Fear the terrible power of Telekinesis Cat. // Trash owl sees all. // Think lettuce, think Toshiba. // Oh, no-one lives in London any more. // Quantum whirlpool created. // On sloshing, spilling, beer and coffee. // Red Kubrick. // Orchestra versus chili peppers. A test of musical discipline. // Pocket-size espresso maker keeps your hiking classy. // Pygmy seahorse camouflage. // Poultry lifter. Cook bird first. // A near miss. // The big wide world of Spam and Spam-like products. // Baseball players of yore. (h/t, Coudal) // Paying a fair share. // “Nearly half of the president’s 43 million Facebook followers appeared to be fake.” // Fire in the sky. // For that elegant dinner party you’ve been meaning to have. // And after dinner, obviously, grandma and her friends will want to smoke some weed.

At DePauw University, Indiana, someone may have said something unkind to a student with brownish skin. And so, inevitably, 

Professor of Sociology David Newman stated, “I’m a white man. I’m a white middle-class man. I’m a white middle-class heterosexual man… This is my fault. I didn’t do anything directly, but this is my fault. My silence makes this my fault.”

Because what’s education without a little Maoist pantomime? 

Yes, it’s time for more of that lovely performance art. Today we bathe in the radiance of Mr Joseph Ravens, a fearlessly non-conformist artist who uses the medium of “action and movement” to “project energy and images with abundant focus.” Not just that, of course. Mr Ravens also “devises highly stylised situations in which images and actions coalesce to produce decidedly poetic, often conceptual, narratives.” It’s decidedly poetic. He says so himself. 

Naturally, all this decidedly poetic energy projection is harnessed to “touch on subjects such as materialism, insatiability, conformity, and alienation,” with works presented in “hay fields, school buses, closets, and [on] rooftops.” “My images and ideas are designed to have impact,” says he, “while at the same time embracing depth, resonance, and artistic integrity.” Pondering his own efforts to awe and enlighten, Mr Raven adds, “Only a short time ago I realised that in much of my work I am expelling something from my body. I often produce objects from my mouth, my anus, or compartments within my sculptural costumes. For me, these objects represent creation and the creative impulse.” I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

In the following piece, titled Ravenous and performed in 2012 during the Venice International Performance Art Week, Mr Ravens projects his energies, poetically, with the aid of a marker pen, feathers and a small metallic groin cup. Go on, taste the art. 

Apparently, there’s now a fashion trend called “lumbersexual.” As the avid fashionistas I know you to be, I’m sure its details and subtleties are already familiar, if not passé. For those as yet unschooled in lumbersexual grooming, here’s a brief summary:

Lumbersexual men have a calculated look with the desire to be (and be seen) as rugged and the heteronormative version of “manly.”

If that isn’t sufficiently clear, here are some inspirational pictures. 

And here’s where you can buy a sling for your axe. 

However, not everyone is thrilled by this rugged, or rather pseudo-rugged, fashion development. Among the aggrieved is a student and blogger named Indi, who looks like this and describes himself, at length, as:

Cisgender maletype, he/him pronouns. Type-2 diabetes, clinical depression… Panromantic pansexual… A multicultural global nomad… Seen a lot of stuff, done a lot of things… Formerly at Monash University, formerly at Lasalle College of the Arts, currently at Deakin University. Former theatre kid wholly sick of the industry… I want to perform or write for the rest of my life, whether it’s music, theatre, comedy, films, TV, voice acting, whatever… I don’t like people that ignore intersectional issues.

Regarding the lumbersexuals’ ersatz burliness and ostentatious facial hair, he says, rather testily, 

Let’s promote traditional aspects of masculinity by pretending it’s harmless! Let’s glorify large beards, because only ‘real men’ have huge amounts of facial hair based on their level of testosterone! Let’s make something seem harmless to give credit to a bunch of cis white men for no reason other than to uphold [a] European beauty standard.

Fads, it turns out, are terribly important and something that people attuned to “intersectional issues” should spend their time seething about: 

This shit is as transparent as the people promoting it. It’s the same as normcore, glorifying behaviours typical of people in white hegemonies. Take this ‘real men’ shit and go elsewhere. Stop trying to make what white men like fashionable, thanks.

Beards, then, are harmful and oppressive. Especially when combined with plaid shirts and skinny jeans. Because they’re “glorifying behaviours typical of people in white hegemonies.” Like this. And no, I’m not entirely sure what normcore is. Though that does seem quite a lot of baggage for a chap of 22 who’s still at university.

Update:

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams once again imparts her infinite wisdom:

I would like to see shops treated a bit more like shoplifters – prosecuted for dishonesty even when it seems petty – and shoplifters treated a bit more like shops.

Yes, I know. Its profundity resists mere human comprehension. The gnomic nugget above is from a piece, the headline of which insists “the world is run by sociopaths,” and in which our moral guru airs her belief that “the successful entrepreneur or innovator will be sociopathic.” This, you’ll remember, is the same Zoe Williams who believes that rich people helping Romanian orphans and funding the distribution of retroviral drugs in Africa is a Very Bad Thing™ because giving money away “creates inequality.” Dear sweet Zoe, who values “moral clarity,” therefore likes to imagine how upscale charity galas, which raise millions for such causes, might be made more amusing and congenial if those doing the giving suffered some hilarious physical injury. 

