As I’m pushed for time this week, you’re getting another chance to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with a speck you may want to magnify; a symbolic modern dialogue; some serpentine feathers; what someone apparently needed; the poorly-made shirts of William Shatner; and a brief history of deadly hats, killer bras and crinoline conflagrations. 

Oh, and here we see our betters, including several educators, demonstrating why they’re just more evolved than we are. 

“We want to destroy the Conservative government. We want to bring down the Patriarchy.”

And if this doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will: 

In the UK, women and femme-identifying people have come under sustained attack by the Conservative government… But Phoebe Patey-Ferguson and Anna Smith didn’t want to give in to hopelessness. Instead, they decided to wrestle each other in their shared art studio in east London.

Chunky tattooed ladies channelling their inner umbrage. Part fetish, part psychodrama, part delusional politics – feminist fight club is apparently a thing now:

“Most of the spaces we perform in are queer spaces so often people haven’t been able to really allow themselves to feel the anger and rage that they do feel,” [says Patey-Ferguson]. “So often they are thankful to us for the space that we can feel that together… You don’t feel like you are locked in your room staring at the internet alone. There is a kind of empowerment in that, because if we express that together, there is a possibility of change.”

For these terribly radical ladies and “femme-identified” beings, fighting each other ineptly and accidentally cracking each other’s ribs – while screaming “Fuck you, Theresa May!” – is “a mode of resistance.”

And yes, there is video. 

I don’t, as a feminist, want to undermine your earning capacity, but…

Tim Newman finds plenty to poke at in a clip from This Morning, about feminism and glamour models in televised darts competitions. Do note who condescends and does the interrupting.

Franklin Einspruch on our fearlessly radical aesthete caste: 

Last fall, the Guggenheim made quite the symbolic gesture of its own. As reported in the Washington Post, the White House asked the museum to lend it an 1888 canvas by Vincent van Gogh in which a man and his dog trudge through a snow-covered, vibrant landscape. A smarmy reply from the Guggenheim explained to the White House’s Office of the Curator that “Landscape with Snow” was unavailable… Instead, the museum offered a work of conceptual art by Maurizio Cattelan, a functioning toilet made from solid, 18-carat gold that had been installed at the museum during the prior year. “The work beautifully channels the history of twentieth-century avant-garde art by referencing Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal of 1917,” the email explained. It did not mention the title of the 2016 piece, which is “America.” 

When our self-imagined betters speak, it often pays to consider the psychology in play. In the case above, the Guggenheim’s artistic director, Nancy Spector, was prepared to publicly insult not only the First Lady but also, more importantly, everyone who voted for the current incumbent of the White House – half of the nation that the Guggenheim supposedly serves - in order to signal her own political edginess. As Franklin notes, one wonders whether Ms Spector believes that her display of disdain will help the wider cause of arts funding or encourage the kind of broader public interest that such organisations claim to want.

Perhaps she was too busy admiring herself to consider such details.

In the pages of the Guardian, another pressing issue of the day:

Marijuana: is it time to stop using a word with racist roots?

Posing the question for a general readership, even one as fretful and agonised as the Guardian’s, is, however, somewhat misleading, given the author’s conviction that only “marginalised communities” have the “moral authority to decide if marijuana is a racist word which should be avoided, or an important reminder of a more racist past.”