Girl-friend less Japanese men have found companionship on their iphones. Not via a new dating site, but a program called Love Plus that allows them to travel to different locales (yes, actually travel, not just online) to have their photo taken with Rinko, a popular Japanese school girl cartoon character.

At certain spots, they stand beside a two-dimensional barcode that uses “augmented reality” software to make them appear to be standing beside the virtual love of their virtual life.

It may sound lame. You  may wonder why they haven’t just bothered to learn Photoshop. But so far more than 2000 young men have traveled to the once romantic city of Atami for a faux photo op.

Check out the story in SMH here.

Mall security brought both women to a police station where they were detained briefly, then released.

There have now been a string of incidents in Dubai. In March, a British couple spent a month in jail for kissing in public. An Indian couple got three months in jail for exchanging sexy text messages. In 2008, a British couple went to jail for three months for having sex on the beach.

Titanic Editorial: Dubai needs to make a decision. If they want to position themselves as a major tourist destination (especially for charter trips) and business hub for Westerners and the rest of the world, they’re going to need to make some adjustments.  I’m not saying they should change their values or culture or dress differently.  They just need to find a better way of informing visitors about their unique rules and a better way of punishing foreigners who violate them.  If a foreigner commits one of these social crimes (inappropriate dress, inappropriate speech or touching), a fine of perhaps $100 – $500 seems like a more realistic punishment. Months or days in jail is WAY overboard.  And Dubai tourism will continue to pay for it with bad PR as long as they keep it up.   They need to understand that it’s not easy for many Westerners to make the adjustment. A couple on a honeymoon might forget and spontaneously kiss while walking down the beach.  It’s especially difficult because hotels and bars seem to have a different set of rules. If you step into a Western hotel, you can wear a bikini, drink, and kiss without penalty.   Dubai is a fascinating city in many ways (I’ve had the pleasure of visiting it 4 times), but tourists need to be able to relax and walk down the street (or thru a mall) without fear that they’ll be chucked in jail for a crime they didn’t even realize was a crime.

1. Wrong Numbers
One wrong digit can be disastrous. We do a lot of double checking, but every now and then a “1″ becomes a “2″ and all those young travelers arriving at the bus station at midnight phone a popular backpacking hostel and wake up an innocent bystander instead. We did it to Mrs O’Something in Ireland and, apart from changing her phone number, informing everybody she knew, and paying her damages, her lawyer suggested a family trip to EuroDisney would be a good idea.

2. Wrong Title
Sometimes it’s not even the fine print. We managed to turn “Western Europe” into “Westen Europe” on the two-inch-thick spine of one edition, the 72-point typo snuck by designers, typesetters, proofreaders and printers before a packer in the warehouse found it.

3. Wrong Direction
“The next time this author researches a book, tattoo ‘RIGHT’ on his right hand and ‘LEFT’ on his left,” suggested the editor after one book was completed. Getting right and left or east and west mixed up can cause horrendous problems. We got the east and west exits from a major railway station crossed up in one book and sent countless visitors on a wild goose chase for a popular budget hotel.

4 Wrong Correction
Don’t let your editors – the profession seems to have a penchant for political correctness – make too many corrections.They’ll turn classic John Wayne cowboy and Indian flicks into something about cowpersons and native Americans. I wrote about one of my own experiences with overzealous correcting in The Lonely Planet Story:

In 1954 baseball hero Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe and, after the wedding, the happy couple was photographed outside the church of Sts Peter and Paul, a noted landmark in San Francisco’s North Beach district. It’s a famous photograph outside a famous church, but I was careful not to say it was taken after their wedding in the church. Because it wasn’t. Joe was a staunch Catholic and it was his second marriage (Marilyn’s too), so there was no way he could get married in a church. The wedding took place at San Francisco City Hall, only the photographs were taken outside the church. A careful editor checked the facts and found out, just as I had, that Joe and Marilyn weren’t married in the church, but then dug further. Fifteen years earlier Joe DiMaggio had indeed been married in the Sts Peter and Paul Church, to his first wife. So Marilyn Monroe got axed and replaced with Dorothy Arnold. Fortunately, I read the edited copy and caught this very accurate, but rather less interesting, correction and reinstated Marilyn.

