That may very well have been true, but the one thing for sure was that this 26-year-old Frenchwoman was not as well-endowed as she would seem.

Describing this woman’s journey to visit her man locked up in the city jail of the northern French city of Rouen, the newspaper Le Parisien put it this way:

Before going to visit her detainee, she had pumped up her bust. Nor for any erotic reasons, but just to supply him with various products he would need. To do this, she had loaded up her bra.

I’ll say: When prison guards inspected her more closely they found in there:

• 5 “mini-telephones” with their chargers
• 1 Sim card (OK, those are small)
• 5 grams of cannabis
• 2 packages of cigarette rolling papers
• 1 recharge for an electronic cigarette
• 20 euros cash; and, get this . . .
• 2 packets of meat (further unspecified)

Quite the heavy load! I bet she was glad to get all that off her chest, even if it turned out to be in quite another room within the prison building than what she expected, prior to her being led off to incarceration herself.

The unnamed author of this piece characterizes this cargo as something out of Prévert, that is, Jacques Prévert who was a prominent post-World War II French poet. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything of his work. In any case, in view of this episode’s setting in Rouen, my own mind is cast much more in the direction of Emma Bovary, that protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel who was so confused about love and men, and whose sad fictional existence was set in and around that city (where Flaubert himself lived most of his life).

Smuggling stuff – a lot of stuff – hidden in one’s bra to one’s lover: surely this the sort of incident Flaubert could have come up with for his fiction. Well, almost: Wikipedia reminds us that the bra was not even patented until 1889 (and that was in Germany; Flaubert himself died in 1880). Then again, the word brassiere originally came from Norman French (Rouen is the capital of Normandy) meaning a child’s undershirt. (Note: as you can see in the tweet, in French they use the word soutien-gorge.)

Did I go to sleep and miss a couple of months? Is it already “silly season” – those depths of summer when real news is so scarce that radio time, newspaper pages, and weblog entries must be filled instead with the trivial and inane (if hopefully amusing)?

Well, you should know by now that you can count on EuroSavant for that sort of thing every so often. The latest bit is from Japan, as reported by Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad within – surprisingly! – the “.biz” business section of its website: Bra stimulates women to seek a man.

Yes, it seems the Land of the Rising Sun has somewhat of a demographic problem, in that its women are increasingly disinclined to marry, preferring to devote themselves to their careers. Now the lingerie company Triumph International has come to the rescue, with its new “Husband Hunting Bra” (available on the Japanese market only, for reasons which will soon become obvious). It’s a bra, all right, but the star attraction here is the digital clock built in on an extension underneath the garment’s supporting sections. There are two set of numbers there that count down; I assume that they represent months and days, for the idea here is that the bra’s owner sets herself a deadline for catching a man, programs it into the digital clock, sets it going, and so has a constant prod to action there on her chest. How to stop the clock? I’m glad you asked: above that clock-section, in the sweet spot between the cups, there’s a slot just big enough to accommodate the insertion of one engagement ring. Upon such an insertion, the clock mechanism stops.

Those Japanese do sometimes inspire the darndest things, don’t they? Oh, and Triumph has even taken care to discourage any sort of pre-marital hanky-panky, in that below the clock part you have printed in big Japanese characters a message which according to the Niewsblad article reads “In search of a husband.” Imagine taking a girl home, getting to third base with her – and recall that the Japanese are very into baseball – and encountering that! Maybe at this point you’re suspecting that I made all of this up, but be my guest and click through to the article: even if you know no Dutch, you’ll find there, appropriately enough, a set of two illustrations showing what I mean, as displayed by a rather cute young Japanese model.

Egad, the German press again! You know I don’t like to concentrate overmuch on one country; even two-in-a-row from the same national press is usually too much, unless the two are related and there was a clear necessity for follow-up. But today’s entry, brought to you by some happy serendipity, is to me the deserved dessert to yesterday’s main course about the Abdelghani Mzoudi acquittal in Hamburg.

You might have heard about an incident at the end of the Super Bowl half-time show last Sunday in which Janet Jackson revealed rather more of herself than is generally deemed proper by American public broadcasting standards. Whether the same incident would have been too racy for European public broadcasting standards is another question; Wolfgang Koydl of the Süddeutsche Zeitung takes the incident as his point-of-departure on a riff about American attitudes towards certain body parts in American Prudery: Let Everything Remain Inside – That’s the Main Thing. (more…)