It was inevitable. || A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785. || A compendium of Victorian magazines. (h/t, drb) || Oh Canada, what have you done? (h/t, Jon) || It just isn’t tricky enough unless it’s also on fire. || Experimental flight videos, over 400 of them. || The future is now. || Photo roulette. || A decade in the life of a Ukrainian park bench. || How to make a wooden knife. || It was the Nineties, everyone was doing it. || Dog and pony show. || Slow-mo sumo. || Tractor pull mishaps. || I don’t think he had a plan. || This is one of these. || That. || Jupiter. || Geometric tarts. || Cow eats mail. || Caterpillars. || Lord Paget and his leg. || And finally, as a warning to us all, a brief history of spermatorrhea, a beastly, life-threatening affliction caused by “abuse of the genital organs.”

“Men are trash” is a “positive observation.” And full of hope. According to Laurie Penny.

Because modern masculinity – whether yours or mine, or your husband’s or brother’s – “wounds everyone” and is “grounded in sexual violence.”

Via Tim Newman, who adds some thoughts of his own. 

“Through ambiguity… deep CREATIVE STATES can be UNLOCKED.” 

What follows, according to performance artist Sandrine Schaefer, is a brief preview of a site-specific piece that “takes on a time structure inspired by cycles of dormancy in bears,” and in which “the tension between mechanical, geological, and felt time is always palpable.” With that in mind, let’s once again witness Ms Schaefer’s devastating heat-ray of creativity: 

Speaking, as we were, of people for whom anger is a credential, a kind of emotional jewellery, this seems apposite:

My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, “I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President.” The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.

Ruth Mayer, a woman seemingly oblivious to the implication of her own words, recounts her pilgrimage to the ‘Women’s March’ in Washington DC. It’s a tale of cultivated umbrage, car trouble, and a moment of reflection, narrowly missed.

Via Darleen.

Katherine Kersten on “social justice” education and its pernicious, all-pervasive racial dogmatism: 

Like students, the district’s faculty and staff must submit to racial equity re-education. One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative… The training session was entitled “Edina School District Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint… Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 31 percent proficiency in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2017. In reading, scores for black students in 10th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 51.7 percent proficiency in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017.

And what parents want, obviously, is for their children to be taught how to become racially fixated leftwing activists, albeit illiterate ones who struggle with basic arithmetic, but who’ve learned the important things, such as how to confess or denounce “white privilege,” and “how to embrace ancestry, genetic code and melanin.” At some point, perhaps quite soon, the words foolish and dogmatic will seem an inadequate response, and the description that comes to mind may be something like evil.

As I’m pushed for time this week, you’re getting another chance to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with a speck you may want to magnify; a symbolic modern dialogue; some serpentine feathers; what someone apparently needed; the poorly-made shirts of William Shatner; and a brief history of deadly hats, killer bras and crinoline conflagrations. 

Oh, and here we see our betters, including several educators, demonstrating why they’re just more evolved than we are.