Vaudeville ventriloquist dummy portraits. You heard me. // Animals with two heads. // World’s largest shark tank. // Decommissioned cooling tower. // Feminist economics. Oh yes. Be afraid. // Former dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev on the nature and memory of communism. Parts 2, 3, 4, 5. // Quote of note. // Assorted cinemagraphs. // Notable science videos. Includes Nature by Numbers and Touring the Earth from Space. // An illustrated list of suspicious vans. (h/t, Coudal) // The technology of the pizza box. // Spider-Man rebooted. Already? // Light painting. // Mushroom cloud lamp. // “And what is your message, Mr Miliband?”

Simen Thoresen alerts us to the existence of Preparatio Mortis, a new work unveiled at the Vienna International Dance Festival and aimed at the discerning aesthete. Guided by Belgian artist and choreographer Jan Fabre, dancer Annabelle Chambon “tackles the still effective taboo ‘death’ and her body enter[s] into a transformation process,” while Bernard Foccroule elevates our minds with his “intensive” and “spherical” organ stylings. As will no doubt be obvious to everyone, Ms Chambon’s “assignment” is nothing less than “an attempt to reconcile life and death.”

The video above is of course a mere glimpse of the project’s artistic highlights. Happily, the full performance lasts for 50 minutes.

Update, with added nudity:

Janet Daley ponders media hegemonies:

It was a broadcasters’ event some years ago. I had been invited to speak on a favourite subject: the BBC hegemony in broadcast news and the risk that its own package of tendentious assumptions – that Euroscepticism was a lunatic fringe irrelevance, that anyone who expressed concern about immigration was a bigot, etc – was going unchallenged in the mass media. After I had said my piece, a BBC producer in the audience asked whether, since I was so concerned about the dangers of large media organisations, I did not have the same objection to the existence of the “Murdoch empire.”

“No-o-o,” I replied patiently, I did not have the same objection. If I did not wish to support Mr Murdoch’s enterprises I could refrain from buying his newspapers or subscribing to his television service – and no one could threaten me with arrest and imprisonment for so doing. This was, I suggested, a rather significant difference between the two media corporations.

Tim Blair shows us why,

It’s always a good thing when politicians become involved in the workings of the free press.

And Heresy Corner basks in the radiance of Sunny Hundal, a titan among men:

The Liberal Conspiracy supremo is agonising – agonising, I tell you – over his tactics. Should he mobilise his online army and – gulp – declare a boycott of the Sun? People have been urging such a decisive course of action. “Several readers,” he notes, “keep asking when the boycott of the Sun newspaper or the whole of News International will take place.” But like any good general, Sunny knows that timing is everything: “Look, I’m not fan of the Sun newspaper by any stretch of the imagination, but this isn’t going to happen any time soon. If we do strike, it would have to be at the right time. That isn’t to say a group of us haven’t discussed this already. The problem is, for a boycott to work would require a big scandal that motivates lots of people outside the usual suspects.”

Because if a handful of people who don’t buy the Sun anyway declare that henceforward they’re not going to buy the Sun, the effect on News International’s global domination might be less than catastrophic, however psychologically satisfying.

Regular readers will be familiar with Mr Hundal, who in 2009 announced his “hard-line stance on environmental issues” along with his support for Plane Stupid, an activist group who “occupy” airport runways, stranding thousands of passengers, and who denounce air travel as “mostly unnecessary.” “Honestly,” said Mr Hundal, “I love these guys.” Though perhaps not as much as he loved flying halfway around the planet, twice, to India then California, weeks before declaring his eco-radical credentials. Readers may also recall Sunny’s admiration  for John Pilger, whom he hailed as a “voice of conscience” for the left. Albeit one who described American and Australian troops as “legitimate targets” and who predicted a NeoCon attack on China “within a decade.”

As usual, feel free to add your own.

The debris may amuse.

Laurie Penny, of whom we’ve spoken often, is rolling in a ditch with Julie Bindel, whose subtlety of mind has previously been noted.

How to deactivate a cat. (h/t, rjmadden) // Weighing orphaned owls. // Migration flows across the world. // Meat forks of note. // Notable trees. (h/t, MeFi) // Teller (minus Penn) on making magic. // Tiny things in tiny bottles. // Cardboard giant. // Cities at night. // Do San Francisco by Zeppelin. // Artificially dyed frogs. It’s a thing in China. // Space shuttle flight deck. I see no cup holder. // Storms on Saturn. // Sand magnified. // Your tax dollars at work. “Social justice.” // Tetris alarm clock. Clear four lines to switch it off. // The Museum of Useful Things. // Video coat for the ravers of tomorrow. // Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

The bin liner poncho is a classy touch.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

New Tyranny Detected.

Lara Pawson rails against “heteronormative privilege” and “the tyranny of coupledom.”

