Even if you feel a very strong urge, don’t try this at home. // Age of Tin Man. // User preference. (h/t, Kristian) // Throwable panoramic ball camera. // Unfortunate technical gaffe of note. // How to detect a nuclear weapon test. // Chicago below. // Sweet Dreams banjo-style. // More joys of public transport. // The puzzle of baldness. // She’s a big girl. // Battle of wits. (h/t, Dr W) // Ice cream in Cuba. “I thought this was a bus stop.” // Crash helmets of note. // Tiny hand-thrown pottery. // Parts of speech. // Restoration. // “An erratic structure brought to life by mechanical agitations.” // Mechanical calculator. // Victorian data visualisation. // At last, your very own bioluminescent desktop dinoflagellates. // And finally, for the adventurous, hold on to your lunch. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Repent at Leisure. 

Graduate job-seeker is shocked to discover that choices have consequences.  

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark – who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes, to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along?

Comedy Economics. 

Improving the species through enforced poverty.

The New Economics Foundation is convinced that, once implemented, its recommendations would “heal the rifts in a divided Britain” and leave the population “satisfied.” That’s satisfied with less of course, and the authors make clear their disdain for the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.”

Scenes of Extended Fretting. 

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman discovers how competitive piety can be.  

Mr Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers, believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Just Surrender to the Will of Clever People. 

Private education must be banned, says leftist academic. And reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”

Sadly, Dr Swift doesn’t say whether he has any personal experience of the state education system that he thinks the rest of us should make do with in the name of “social justice.” But perhaps he could share his comforting words with some of the children left at the mercy of such schools, where, as one national survey of teaching staff puts it, “a climate of violence” and “malicious disruption” is the norm, the assaulting of staff and pupils is commonplace, with almost half of those surveyed witnessing such behaviour “on a weekly basis,” and where vandalism of personal property is “part of the routine working environment.”

I’ve hidden free puppies in the greatest hits. 

Kevin Williamson on being the wrong kind of brown person: 

For his political conservatism, Governor [Bobby] Jindal, like Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, also Republicans of Indian origin, is savaged as an Uncle Tamas — an Indian guilty of acting white. The charge has been led by the New Republic, the former political journal turned vanity press owned by Facebook millionaire Chris Hughes, one of the whitest white men in the history of whiteness, an argyle sock of a man… Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley stand accused of the worst sort of heresy: being members of an ethnic minority group who neither present nor understand themselves as the white man’s victims, whose stance toward the country in which they all reside and in which two of them were born — the country they love — is not one of opposition. The Left needs neediness, and these three aren’t offering up much of that.

Tim Blair explores the subtle, compassionate mind of Clementine Ford, a writer of “feminist social analyses” who tells us “abuse is not a joke.” 

And Brendan O’Neill on austerity and its champions: 

Before they developed their new-found emotional attachment to describing everything they don’t like as ‘austerity’, [leftist critics] were openly calling for austerity. George Monbiot is one of the Guardian’s chief complainers about Tory austerity — the same George Monbiot who in 2006 proudly described environmentalism as a “campaign not for abundance but for austerity” and who inspired the radical group Riot 4 Austerity. His colleague Zoe Williams likewise complains about “austerity” yet a few years ago she was dreaming of introducing Second World War-style food rationing, because “the lesson from the 40s is that to fix a public-health problem… you need big government.”

Yes, the chronically unhappy and tormented George Monbiot, who one week claims that austerity is crushing the poor and is “an assault on public life,” and then another week calls for his readers to “riot for austerity. Riot for less.” Because, says he, economic growth is “a political sedative,” a tool of false consciousness, “snuffing out protest” in our dulled, befuddled minds. And so Mr Monbiot denounces “the blackened waste of consumer frenzy,” by which he means shopping, and instead wants “a campaign not for more freedom but for less… a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.” “Unpleasant as it will be,” says George, and while “some people [will] lose their jobs and homes,” austerity and recession will avert “ecological collapse,” while saving us from those jet skis and diamond saucepans that we’re all intent on buying, and the mere existence of which robs him of sleep.

For more of Mr Monbiot’s strange mental adventures, see here, here and here. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Attempting flight. // Tooth, claw and torpedoes. // About 40 seconds in you’ll spot what’s gone wrong. // Trees and fog. // A bunk bed for dogs. // “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Jaws, short version. // Jazz computer. Full-fat cheesy noodling. // Caterpillars, baby. // Abandoned Chinese fishing village could use a woman’s touch. // Jellyfishies. // Caution, wet floor. // Students, check your leftist privilege. // Up, up and away. // To lift a big helicopter you need a bigger helicopter. (h/t, drb) // First swim. // Leafcutter ant farming. “They’re using the leaves to grow something else.” // Maps on demand. // Dickens World and other theme parks. // Vertical turntables. // And finally, “obtain alluring slim loveliness” with bust-reducing cream. Works in weeks. Also enlarges bust. 

What, you didn’t know? 

Remember, Laurie is a fearless feminist warrior, a Wadham College “riot girl,” a communist, a revolutionary, a self-described “rebel” and “troublemaker.” One whose world is “on fire.” She and her radical friends are going to bring the whole patriarchal capitalist system crashing down. 

But life without Facebook isn’t worth living.