You can’t get anything past the Japanese boys in blue:

A man stole a police car from outside a post office in Maebashi on Monday because he was too tired to walk home….

The policemen who drove the patrol car left it idling in the parking lot. I know Japan is a relatively safe country, but this is still pretty stupid. The man apparently did not even drive the patrol car all the way home. Instead, he stopped 5 km later and told a woman that he was a police officer and needed her car.

Nothing you can tell me will shake my conviction that beer was involved in this somewhere.

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From the This-Is-What-You-Get-for-Electing-Right-Wingers Department:

On Jan. 27 Japan’s Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa gave a speech on the country’s shrinking population in which he referred to Japanese women of childbearing age as “baby-making machines.” He went onto explain that arresting population decline was difficult “because the number of baby-making machines and devices is fixed [in the population]; all we can do is ask them to do their best per head.” The 71-year-old Yanagisawa did add, however, “that it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”

Ya think?

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And from the irony department:

A former assistant professor of Meiji University’s School of Information and Communication plagiarized 96 percent of a report on copyright submitted to the Institute of Intellectual Property, sources said Monday.

Plagiarizing a report on copyrights. Well, you gotta give the guy an A+ for sheer brass balls.