Reciprocation is a lovely thing. || She reeks of class. || Intruders detected. || It is damaged. || The undead. || Because you demanded it, four decades of Argos catalogues. (h/t, Things) || Caption unnecessary. || Kitchen nightmare of note. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || If you’ve ever wondered what would be published in a journal of “feminist geography.” || Girls’ night in. || This may amuse. Do try it out for yourselves. || Slightly underwhelming library books. Includes Bowling for Women and How to Make a Mystery Smell Balloon. || The size of space. || The Crawling Eye (1958). || Crisis averted. || Cutie. || It’s called a guqin. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || And finally, via Dicentra, the eternal struggle.

When they put up the posters [advertising the event]… the campus completely melted down. They had two campus-wide meetings attended, according to reports, by hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators about what to do with me coming to campus… The rumours were spread – not just rumours, emails, including from the student government – that I was a white supremacist coming to campus with my white nationalist followers to target minorities… They organised safe spaces for my visit. They organised safety teams to guide people to safe spaces with glow sticks if they couldn’t find the safe spaces. In the library, which was the main safe space, they had colouring books for students—college students. It was the craziest thing.

William Jacobson recounts a lively visit to Vassar College.

Other subjects touched on include blogging versus Twitter, and the Oberlin College / Gibson’s Bakery court case:

It’s just an example of a powerful left-wing entity, which essentially runs the town and is not used to people standing up to it, and which has reacted, in my view, completely irrationally… Oberlin moved to transfer the case out of… their home county, because they didn’t think they could get a fair trial… I think that should tell you something of the bubble that the college community is.

Professor Jacobson explains the Oberlin saga in more detail in this video.  

Readers unfamiliar with the incident and its elaborate, rather farcical inversions of reality, can find a short but informative overview here. As I wrote at the time,

It’s worth noting that Oberlin College is the Clown Quarter writ large, a leftist fiefdom, where woke psychodramas are normative, encouraged and institutional. And hence the delinquency and moral inversion – the ripened fruit of all that leftist psychology. Such that students were encouraged by staff to side with a trio of physically aggressive shoplifters - people stealing for fun – and to actively destroy the livelihood of a baker who would rather not be preyed upon by thieves. The expectation of lawfulness, of common civility, being repaid with libel, harassment and ruin. Activities that Oberlin’s administrators were happy to enable, using college funds, and often with bizarrely adolescent behaviour of their own.

Our betters at large.

Oh, I think you’ll find it is. 

Also, open thread. Because I’m generous that way.

Back yard scenes. (h/t, Holborn) || Synchronised boobies. || Hey, baby. || Being proud, they filmed it. || “Grandma always wanted a pig.” || Twitter indignation. || Twitter done well. || Dental nerves. || He does this better than you do. || Documentary idea of note. (h/t, Damian) || Unmix your music. Not there, but not bad. || Always respect the media. || Teachable moment. || Teachable moment 2. || The longest sight-line? || Unexpectedly. || New shoes, I see. || On Soviet cannibalism. || “I heard about McDonald’s never decaying so I wanted to find out whether this was true.” || Underclass scenes. || Everything wrong with The Shining. || And finally, if you laugh at this, you’re a terrible, terrible person.

Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023… The popularity of these devices has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s Funniest Home Videos of petty crime.

In the pages of The Atlantic, our sympathies are solicited. Though not for the people being robbed, of course:

The first time Ganave Fairley got busted for stealing a neighbour’s Amazon package, she was just another porch thief unlucky to be caught on tape.

The words first time and unlucky should perhaps be borne in mind.

The deliveries that were dropped daily on her neighbours’ porches caught her attention. At that point, she didn’t know about the cameras or [neighbourhood watch app] Nextdoor. In the months that followed, the police would find a cache of the neighbours’ belongings and mail in her possession… Her sister told me that Fairley generally sold the packages “for a little bit of nothing, just to get high.”

I sense that some of you may not be feeling overly sympathetic.

Ms Fairley – who invokes racism as a cause of her local notoriety, and whose extensive cache of stolen belongings included other people’s credit cards – is described to us at length and in the softest possible light. We learn of her dysfunctional upbringing, her struggles with a mouldy apartment, and her various drug habits, including “trekking daily to a methadone clinic” – a heroic feat, apparently. Ms Fairley’s failure to attend numerous court dates – for petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen property, possession of heroin, and child endangerment – is, we learn, due to her having “a lot going on” in her life. In at least one instance, it turns out that what was going on was stealing from a resident she’d previously targeted and who, while being robbed again, was waiting to see Ms Fairley appear in court.

The fact that Ms Fairley is gay is mentioned too, as if that were somehow relevant or an explanation for credit card fraud and chronic thieving. We’re also told, touchingly, that she has “family members’ names tattooed on her neck.”