KOBE, JAPAN
Does wearing a surgical mask while singing karaoke decrease infections?
The swine flu has come as an unexpected benefit to some karaoke parlors in Japan. Over 4,432 kindergartens, schools, college and universities have been closed this week at the request of the government, to help contain the cases of swine flu. Nationally, Japan has the fourth largest number of cases of the flu and fortunately no one in the country has died from it.
So what happens when you have hundreds of thousands of bored school kids who are supposed to stay home? Of course, they all want to go out and have some fun since they have some unexpected and unscheduled days off. So away they go to the nearest karaoke club.
A karaoke club manager said: “We suddenly had a number of high school students after 2pm yesterday, right after the announcement that schools would close for a week. All of our karaoke rooms were full at one point, and I’m expecting something similar today. I don’t have the right to say something like ‘you should stay at home.’”
However, another manager who was interviewed indicated that about 10 different groups of high school students came to his establishment yesterday. He said he declined to accept the students when he found they were supposed to stay at home while their schools were closed.
Some of the first outbreaks in Japan were between the students of two schools who got together for a volleyball tournament.
Wonder if this Japanese invention would allow all the kids to sing without spreading germs around?
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Dance students taking classes to learn pole dancing
Now HERE is an idea I can get behind — pole dancing in karaoke clubs. I have no idea how pole dancing in a karaoke club works, but I’m sure willing to give it a try. No, No, wait. I don’t mean *I* am going to pole dance, I just want to watch all the ladies do it.
Apparently pole dancing in karaoke clubs is pretty normal and popular among the young people in certain areas of China. It became controversial when one of the many Chinese sub-governments decided to ban it. In a move that made all the karaoke bar owners sigh with relief, in the end the government decided not to put the prohibition into place. “The initial draft to disallow pole dancing aimed to nip erotic performances in the bud,” said an official surnamed Wei at the Culture, Broadcasting and Press Bureau. “But we’ve found no law in China that forbids pole dancing, so we decided to delete the stipulation.”
They did end up passing a new regulation that will prevent erotic performances at venues, including a detailed stipulation to make “all balconies transparent” to people on the street outside. Huh? Explain that one to me. Maybe there was a problem with the language translation software, but that is something else I’d like to see. Those inventive Chinese folks. Transparent balconies. Cool.
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Two Vietnamese karaoke singers trying to stop themselves from dancing
In a move that has a lot of citizens of Vietnam scratching their heads, the government is proposing to ban dancing in karaoke clubs. Karaoke is enormously popular in Vietnam, but so are prostitution and drug use. By stopping the dancing, the government hopes to - yup, you guessed it - cut down on prostitution and drug use.
The governmental thinking seems to go something like this: people who take the designer drug ‘ecstasy’ like to dance and hang out with prostitutes so by banning dancing the problem should be solved.
“Karaoke parlors are for singing, not for dancing,” the newspaper Thanh Nien (Young People) quoted Le Anh Tuyen, a ministry official, as saying.
This has led some skeptical observers to wonder exactly what would constitute dancing, and who would monitor it. Can you imagine singing karaoke standing ramrod straight without moving around a bit? Violators would be fined, although the amount is not yet specified.
The proposed regulations would also extend the hours of karaoke parlors and dance clubs from midnight until 2 a.m. - but only those located in luxury hotels. That provision appears to be intended to attract more foreign tourists in the face of the global economic downturn. Maybe they’re hoping to encourage foreign tourists to support the local economy by spending money on drugs and prostitutes.