A good news morning thusfar.

From the Washington Post, a nice story about Tokyo's Akihabara district which is believed to be the first urban enclave that caters to nerds (or in Japanese "otaku")

In a Chinatown you will find dim-sum restaurants. In a gay-borhood you'll find rainbow colored doo-dads. And in a nerd enclave?

Well there are "costume cafes" where the waitresses wear anime outfits and speak in squeaky voices. There are transparent lockers where nerds can arrange little dioramas of their action figures to show them off. There are comic book stores, of course, and game arcades. Also eyeglass adjustment kiosks.

As the story points out, there is a very weird undercurrent in some anime. One of the otaku, a 34 year-old computer programmer, maintains a collection of 130 life-size pillows of female anime characters.

"There are some people who do lose their grip on reality, but that is not me -- or most of us," said (the nerd), a chubby man with glasses who this year started dating a woman steadily for the first time. She's an anime artist. "For me, the pillows have been my source of unconditional love, a reminder of when I used to be hugged by my parents. There is nothing strange about it."

The other story that I find totally fascinating (and I'm afraid I don't have a better transition than this very sentence) is the phenomenon of "Trucker Bombs".

Roadside litter comes in all shapes and sizes — from dirty diapers to syringes — but there's one category that out-grosses the rest: trucker bombs.

Most drivers whiz along the nation's highways largely oblivious to their roadside surroundings. But next time you are out there, take a closer look.

"As soon as you look for it you’ll see it," says Megan Warfield, litter programs coordinator at Washington state's Department of Ecology. "You just see them glistening in the sun. It’s just gross."

They are trucker bombs, plastic jugs full of urine tossed by truckers, and even non-truckers, who refuse to make a proper potty stop to relieve themselves.

The link has a lovely photograph of several bombs arranged on a grassy slope.

As you might imagine, when mowing roadsides, these bombs do indeed "explode" when mowers hit them.

Other than the total gross-out factor, my favorite part of this story is how very on-message Leigh Strope, a spokeswoman for the Teamsters union, is when discussing this topic.

"You won't find Teamsters urinating in jugs and littering the nation's highways," she says. "Our drivers are guaranteed rest and dinner breaks because it's in their union contract."

Go Union!