The new 122-second ad for Hovis. A journey home from the shops, through 122 years.

Agency: MCBD. The making of. More. (h/t, The Thin Man.)

Hurricanes, seen from space. // Tilt and shift. Make big things seem small. // The ultimate masculine barbecue. // The deep dish pizza vending machine. // “After the liquor was smoky, he filtered out the bacon pieces and chilled the vodka to congeal the fat.” (h/t, Ace.) // Ejector seat tests we have known and loved. // The typewriter sculptures of Jeremy Mayer. // Robert Hughes: American Visions. A history of American art. // Visual migraine, visualised. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // The otherworldly Socotra Island. // Homes that defy gravity. // More dwellings of note. // Fish condo. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Greensleeves played on a Theremin. (h/t, Coudal.) // Cockatiels perform The Imperial March. // Christina Hoff Sommers on the war against boys. (h/t, Jeff.) // Bruce Bawer on multicultural doublethink. Soaping the vanities of our would-be overlords. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // Stalin and genetics. // Cold War concept cars. // Alan Moore on comics, politics and Watchmen. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Carmen McRae. 

Further to this, two things you may not know about Californian tree hippies.

They protest through the medium of dance:

They flatter themselves shamelessly:

“Shades of Germany, 1938.”   

More. And. (h/t, Cookslaw.)

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.

Attention nerdlings. Tune in to the LHC “first beam” broadcast, 9am-6pm. So far, so good.

Feeling rough today, thanks to throbbing temples, a temperature and fits of explosive sneezing. But this is too good to miss.

Jeff Goldstein on Juan Cole on Sarah Palin: 

Rhetorically, Cole’s trick is to ascribe to Palin motives that he knows his readership, who’ve been conditioned to believe that Christian boogymen are out to replace the Constitution with the New Testament, will believe uncritically; from there, it is but a small step to suggesting a sinister cause/effect relationship – the suggestion being all that matters, else the facts would have received a place of prominence in Cole’s “investigation”. But then, because the facts undercut the suggestion, and because the suggestion is what Cole hopes will have lasting power, Cole merely omits the facts. Academic rigor at its finest!

What Cole also fails to acknowledge is that, when it comes to book banning or bowdlerization, the real problem lies with PC progressives, who have, in recent years, had problems with the “ageist” Old Man and the Sea, the “racist” works of Faulkner and Twain, the “insensitive to the differently abled” title, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and on and on and on – to the point where textbooks themselves are being “cleaned” of anything that might give “offense” or be construed as “hate speech” – foregoing historical context and intent for a more sanitized and “diversity-friendly” world of literature and learning.

The whole thing.

Update: Anna points out that Cole is no stranger to censorious urges himself. From the Detroit Metro Times, February 2006:

I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it. It is a highly ideological, explicitly ideological operation, and it is polluting the information environment… Frankly, I think in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It’s an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on.

“Polluting the information environment”? Not at all like our esteemed academic, whose disregard for facts is a much loftier endeavour.

Update 2: The academic language police have issued new euphemisms. “Civilised” and “immigrant” are now racist words. And “seminal” is sexist. Please update your records and comply.

Busy today, but I thought you might like to see this exploding banana mask.

You heard me.

I often enjoy Nick Cohen’s writing, not least when he upsets his readers at the Guardian and Observer. Which he does again today:

For once, the postmodern theories so many [Democrats] were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against…

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right…

Naturally, umbrage ensues.

Eco-hippies weep for fallen trees. “I want you to know, trees, that we care.”

Emotional Hippies – Crying Over Dead Trees – Watch more free videos

Hand me the gun. No, the bigger one.

(h/t, Clazy.)

When the parachute doesn’t open. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Your very own dinosaur suit. Frighten children, impress women. More. // Idhi oka idi le. Bollywood psychedelia. // Bicycles with enormous speakers. It’s a thing, apparently. // Stop-motion fireworks. // Stop-motion chalk. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Water sculpture. // Bruce Mozertom’s underwater photography. (1938) (h/t, DRB.) // Japanese goblin shark. Does anything about it look… familiar? // Guinness and light. // Sun spots and climate change. // Sunglasses of the Sixties and Seventies. (h/t, Anna.) // Nigerian man to divorce 82 of his 86 wives. // The size of Africa. (h/t, Norm.) // Michael Jackson at 50. // Tube clocks. // Buildings of note. // A short history of anatomical maps. // Architectural jelly. // Geothermal energy projects. // Deodorising snowflake gun brings joy to consumers. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Valaida Snow. 

Arabella Weir, whose leftist credentials have previously been noted, today shares her wisdom on parenting and education:

Weir’s definition of a “good, responsible citizen” will become apparent in due course.

Some might think of that as where ideology collides with actual parenting.

Actually, Ms Weir attended the hardly-rough-and-tumble Camden School for Girls, a voluntary aided school, whose alumnae include Emma Thompson and Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor. Arabella is, lest we forget, the daughter of former British ambassador Sir Michael Weir and not short of a bob.

State schooling is, one might suppose, entirely free of disabling and alienating effects, being as it is so ideologically sound.

Here, the “right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and seems to mean trading educational opportunity – say, in terms of motivation, class size and a culture of learning – for an approved and “representative” social mix, i.e. one which involves mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged”. Thus one’s leftist credentials can be seen by passers-by. Is this really about doing the right thing? Or is it just a matter of admiring one’s own socialist credibility?

For shame. Parents must make sacrifices, you hear? Not for their own children, of course, or for their peace of mind, but for the Greater Good.