So how was your day at work, darling? (h/t, Damian) || Upgrade. || Her dessert is much fancier than yours. || Nun armed with chainsaw does her bit to help. || Trek nerdology. || A taste of New York. || BBC Pidgin. || Pro tip. || Perverse objects. || Genes and Marmite. || Robotic gams. || Aliens the size of guinea pigs. || A pile of Python. || She chose poorly. || Cat vacuuming. Do try it at home and let us know how it goes. || “Yes, but technically, I’m inside it.” || Street art. || They do this better than you do. || “A person can control it like a car.” || Zero to four hundred, and back, in forty-two seconds. || 30 days at sea. || Drawing on water. || This. || That. || A bit of the other. (h/t, Obnoxio) || Cassini’s farewell photos. || And finally, the man who survived not one but two atomic bombings.

Speaking of sociology and its clown school connotations:

I will gladly sow gender confusion in kids. It’s my duty to.

So says Colin Cremin, a sociology lecturer who uses the workplace – and his colleagues and students – in order to indulge his transvestite kink:  

While I’m delighted to contribute to the breaking down of hetero-fascist biases, this was not the principal reason I started dressing to work as a woman. No doubt to the disappointment of colleagues in sociology, I never suffered from being born into the wrong gender… I dress as a woman because I like wearing women’s clothes. I like the look of the westernised feminine aesthetic. I like the feel of the silky fabrics on my body. I like the process of selecting outfits, matching up jewellery and shoes and putting on makeup.

And apparently all that fetishistic cosplay really needs an audience, preferably an involuntary one, during office hours. How terribly selfless.

Update, via the comments:

A Harvard-educated sociology professor named Crystal Fleming – whose areas of expertise include “critical race theory” and “mindfulness and spirituality” – wishes to share her wisdom. Specifically, that we shouldn’t judge people who smash the windows of local stores and loot multiple pairs of trainers while the owners of said stores are distracted by an oncoming hurricane.

Because white people. 

And if you don’t understand why Everything Is Racist, Including You™ and why looting local stores for half a dozen pairs of expensive fashion items is therefore totes okay, it’s “very, very sad.” You see, “white supremacist racism” is all about “hoarding resources.” 

Further to this item here, on the academic heresy of affirming bourgeois values, Aryssa Damron has more: 

The National Lawyers Guild chapter at the University of Pennsylvania Law School condemned Penn professor Amy Wax’s recent op-ed, in which Wax, along with a co-author, lamented the “breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” and declared: “All cultures are not created equal.” The members of Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote that Wax’s comments are a “textbook example of white supremacy and cultural elitism” and alleged she is a “segregationist” with “bigoted views.” “We call on the administration,” Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote, “to consider more deeply the toll that this takes on students, particularly students of colour and members of the LGBTQIA community, and to consider whether it is in the best interests of the school and its students for Professor Wax to continue to teach a required first-year class.”

When asked for evidence of Professor Wax’s supposedly “segregationist” views and her alleged endorsement of “white supremacy,” the indignant students chose not to oblige. But hey, witches must be burned.

Entirely unrelated, Pamela Paresky on things that mustn’t be thought, or at least articulated: 

Today, for what seems to be an increasing proportion of the educated left, even the mere willingness to discuss certain kinds of facts is “harmful.” The data in the [Google] memo… was beside the point. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that [James Damore] was willing to cite it was the problem… As John McWhorter has pointed out, “certain questions are not to be asked.” And when they are, they are received “with indignation that one would even ask them.” Even more pernicious, however, they inevitably lead to the implication that not only is asking these questions a symptom of the problem, but the presence of the asker is, too… Perhaps what makes the Google scenario stand out from even the most astounding campus reactions is that Google is not a college campus, but a company. And not just any company, but one responsible for much of the scientific, historical and objective facts that many, if not most of us find online.

Charles Cooke on academia’s mental agoraphobia: 

If our colleges continue down this road, they are going to create a host of extremely weird, hyper-sensitive people who have no earthly idea how to converse and interact with the sane… Ideally, universities would be far more tolerant, open, and intellectually diverse than the “real world.” Ideally, they would host genuine and untrammelled free inquiry, and in a manner that is hard, if not impossible, to replicate elsewhere… The old archetype is of the student who leaves his stuffy parents and has his mind expanded by learning. “You don’t understand,” he says, when returning home. The new archetype, by unlovely contrast, is of the student who can only express himself when outside of his professors’ earshot. 

And Berkeley’s fainting couch has been wheeled out once again. Because apparently Ben Shapiro endorses “white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia,” and engages in “fascist intellectual thuggery.” Which I suppose means acknowledging facts. The trauma-inducing event featuring Mr Shapiro can be viewed online here on September 14.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Today’s word is suboptimal. (h/t, Damian) || “Breast support for side sleepers” and other boob-related wonders. || Birds. || Big things at sea. (h/t, drb) || Tokyo street photography. || About Devils Tower. || The radium girls. || The real-time alignment of very large objects. || Jupiter. || How Stanley Kubrick ventured beyond the infinite in 1968. For fans, the entire playlist may be of interest. || Thomas Sowell on freedom versus equality. || Firing Line playlists. || Oh come on, ladies. How can you resist? || Designer desserts. || Assorted thresholds, in handy graph form, set to music. || Modern horrors. || Modern horrors, part two. || This. (h/t, Obnoxio) || Compton car repossession is livelier than planned. || Crime news. || And finally, as first dates go, I suppose it could have been worse.