When not wishing injury on people richer than herself, our high-minded Guardianista spends her afternoons conjuring scenarios reminiscent of the Soviet Union circa the 1920s, in which parents who can no longer afford to send their children to private schools are “whittled out” and ritually humilated on entering the state system. You see, preferring private education (even if you can no longer afford it) is sinful and must be punished. By people like Zoe, whose own education was at Godolphin and Latymer, where the list of extracurricular activities includes visits to Rome and Morocco and an eight-day tour of Barbados, and whose own children, named Thurston and Harper, are no doubt thriving at the local comprehensive.

Oh, and lest we forget, this is the same Zoe Williams whose most famous written line is, or certainly should be,

As for vindictive, ha! Good.

We’re lucky she’s there to show us the way.

BattleTop GalactiGun. Smell the Eighties. // 70 billion farts a day. “And roughly 10 of those are yours.” // Orson Welles meets the Twilight Zone. // Walking cane of note. // Karen Straughan was interviewed by the BBC. // Keyboard of note. // Making kokeshi dolls. // Things to do with nails. // What astronauts see. // Shavings. // Satiregram. // The cat petting simulator is ideal for people with allergies. // Pondering testes. // Improbable architecture. // The Marxists’ apartment. // Juggling luminous balls while in a large plastic cone. // For the ladies, giant man-hands. // How big? This big. // Bad translator. // More fog in Dubai. // Flirting via text. // And finally, the long-awaited dog squat detection system – for when you need to know exactly where your dog has had a shit.

Susan Kruth and Harvey Silverglate on educational environments and the things you can’t say in them: 

On campuses across the country, hostility toward unpopular ideas has become so irrational that many students, and some faculty members, now openly oppose freedom of speech. The hypersensitive consider the mere discussion of the topic of censorship to be potentially traumatic. Those who try to protect academic freedom and the ability of the academy to discuss the world as it is are swimming against the current… Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement — a disorder whose spread in academia grows by the day.

Note how the code words and euphemisms that have replaced salty language have become so numerous that readers now struggle to guess what the offending word was. See also this. 

Thomas Sowell on the current occupant of the White House: 

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

And Peter Suderman reminds us why tar and feathers should never be out of fashion: 

Professor Jonathan Gruber was, by most accounts, one of the key figures in constructing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He helped design the Massachusetts health care law on which it was modelled, assisted the White House in laying out the foundation of the law, and, according to the New York Times, was eventually sent to Capitol Hill “to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.” Jonathan Gruber, in other words, knows exactly what it took to get [Obama’s] health care law passed. And that’s why you should take him seriously when he says, in the following video, that it was critical to not be transparent about the law’s costs and true effects, and to take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” in order to get it passed.

Note that our progressive Professor Gruber is happy to admit deceiving the electorate – deliberately, at length and on a grand scale – in order to get his own way. Along with $400,000 in consultancy fees.  

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

More niche sorrows from a certain newspaper:

If punk is the ultimate anti-establishment scene, why is it still run by all these white men?

And so we find “would-be musicologist” and transgender punk musician Alyssa Kai pining for a cartoon scene that reality can’t live up to: 

DIY punk – with its self-released music, non-corporate labels, cheap all-age shows in basements – embraces those things not as means toward corporate success, but as intrinsically worthwhile tools to build authentic rebellion and powerful community.

She wants none of that “corporate success,” which entails “getting signed, getting famous, getting a world tour,” terrible things like that. No, Ms Kai wants “authentic rebellion” and the purest of motives. Inevitably, disappointment looms:

Our authenticity [is] built on false premises of what it means to be “true” to punk in a messed-up, still-exclusionary scene made up of mostly white, abled middle-class men who make and buy most of the music.

Yes, too many punk musicians – and too many of their fans – are white, male and able-bodied. Will the horror never end? Apparently, our “would-be musicologist” is unfamiliar with the genres afro-punk and queercore, to say nothing of Pussy Riot, Pansy Division, Dinah Cancer and of course The Slits. 

And then it gets worse.

Without warning, in the audience or on a stage, I’ll hear someone say, “This song is about feminism,

Yay. Girl power.

which means: How hard it is to have a vagina in this world!”

Oh dear. Major gaffe. Ixnay on the v.j. 

And I’m suddenly… excluded from the supposedly ultra-inclusive community I’m trying to build.

Because feminist punk that doesn’t nod to transgendered women and their pseudo-vaginas is just no punk at all.

The adventures of Hover Cat. // How to build your own air raid siren. The moment of victory is at 8:42. (h/t, sk60) // Two types of squirrels. (h/t, Pootblog) // Lick me to sleep. // Owl gif of note. // Folded by hand. // Clever crows. // Sneezing chicken. // Sneezes on a plane. // Spinning top of note. // We must summon the mothership. // Xenomorph. // Small gestures, big marble. // The bells of Amsterdam. // Houdini’s illusions. // The free, complete Sherlock Holmes. // The mosh pit simulator does what it says. (h/t, MeFi) // Strum it, stroke it, beat its strings. // An interactive rat map by the Rat Information Portal. // And finally, behold Scroguard - the “premium latex feels like a second skin” and “can accommodate waists up to 48 inches.” Oh, and yes, it’s washable.

Norwich City Council’s first computer being delivered, 1957.

It’s an Elliott 405, since you ask. Here’s one being used by schoolboys in 1969. Via System 360, via Things.