Right up there with the Chevy No-va....

This from my friend Logan, who posted it on Facebook:

Shop pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls
Fri Feb 1, 2008 2:01pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

(Reporting by Peter Apps, editing by Paul Casciato)

Meanwhile, Back at Jesus....

I'm not sure I've mentioned that the college here at Cambridge with which I'm affiliated is Jesus College--a name that creates all sorts of opportunities for unintentional hilarity, as in, "Are you going back to Jesus soon?"

Name aside, I get a good giggle every once in a while at printed materials, like these:

From the Jesus College library rules:

"Please do not let the college cat into the library."

Yes, there is a college cat, and it's black and white--very attractive, and he (?) nearly came up to me one day, only to pass by nonchalantly as though I weren't sitting there clicking to him. It seems a fairly common thing, having a college cat, and I wish we had an NYU cat--except that it would certainly come to some terrible end.

And best of all:

This morning, as I was walking to the library, I saw the notices out for Chapel events this evening. Thinking I would see something about music, I looked more closely, but what I saw was a sign that said

"TONIGHT! Film of a potentially morally improving nature!"

The film is A Room With a View, and I would almost go, except that I'd be afraid of the sorts of people wanting moral improvement on a Friday night--they might potentially want to morally improve me! So I have decided that unless I meet a crowd at the LGBT drinks earlier who want to go and crash it in order to leer salaciously at Helena Bonham Carter, I'll sit this one out. HBC isn't my type, anyway.

Showtunes from Sliabh Luachra?

Something is very wrong here, or at least, was when I did a Google search for Julia Clifford this evening.

Or maybe there's something "they" haven't been telling "us"....

ADDENDUM: Rob says that site tried to download something onto his computer, so I took down the link. If you clicked on it, you might want to run a virus scan just in case. And since the wonderment of it is lost without the link, what it *was* was a site that listed Julia Clifford and Denis Murphy as the musicians in a music of Sondheim sampler! Bizarro!