“I want to divorce the man I love and he wants to divorce me,” says Pawson. “We do not wish to separate – simply to end our seven-year marriage… We are both fed up with being part of the hetero-husband-and-wife brigade that is accorded so much status and privilege.” Such are the terrible burdens of those who go out of their way (and then some) in order to invent problems and thereby become interesting. Behold: fake divorce – it’s a bold political statement. Ms Pawson is of course indulging in a spot of overlording, which is to say, using pretentious egalitarian hand-wringing to signal her own moral, social and intellectual superiority: “See how sensitive, radical and intriguing I am – so much more enlightened than those lumpen married couples and their heteronormativity.”

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of Social Justice.

Or, “if you expose our student indoctrination policy we will punish you.”

Looking through various teacher-training outlines, the familiar leftist buzzwords appear repeatedly. “Diversity” and identity politics feature prominently and teachers-to-be are referred to as “critical thinking change agents.” These “agents” will use the classroom “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” and will “speak on behalf of identified constituent groups,” becoming “advocates for those on the margins of society.” Evidently, “critical thinking” should be taken to mean leftist thinking – critical of capitalism, individualism and bourgeois values – not thinking that might also be critical of the left, its methods and its assorted conceits. And one wonders how many liberties will be taken while speaking on behalf of “groups” deemed marginal and oppressed.

Ignorant Teachers, a New Socialist Ideal.

Knowledge and competence are outmoded and unfair, says incompetent philosopher.

Natural variations in cognitive ability, unlike those in musicality or athleticism, are a thorn in the paw of devout egalitarians. Avid readers of the Guardian’s arts and music pages would no doubt feel free to delight in the prowess of, say, Helen Mirren or Pinchas Zukerman without believing that everyone they passed on the street could with training do the same. It seems that only intelligence attracts contrarian manoeuvring. The latest example of which comes via Fabian Tassano, author of Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture. Tassano steers us to the claims of senior philosophy lecturer and Guardian contributor Dr Nina Power, who insists, apparently based on nothing, that “everyone has the potential to understand everything,” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because – “everyone is equally intelligent.”

And by all means take a shovel to the greatest hits. There may be puppies trapped inside. 

Cymbals don’t behave quite how you’d imagine. // Nor does water, for that matter. // Toast mosaic, made of toast. // The unmade trains of tomorrow. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // The video time machine. // Necklaces of human hair. // Harryhausen monsters. // Emergency underpants dispenser. // Marlon Brrando: percussionist and inventor. // Faces of note. // Face projection by the chap who did this. // How Pac-Man sees the world. // Dust storm. // Resonance. // Squidlings. // Statistic of note. // Theodore Dalrymple: Murder Most Academic. // Angry people in local newspapers; includes student rubbish anger and noisy cock anger.

One for our collection, care of Zoe Williams:

I think she [Margaret Thatcher] almost certainly didn’t say it (the bus thing). It’s just ambiently true, because she seems like a person who hates buses.

The alleged comment in question – “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus, can count himself a failure” – is difficult to verify and somewhat implausible but is nonetheless repeated by Thatcher’s critics, including the BBC. Its repetition seems to exist independently of a reliable source, possibly because so many would like to believe that it’s true. What’s interesting, though, is the notion that this claim, and by extension any number of others, is ambiently true. Which is to say, it’s assumed as somehow typical – accurate or not – and fits a chosen narrative. Presuming the particulars of what so-and-so might as well have said (or done) – whether or not they did – is ripe with potential. It’s therefore no great surprise that others have taken this strategy much further – to its predictable conclusion.

As when Johnathan Perkins, a black law student, told the University of Virginia’s student newspaper that while walking home he’d been taunted and intimidated by two white police officers. Perkins’ letter claimed that “most Americans are raised in racially sterilised environments,” and that “black people are accused of… playing the victim.” The student’s stated hope was that, “sharing this experience will provide this community with some much needed awareness of the lives that many of their black classmates are forced to lead.” A subsequent investigation, involving dispatch records, police tapes and surveillance video from nearby businesses, revealed the student’s story to be entirely fabricated. In a written statement, Perkins admitted, “I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct… The events in the article did not occur.”

As Mark Bauerlein noted recently, Perkins’ dishonesty was oddly free of consequences, for him at least, and not without precedent. Previously, a 19-year-old freshman ransacked her own room and scrawled racial slurs across its walls before curling into a foetal ball, supposedly in shock. When this “hate crime” was revealed as a hoax, Otis Smith, a regional president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was remarkably untroubled. That the events had been staged and then lied about was, he said, “largely irrelevant.” He added, “It doesn’t matter to me whether she did it or not because of all the pressure these black students are under at these predominantly white schools. If this will highlight it, if it will bring it to the attention of the public, I have no problem with that.”

Similar instances of students fabricating “hate crimes,” rape and “hate speech” aren’t exactly hard to find. Maybe what we’re seeing is, at least in part, a kind of activism, albeit one with an unhinged postmodern twist. Perhaps Mr Perkins and his fellow dissemblers believe themselves to be righteous in illustrating some greater truth – an, as it were, ambient one – in the service of which lies can be told, proudly, repeatedly and in good conscience.

Some things can’t wait ‘til Friday. How to make luminous gin and tonic jelly.