Friday grab-bag

Busy tomorrow, so posting the Friday grab-bag on Thursday.

● The funniest sentence I read this week was in the Guardian’s article, “Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?”

In her business pamphlet, she offers up the gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s and squeezed the testicles of a top army general.

Later in the article, one learns that 90 percent of young Japanese women think staying single "is preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like."

● They’re both behind the paywall, but the New Yorker’s articles on Elizabeth Smart and Norman Mailer are fantastic. Smart is the young Salt Lake City woman who was abducted from her bedroom in 2002 and held captive by a rapist for nine months. She has since become an activist. I came away tremendously impressed by what the article accurately calls her “extraordinary resilience.” As for Mailer, I know there’s no reason why being brilliant should necessarily give you a better purchase on reality than anyone else, but still – that brilliant, yet that batshit crazy? It makes you wonder.

Video of the week: While doing a Google search for Woody Allen, I stumbled upon Allen Woody (1955-2000), bass player for the Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule. How appropriate that a guy with the opposite of Woody Allen’s name, so to speak, would indeed be pretty much the opposite of a neurotic Jewish comedian and sometime jazz clarinet player from Brooklyn. So here they are, Woody Allen and Allen Woody, together at last.