Two Irishmen and a couch. // As endorsed by Doris Day. // This is one of these. // Tongue caught in a mousetrap. // Multi-tool of note. // Moscow from above. // Whale-shaped shipwreck sculptures of note. // Niche appetite advertised. He wants to be breathless and sweaty. // Chocolate-coated licorice. It’s not for everyone. // Fractal jigsaw puzzle. Endless fun. // Surfing in Tahiti. // Trump Donald. // Cooking with gas at 90 million degrees. // In cinemas again. // It’s all gone a bit Hieronymus Bosch. // Impress your guests with an ice ball cocktail. // He plays with his better than you do. // At last, a zero-gravity pop video. // Accelerated thunderstorm. // River caves, Laos. // Kites. // And finally, educationally, if you’re unfamiliar with the word Vajankle, all is explained here.

Lifted from the comments:

A nasty non-leftwing man said that we can’t handle unflattering non-leftwing ideas or even debate rationally. So we smeared paint all over ourselves and screamed so that no-one could hear what the nasty man said. Then we walked out, giving everyone else the finger and leaving a mess for the janitors. Because we care so very much about everything.

I’m paraphrasing, of course.

As today is this blog’s ninth birthday, it seems as good a time as any to have one of the quarterly fundraisers that keep this rickety barge afloat. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love for this low establishment. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Now you can indulge your consumerist lust and feel saintly while doing it.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last nine years, and in over 2,000 posts, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in. 

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad casts an eye over politically corrected academia:

There is a disorder known as Munchausen syndrome, wherein I fake illness and I go to the hospital because that will garner me a lot of attention and sympathy… I think this hyper-victimology poker is a manifestation of this type of syndrome. I can garner a lot of sympathy by constantly seeing life through a prism of endless victimhood. People respond to that. “Oh, it’s okay, you’re protected here.” It’s hard to argue this stuff with me, though, because I can always use the card of “I escaped execution in Lebanon, therefore you better have a really strong victimology story to outdo mine.” And usually they run away. So this is what happens when people are using their identity for these types of purposes. It’s grotesque.

Dr Saad’s recent lecture at the University of Ottawa can be viewed in full here. A brief taster, with illustrations by Matthew Drake, can be viewed here.  

Attention, citizens. Rotary dials are coming. (1936) // Duet is a maddening game. // A small miscalculation, an atomic explosion, and a rapidly moving manhole cover. // Home-made smart mirror. // Home cinema on a budget. // Alaskan blue. // PlantBlock. // Baby swordfish. // On Kubrick’s beginnings. // Because she could. (h/t, Franklin) // A brief history of spite houses and passive-aggressive architecture. // The London that never was. // Wearable chair for the upright citizen. // Yiwu Commodity City, Zhejiang, China, is a really bad place to get a migraine. (h/t, Coudal) // People holding posters, a Tumblr. // Lover’s eye and other horrors. (h/t, Things) // A brief history of Japan. Some liberties taken. // And finally, athletically, Jurassic Parkour II: The Revengening.

The Council of the District of Columbia approved legislation Tuesday that would pay residents in the nation’s capital for not committing crimes.

No, really: 

First reported by the Associated Press, the bill penned by Democratic Council-member Kenyan McDuffie gained unanimous approval from the D.C. Council. The legislation, called the “Neighbourhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act),” would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes. The individuals would be instructed to participate in life planning, trauma informed therapy, and other programmes; if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend. The legislation was based on a Richmond, California, programme that pays individuals who participate as much as $9,000 annually.

Mr McDuffie describes his bill as “bold and innovative,” “a step in the right direction,” and “working to prevent crime by treating its root causes.”

Update, via the comments: 

Meanwhile, on feminist Tumblr…

Someone wants to buy a shirt that bears the immensely radical slogan “you cannot weigh beauty” and is promptly horrified to discover that said shirt is available in different sizes.  

Apparently, sizing clothes is triggering and oppressive.

Katherine Timpf on when blue hair and facial piercings just aren’t enough to get a girl noticed: 

A Norwegian woman is claiming that she is actually a cat trapped in a woman’s body — and that the fact that she has a human body is a “genetic defect.” […] Because Nano believes that her true identity is as a feline, she sees no choice but to live her life as one, even wearing cat ears, a tail, and fluffy pink paws that she grooms herself with in order to express her true self. Nano claimed to have feline characteristics such as superior hearing, better night vision than day vision, the urge to hunt mice (although she’s never actually caught one), and a fear of water. In fact, she even said that some of her catlike behaviours are involuntary. For example, she claimed to have no real control over how she started hissing at a dog in the middle of her interview.

Happily, there’s a video. 

Kevin Williamson on the inadvertent comedy of identitarian Oscars protests: 

The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white  —  and who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa; Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan… The convolution necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the offence, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart. 

And Jacob Kohlhepp on the farce and dishonesty of “diversity” classes: 

[Psychology professor Anna] Lau recalled a situation during which a foreign student asked “what if the reason black males are incarcerated more than whites is because they commit more crimes?” She said there was a total silence in the room. She then stated she wished she knew how to answer, because hard questions should be asked. Shortly after, Assistant Professor Safiya Noble stated “we cannot let unsophisticated comments stand.” She said that as a faculty in residence for the “Afrikan Disapora” dorm floor, she has learned that “those questions outside the norm make black students feel not just microaggressed, but actually aggressed.”

Yes, those unsophisticated questions can really be a bitch. By most credible estimates, black males aged 15-24 – around 2% of the U.S. population – are responsible for around 5o% of U.S. murders, and for disproportionately high rates of other violent crime, including rape, armed robbery and assault. The disparity is so great that even if one assumes police bias and differential rates of conviction, despite evidence to the contrary, one still has to wonder why the victims of such crime  - whose descriptions match rates of arrest and who are themselves very often black – would lie about the appearance of their attacker.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.