for you as a reader is: mo-betta tags and a faster blog.

It may also mean more authors! With the addition of a feature called “pending review”, it means I can invite others to share this blog space and still maintain the RKNet quality you know (I hope) and love (I hope!). (Also, if you have an interest in contributing let me know!) I hope to step up with providing more constant content, and more original content, and having other authors would help immensely in that.

This might also mean some issues, since I’m a little fuzzy on the whole wordpress update process, but I’ve got some assistance and I’m hoping for the best!

Comments (2)

Friday Brain Fodder

It is important to be beautiful, so start from the inside.

Please discuss.

Comments

Owen Wilson Hospitalized, Doubtful He’ll Be Left Alone

Owen Wilson was brought to the hospital today via ambulance. It is unknown at this time why exactly, but he has already released a statement regarding this incident, stating:

“I respectfully ask that the media allow me to receive care and heal in private during this difficult time,” the 38-year-old actor said in a statement released through publicist Ina Treciokas.Via Yahoo! News

Naturally the news is abuzz with this event. It is this author’s opinion that there will be a great deal of journalists who will not do as he requests and simply allow him privacy during this time - and I don’t just mean the obviously opportunistic tabloid types. There are already a great deal of articles running that he “reportedly tried to commit suicide”. The real questions are, how can they so casually include this hearsay, and how much worse will it get before the end of the day?

This internet rag, known as the National Ledger, has already gone so far as to claim knowledge of “a slit wrist and ingestion of a bottle of pills”; this bit being written just before a complete breakdown of his astrological chart. There were also no sources cited for their claim. Splendid detective work, National Ledger, now get back to your charts and your remarkable slew of banner ads.

Give me a break, people. The guy went to the hospital. It happens to thousands, for various reasons. I sincerely hope that this base speculation is as far as the majority of the media goes into prying into his not-very-private-right-now life. Good luck to you, Owen Wilson, in what may be a difficult time. I for one wish you swift and peaceful healing.

Comments (1)

Sesame Street: Keeping it Real

To this very day, I maintain that this is one of the most awesome songs I have ever heard. I like it well past its usefulness as a learning aid. As learning aids go, this has to be one of the catchiest things anyone ever came up with. Besides, who doesn’t freaking LOVE that pinball table action? Even the “ADD” kids (or ADHD, as is more popular these days), with the short-ass attention spans could appreciate something like this. It’s got so much to offer. I really can’t stress enough how much classic Sesame Street rocked.

This message brought to you by my extreme nostalgia, and the IRC channel associated with SubGenius.com.