[reprinted with permission from TW]

5 Wrong Translation
Translate your guidebook into a different language and a whole new field of error possibilities opens up. Like the German translation which declared that a red light district bar was the very best, the most superlative, the absolutely unbeatable, the incomparable. In fact, in English it was  “topless.”

A travel insurance firm is doing the legwork of sorting through some of the world’s worst travel insurance claims.  Here’s a classic about a doctor from California who was urinating off the edge of a cliff in Vietnam when the ground beneath his feet gave way and sent him plunging 30 feet down.  Talk about landing in an awkward position…  Got a travel nightmare? Send it in to Travel Guard’s World’s Unluckiest Traveler contest. According to the website, they’re handing out a $10,000 grand prize.

Sports  reporter Erin Andrews has filed a lawsuit against Marriott International Inc. and several hotels affiliated with it, for negligence, emotional distress and an invasion of privacy.

The lawsuit states refers to incidents in 2008 in which a 32-year-old man named Michael David Barrett (who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison) videotaped Andrews naked through hotel room peepholes in several US states and posted the footage on the internet.

Where does Mariott come in? According to Andrews’s lawyers, when Barrett called the hotels to find out which rooms she was staying in, the hotel confirmed she was a guest, told him the room number and provided him a room just beside.

Why the delay? FBI agents questioned him about his time in Yemen, Wehelie said. He had gone to Yemen  two years ago at his parents’ request so he could learn Arabic and find some guidance in his life.  Wehelie is of Somali descent, but many Somalis live in Yemen, where educational opportunities are cheaper than in other parts of the Middle East.  Wehelie was studying information technology at the Lebanese International University.

Wehelie has no ill will toward the US or the FBI.  “I’m not angry at all. I know who I am and I knew eventually I would go home,” he said. “They’re trying to find the bad people, so more power to them.”

During the reign of Silvio Berlusconi, over 150 laws to crack down on anti-social behavior have become a part of daily life.

A young couple sitting on a monument in a piazza in Vigevano, a town near Milan, had to pay a fine of €160 .  Another couple was caught kissing in a moving car in the town of Eboli and had to pay a €500 fine.  In the coastal town of Eraclea, it is forbidden to build sandcastles, as they “obstruct the passage” of those strolling along the beach.  And don’t even think of wearing wooden clogs on the island of Capri — they’re too noisy and have thus been banned.  In Venice, it’s a €500 penalty to feed the pigeons.

Kissing a pigeon in a moving car while wearing clogs? Probably a life sentence.

Dee Darwell, a 56-year-old tourist from England, was bitten by several monkeys on a tour to Monkey Island (in Thailand, near Phuket) while trying to overcome her phobia of monkeys.

Thai fisherman pulled the monkeys off of her as she collapsed with blood coming out of a deep wound in her arm.

Here’s Ms Darwell’s account of what happened: “The monkey took my wrist and pounced on my right arm, sinking his teeth in and hung off it. He wouldn’t let go;  he was locked on. I was absolutely petrified. I was shaking from head to foot and I froze. There was one man, a tourist, and when he saw the monkey bite me, he screamed and ran off. … Then another, bigger monkey bit my arm, just next to the other one biting me, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by monkeys.”

Why did they attack?  Ms. Darwell’s tour leader, Yongyut Buasod, said that some people were teasing the monkeys that day and they don’t necessarily attack the specific person teasing them.

“We have a duty to combat this phenomenon, which is becoming unmanageable,” said Francesca Calzavara, head of the province of Venice.  That’s one way to crack down on the problem. No word on what happened to the person who was actually selling the fake purses.