Notice of note. (h/t, Holborn) || I am the night. || Gracious in victory. || The inventor of karaoke. || Vibrant diversity in street and park. || Place your bets – will advocaat carbonate? (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Quick and tasty snacks, plus patting. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Interloper. || Portals. || One pack or two? || Today’s word is parasites. || She calls it prayer rape. Because of course she does. || Cleavage detected. || A labour of love. || When you really channel that bad mood. || Jam session of note. || Jigsaw puzzle. || Just like normal people. || “You have to, you do.” || Woke art, woke artist. || Woke blathering level 9: “Fat-phobia is a direct result of anti-blackness.” || And finally, you want to and you know it.

For newcomers and the nostalgic, more items from the archives:

The Sound Of Wringing (2).

The Guardian’s Theo Hobson sticks pins into his eyes, rhetorically.

Despite Mr Hobson’s claims, rejecting “liberal guilt,” as manifest all but daily in the pages of the Guardian, doesn’t require an indifference to, or denial of, real injustice, merely a dislike of pretension and dishonesty. As, for instance, when Mr Hobson’s colleague Guy Dammann looked at the stars and howled, “Am I fit to breed?” Or when Alex Renton told us, “Fewer British babies would mean a fairer planet.” Some Guardian regulars declared their plans to make us “better people” by making us poorer and freeing us from the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.” While others chose to agonise over peanut butter residue.

And then there’s Decca Aitkenhead’s classic piece, Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame.

Apocalypse Averted With Collective Juddering.

Just another day at the Guardian.

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

Passionate Attachments. 

The strange, tearful world of “water-bottle separation anxiety.”

Or, Being One Of Our Betters, She’s Risen Above Such Things.

Apparently, her mother is the one “making the world a miserable, miserable place.” 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

A keyboard drama unfolds. || Cheeeldren of the night. || Heat conductor of note. || Today’s word is Italian. || News to me. || Spare room. || An inexpensive scientific demonstration. (h/t, Noah Carl) || A stretching definition. || The jeans you’ve always wanted. || Just like normal people, a thread. || “Of the 86% of white liberals that have heard at least ‘a little’ about Antifa, 59% think it’s been a ‘somewhat’ (41%) or ‘very good’ (18%) thing for the country.” || Somewhat related. || Bling. || Big leggy. || The displays of Infinity War and The Expanse. || A present for doggo. || Pig versus vacuum cleaner, the eternal struggle. || Meanwhile, in fashion news. || And finally, if they learn to make fire, we’re, like, totally screwed.

*Now with functioning comments.

As a Boston high school sophomore, Keondre McClay said he was pressured by the head of a district-sponsored youth advocacy programme to attend an overnight retreat in Newton, where white adults asked the black teenager to wrestle out his emotions on a gym mat with them. They said it would help him purge his trauma from experiencing racism.

Um. A little odd. But hey, we mustn’t judge. After all, these are progressive, caring people, tumescent with compassion for the brown-and-therefore-downtrodden. 

McClay fled to his room. Jenny Sazama, the programme leader, and other retreat participants chased after him. For more than an hour, he recalled recently, they hugged him on his bed and entreated him to return to the group “counselling” session while he hid under the covers screaming, “Please leave me alone!”

As you can see, they care an awful lot. 

When they eventually left, he locked the door, but someone got the facilities manager to unlock it. McClay called someone to help him get home at midnight. “I was, for lack of a better word, assaulted,” said McClay, now 21.

Boston Public Schools saw fit to endorse this programme of “Re-Evaluation Counselling” for fifteen years. And the counsellors declare that they are “dedicated to eliminating racism in the world,” thereby enabling “deep relationships across racial lines.” Hence, one assumes, all the chasing and screaming.