A switched-on hepcat works her sweater like a pro. (h/t, Damian) || His handmade paper toys are better than yours. || Some people are just hard to please. || Woke pattern of note. || Bookcase inserts. || Minimals. || Manufacturing pencils. || Always respect the media. || The Manhoff Archives: Stalin’s Soviet Union in colour. (h/t, Coudal) || A (fairly) brief guide to flu jabs. || An unexpected turn of events. || Scenes. || This. || Twisted knickers. || As we’ve seen, repeatedly, Shoreditch is vibrant and diverse. || Darts post-game interview of note. || Real-time orbit in high definition. || And via Monty James, it turns out men have always wanted their own “imperceptible” foundation and waterproof eyebrow pencils.

An open thread, that is, in which to share links and then bicker about them. I’ll set the ball rolling with this item here, by Tim Worstall, on the thrill and intrigue of wombat faeces. 

If you should fail in the task of entertaining each other, the reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

Or, The Mao-lings’ Unhappy Id Spills Out In Portland.

“You’re inherently violent,” screams an unhinged blue-and-purple-haired woman named Hannah McClintock, while repeatedly spitting on people and trying to punch them in the face:

Heather Mac Donald on the obvious-but-seemingly-unthinkable:

Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.

But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorising dictionaries—a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a foreign language that the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to Hasbro, 83% of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.

Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, math, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorise facts. [World Scrabble Champion, Nigel] Richards’s mother told the Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. Feminists will need to employ circular logic to conjure forth a discriminatory barrier in Scrabble: Males’ excellence at a certain activity itself keeps females out. But that leaves unanswered the question of how males came to excel at Scrabble—or any other abstract, competitive activity—in the first place.

Also this:

“Blink, motherfucker.” (h/t, Damian) || Brew of note. || Today’s word is suboptimal. || Toothbrush of tomorrow. || Dicycle. || Dude. || Turn your desk into a touchscreen. || “Makes drinking water fun.” || Stormy weather, somewhat distant. || White women bad. || Whale heart. || New legs. || Photographing lichen. || Small claims. || Scenes. (h/t, Obo) || “This teacher had to tell her deaf students that people can hear farts.” || Flat-Earth gravity and other fun facts. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Jigsaw of note. || “Jigsaw companies tend to use the same cuts for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable.” || Parallel universe detected. || Florida man sighted. || And finally, behold ye, a party trick of note.