Comments

Dream Log: Flaming Lips, Purple Valve, and Evil Symbiotes

I went to bed rather early because I got up early and was a lot more active than normal.
At first I dreamt I was in a field and the stars over my head shone with a brilliance I have never seen before (not even in NM and the stars there were intense). At some point it became a stadium-like concert hall with a peculiar pattern of open roof. I sat down in a chair and continued to relax and look at the stars. I was there for a little while when I saw people coming in and sitting down. Then I realized that someone was setting up the stage area below. I thought to myself that since I was already here and no one stopped me before that I may as well stick around. At some point during all of this, I had company on either side of me, my father and a mystery person. As it turns out, the people setting up on stage were The Flaming Lips. They started to play (and it really was familiar songs, I was stunned almost in-dream by the accuracy) and it was really great but I got a little nervous because I didn’t know if I was allowed to be here or not. I turned around and looked, and there was a familiar looking young man. I asked if we’d gone to school together and he said yes. That was pretty much the end of that conversation. There were some fancy effects, one of which went wrong.
f_1829optical-illusion-4.jpg
It had to do with a pattern of lasers over the crowd that would present the optical illusion represented above, and then had another image overlaid on that. (Looked sort of like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs if I recall correctly.) Of course to do all that, they needed smoke in the air. However, they couldn’t figure out how to keep the smoke from rising too quickly to the top and out of the open dome. I looked upward and saw that they attempted to “close” the dome but there was no fully closed setting and even still the ceiling was very high, causing the smoke to drift well out of laser range. I peeked through holes at the stars and longed for the way it was before. Though I was grateful to be sitting with my dad and grateful to be seeing the band perform. The nervousness of being discovered for my ignorant seat theft and the pang of longing for the peace field I had started out in were pretty overwhelming. I had gotten caught for my apparent trespass (despite having been there first) and was frantically trying to come up with some way to redeem myself. I stammered a suggestion to the large man towering above me that if they had linen sheets, lots of them, they could use it to create a canopy to blow the smoke under and contain it. I fled from the building, on a determined mission to find linen sheets. The open country had gone from field to urban while I wasn’t looking and there were a variety of stores, most of which were closed. I started out moving along by car but for some reason decided that was not the most efficient way to manage so I left the car in some parking lot and ran.
I wasn’t able to find linen sheets, so many places were closed and I returned to admit my defeat after the concert, despite the fact that I could have just run as my gut tried to tell me to. I lose the thread of the dream there. I may have woken up.
Later on, I dreamt of a video game. I believe it was called “Purple Valve: The Assisted Suicide Game”. Not sure why they called it that, other than it was remarkably easy to die. Player 1 was on a moving platform that was going down with a few other figures, but the idea was you needed to leap of and get power ups and hop from small block to small block to get the rest of the way down. After falling to my doom over and over again, I finally figured out how to grab power ups that made the fall less fatal, and finished level one. Some of those symbols made no sense. I don’t know why grabbing the baseball and then the baseball glove made an angel come and wing me part of the way down. Perhaps a manifestation of Saint Duh, the patron saint of obvious pattern recognition?
As level two began the whole dream pulled away from that. I was faced with something that was like a low budget cross between Transformers and John Carpenter’s Price of Darkness. There were these “symbiote” creatures created of wire that looked remarkably like CAT5. They informed us of their superiority and started taking people over one at a time. They did so by jabbing one of these wires down the throats of human victims. There was a lot of cautious reasoning with these monsters, trying to perhaps trick them into admitting a weakness while trying to establish the worth of the human race. This dream gets a bit hazy but I suspect that the humans did not survive. Incidentally I think Alec Baldwin was in that dream, portraying some manner of general.
And I wonder why I wake up tired.

Comments

Elective Vaginal Surgery: Another Low-Blow to Sexuality

Pointed out by Ectomo: From the blog Next Nature comes an article discussing Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation surgery and Designer Laser Vaginoplasty. (Caution: If you’re at work, there’s a big picture of a woman’s pubic area at the top of this article. if you turn it sideways it looks like a frowny mouth with a five o’clock shadow!)

This has to be one of the least intelligent surgical developments I have heard in quite a long time. It’s just another item in a long line of things subtly encouraging people to assume that sex has nothing to do with personal happiness and everything to do with how one’s sexuality will be judged by others. Barring any actual deformities, such as those caused by functionally limiting accidents or birth defects, I can see absolutely no reason for this procedure. Anyone who encourages this be performed on healthy women is - to say the least - very disappointingly short-sighted.
As a part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, sex ranks directly with food, sleep, and breathing as one of the most important needs for a human being. I myself am in agreement with that sentiment.

Esteem? That which would make one desire a purely cosmetic change in the first place is a much smaller piece of the pyramid. Rightfully so, as the interactivity one elects to have with other humans is as optional as this “designer vagina” surgery. I can’t really picture a scenario in which the likeness of my pubic area to that of one seen in a magazine or film would really be that important. Even for those in the habit of posing for said magazine photographs, there is indeed photoshop and other such techniques which would prevent the necessity of voluntary genital mutilation.

Ladies, the next time you start to feel insecure about the appearace of your genitalia, just remember: “Who really has any business giving a shit besides me?”

Relevant to topic:
South Park: Plasty

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Comments (2)

« Previous entries

ClickHeat : track clicks