Yes, I know, you’re getting another glorious opportunity to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. Oh, don’t pull that face. Besides, you’re getting pretty good at it. I’ll set the ball rolling with an assortment of home maintenance horrors, an improbable heist, a lesson in the importance of tilting your head, a second-language difficulty ranking, a burly chap in search of jewellery, and an endeavour that starts with jumping off a mountain and only then gets tricky. 

Oh, and how to turn a cat into a black hole. 

With the season of bonhomie fast approaching, patrons are reminded that any festive shopping done via the following Amazon links – here for the UK and here for the US – results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

That is all. 

At Ballou High School, Washington, DC, it would appear that miracles happen:

Teachers… say they often had students on their rosters they barely knew because the students almost never attended class.

And yet, this year, every student of suitable age, including those who were absent more often than in class, has somehow graduated and been accepted by a college or university. At a school were only 3% of students were deemed proficient in reading, where the average SAT score is 782 out of 1600, and where, according to one teacher, those who do attend, in the loosest possible sense, “roam the halls with impunity.”

Of course I use the word graduated in the same entirely bogus way favoured by the school’s administrators.

Via Rafi. 

More lifting from the comments, where, following this post, we were discussing how to spot good intentions, however dire their actual consequences:

If we set aside the explicitly sadistic and murderous fantasies of Marx and Engels, and Lenin and Trotsky and all the others, I suppose we have to ask whether the claim of benevolence and altruism, or the delusion of such, signifies actual benevolence and altruism, or whether it can be used as camouflage, a fig leaf, for something else entirely.

What if someone – say, a politician and supposed intellectual – wants to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings and wants to do this regardless of whether such confiscation would have the social benefits they claimed it would have, even if it makes their stated objective impossible. Are we to trust in their self-image as a person of unassailable virtue?

And what about these guys here, the ones who want to compel us to live more simply, as they conceive it, and who claim, apparently in all seriousness, that not permitting us to own the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing,” will make us “better neighbours,” “better parents” and better people? Do you trust their stated motives – of “healing” us, and curing us of our acquisitiveness – and do you trust their self-image as benevolent and just?

And when a Guardian columnist rages against a random family in the neighbourhood, about whom she knows nothing beyond the size and amenities of their home, and then exults, proudly and in print, at the thought of that random family’s downfall and suffering, and at the thought of the “aggressive redistribution” of their belongings, and that Guardian columnist tells us how pleasing this will be and that she just “can’t wait,” are we to believe that her motives are selfless and high-minded?

Readers are invited to fathom the intentions in play behind each of the above examples.

Lifted from the comments because… well, see for yourself: