Look closely and spot the difference. // How to talk like Michael Caine. // Porn and precognition, together at last. // Play spread sheet Armageddon with Impact Earth. //  US Navy develops liquid antenna. // LIFE in the laboratory. // Impress the ladies with your speakers. Because chicks dig speakers. // Near-vacuum cooking. // Inevitably, bacon soda. // Un-sign. // Advertising Scrabble. // “Godzilla is virtually impervious to other gigantic monsters, and also to robots, artillery, laser blasts, lava and fire.” // Time-lapse marathon. // Booties for your hound. // A giant monkey made of flip-flops. // The must-have Christmas present.

I want to divorce the man I love and he wants to divorce me. We do not wish to separate – simply to end our seven-year marriage… We are both fed up with being part of the hetero-husband-and-wife brigade that is accorded so much status and privilege.

So says Lara Pawson in a piece titled The Tyranny of Marriage, thereby raising self-preoccupation – a Guardianista signature – to transcendental levels. It’s the “hegemony of coupledom,” see? Something must be done. Perhaps we should make room in our catalogue of classic sentences.

So why did we marry? Our wedding was in 2003, two years before the legislation for civil partnerships was introduced. Had civil partnerships been available we might have been the first in the queue of heterosexual couples now fighting for the right to become partners.

Heterosexual couples such as Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, who object to the terms “husband” and “wife” as being “patriarchal” and insufficiently egalitarian, and who claim their human rights have now been “violated.” For exhibitionist ideologues, the words “husband” and “wife” must – simply must – denote inequality. You can see the terrible bind they’re in. Will the oppression never end?

Ms Pawson continues,

We wanted a public celebration to acknowledge our love, and my husband- to-be felt strongly that a ceremony with singing and reading was important, as well as the almighty knees-up. Marriage, albeit a God-free one, seemed to be the only available path.

Ms Pawson’s marriage – or, as she puts it, “state-sanctioned agreement” – took place at a London register office,

and was followed the next day by a large party in a large garden with a grand marquee and later still, 184 hangovers.

Not exactly a shoestring do, then. Perhaps the garden marquee, extensive guest list and “almighty knees-up” were meant to express the injustice, tragedy and trauma of the event.

I did not change my name, nor he his. We simply swapped rings, gave appalling speeches and that was that. Or so I thought… Before we even tied the proverbial knot, I became swiftly aware of discrimination against wives.

Remember, this is a piece objecting to the “hetero-husband-and-wife brigade” being “accorded so much status and privilege.”

“I need to do it.” Kim Rugg remakes newspapers. Via.

Glenn Ricketts and Peter Wood on “diversity,” uniformity and things best left unsaid.

The “diversity” doctrine… urges students to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale [application] question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity… Would the Yale admissions office look favourably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.” No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbour insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.

Eve Binder notes the rise of Fat Studies.

Jacqueline Johnson knows what it’s like to be shunned because of her weight. In the early 2000s fat activism was edging into existence, and Johnson, a weight studies scholar, was deemed too skinny to take part. “I tried to join a fat activist group, and I was rejected because I was not of size,” she remembers… Today it’s a different story. Johnson, who teaches a course on weight and society at George Washington University, is currently a professor with 25 students of all heights and widths. Her Fat Studies class is one of a handful popping up on campuses across the country, teaching students to think about body size critically, politically, and regularly. But despite such courses’ popularity among students, critics worry that such classes emphasize bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigour.

And Jeff Goldstein on the same.

The only epidemic at issue here is the epidemic of grievance-mongering passing itself off as legitimate “scholarship.” A course on the psychology of creating and empowering ever more oppressed victim groups and the new politically correct vocabulary (and corresponding “hate speech”) that will grow around them… would be far more valuable for students.

Feel free to add your own.

At last, a blog devoted to William Shatner’s hair. // Happy dog. // Sneakers made from Play-Doh. // An igloo made from fridges. // Couches made from fridges. // A skeleton made from wool. // Dinosaur skull found embedded in church wall. // Implanted sight. // Freelensing. // Bagelfest. // Nuclear weapons simulator. // Near Earth objects. // The Nile. // Spicules. Side view. // Making glass signs. // Steep. // Tipping etiquette. // How to eat sushi. // Water, sand, slow motion. // Condoms of yore. // Filip Dujardin photographs unreal architecture. // There’s pleasure to be had in a pile of leaves.