Television without context. // 8mm cameras we have known and loved. // A $24,000 turntable. // Some jaunty speakers. // “I heard the pipes rumbling a bit, and suddenly hailstones the size of golf balls started exploding out of the toilet.” // Inside the Lego factory. // Unlikely office space. Shoreditch, East London. (h/t, Andy.) // Lunar transit of the Earth. // Hubblefest. // Brace for impact! Doin’ the spaceship shake. // “Manhattanhendge.” (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) // Typewriters of noted figures. // Detecting academic imposters. (h/t, Vitruvius.) // Extra tentacles. // Rendering things unseen: the flying spaghetti monster. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Fire hydrant collections. (h/t, Coudal.) // “How much tax would ‘the rich’ have to pay before it becomes fair?” // Myron Magnet on victimhood and responsibility: “It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.” // Great moments in internet history. // Ryan. An animated short. (h/t, Drawn!) // And, via The Thin Man, Did You Ever…? (Unknown, 1933)

At last. The Angry Mob Play Set.

Add some dramatic tension to your playtime. Each set includes nine 2” to 3” tall, hard vinyl villagers wielding a variety of weapons for them to wave menacingly at the object of their disdain. Great for intimidating your action figures and teaching children the concept of mob rule.

Only $15.95  (h/t, Tim239)

In today’s Guardian, Marcel Berlins ponders burglary, self-defence and being reasonable.

The problem, of course, is what constitutes reasonable force and who gets to decide. If you’re going to judge how others react in such a situation, and judge what is “reasonable,” you should first indulge in some pretty vivid empathy. Imagine you and your partner wake abruptly in the middle of the night. You hear a stranger moving about in the hallway outside your bedroom. Your newborn child is sleeping quietly, for once, in the room across the hall. There’s now an intruder between you and your child and his motives are unclear but certainly not benign. He’s obviously used force to break into your home at a time when you’re most vulnerable. It’s an act of premeditated violation and he may well use force again. Has he made these efforts in order to steal your property or to do you mortal harm? And, if interrupted, will the former involve the latter? What if your child wakes and starts crying?

Is it “reasonable” to assume that the intruder is merely a thief who doesn’t mind terrorising those whose homes he violates and whose property he steals, but isn’t prepared to do actual violence to his victims, even when cornered? And on what is that assumption based? Given the situation, and the fact your heart is pounding, do you really have the time and means to fathom the intruder’s motives and take them into account before acting – and acting without “excess”? Or do you use whatever force possible to disable the intruder before he can even think about harming you or your child? And what if the intruder is bigger and stronger than you? What if he’s armed with a knife or a gun? Are you going to wait to find out, dutifully bearing in mind the likelihood of subsequent legal disputation?

Wouldn’t it be wise to disable him as quickly as possible, by whatever means, rather than risk being at his mercy, along with the rest of your family? Doesn’t that most likely involve using as much force as can be mustered – say, with a decisive blow to the head using one of these – even if that risks the intruder’s death or serious, permanent injury? Is that “excessive or disproportionate” – or is it a basic moral imperative? And if the law doesn’t permit such things, and permit them unequivocally, don’t you have a right to be just a little “disappointed”? Don’t we want a world in which it’s the bad guys that are scared, and scared for very good reasons?

Mick Hartley on Freud, Marx and Hegel – and being antiquated. 

Freud didn’t cure anyone, or come to his conclusions through the hard work of trial and error. The analytic situation was merely the backdrop for what was really going on: myth-making on a grand scale… To use [Freud’s theorising] to explain Western literature, as generations of academics have done, following Freud’s example, is to hold up a mirror and believe you’re seeing through a window.

Thomas Sowell on some economic fallacies. (h/t, Lattenomics.) 

If it was really true that you could hire a woman for three quarters of what you could hire a man with exactly the same qualifications, then employers would be crazy not to hire all women. It would be insane to hire men. Not only would it be insane, it would probably put them out of the business because the ones that were smart enough to hire women would have such a cost advantage that it would be really hard for the others to compete.

Norman Geras on Seumas Milne’s latest apologia for Hamas.

Milne tactfully passes over what Hamas’s charter reveals about it: that it is a programmatically anti-Semitic organization which quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and promises the killing of Jews. How is it thinkable that a Guardian journalist doesn’t notice this or, if he does, discounts it? It’s thinkable. In fact, it’s getting to be an old story. [There] was a time when it was kind of shocking.

Yet now it’s a routine pathology among a large part of the left, perhaps the larger part, and its mainstream British publication.

Further to my comments on Zack Synder’s forthcoming film of Watchmen, the first trailer is now online.

Here’s the high-definition version. More. And. Also.

Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham. // NASA wants your urine. For the toilets of tomorrow. // Wine in a can. // Toys for cats. // Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. Part 2, 3, 4, 5. // Stephen Salmieri’s photographs of cadillacs. (h/t, Coudal.) // Build your own giant cardboard Ghandi. // 100 ways to draw manga eyes. // “My boots are all sticky.” // Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along. It’s tough being evil. // The Victim Privilege Checklist. (h/t, Anna.) // Communist Loser: James Kirchick on the delusional Eric Hobsbawm. // Cultural imperialism! // Latte art and assorted cakes. More. // The German Hosiery Museum. // World’s largest subwoofer. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // Colour flipbook. // 696 book covers. // San Francisco panorama. // Skyscraper earthquake dampening. A 728-ton sphere should do it. // Dismantling old buildings, from the bottom up. // Ship graveyard. (h/t, Tim239.) // Steve Reich: Piano Phase. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Ethel Waters.

Thank God for the Guardian. No, really. I mean, where else would you turn to find a socialist named Jemima lecturing us on snobbery and the evils of the word “chav”? Yesterday, Tom Hampson and Jemima Olchawski, both pillars of the Fabian Society, urged Guardian readers to fret about their language:

We have to stop using the word “chav”… It is deeply offensive to a largely voiceless group and – especially when used in normal middle-class conversation or on national TV – it betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred.

It’s interesting to note how readily vulnerability is assigned to “a largely voiceless group” that isn’t actually defined anywhere in the article. Apparently, it’s no longer necessary to specify who or what is vulnerable, or how; one can merely assert that something, somewhere is. But which “group” are we talking about? Poor people? Criminals? Antisocial youths? Or some subset thereof? 

We have heard it increasingly used in conversation over the last year, invariably to casually describe people “not like us” and very often used by people who are otherwise rather progressive in their politics.

Doesn’t that say something about the company being kept by the scrupulously leftwing authors, rather than, necessarily, the population as a whole?

You cannot consider yourself of the left and use the word. It is sneering and patronising

And that would be unheard of. Especially among those who hold in such esteem that thing called “middle England”.

On completion, the Burj Dubai will reach an estimated height of 818m and be the tallest man-made structure in the world. In the image below, taken earlier this year, the tower is a mere 400m tall. It currently measures some 636m in height and is expected to be operational in September 2009.

More. Some punier buildings.

At last. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is now an opera. Get those tickets booked. // The Danvers State Insane Asylum. (h/t, Coudal.) // Tentacles. // Behold the amazing Shit Box™. Oh, don’t look so indignant. // Bubble-wrap calendar. Imagine the fun. // TomTom hidden features. (h/t, Andy.) // Ideal wheels. (h/t, Vloody Cloody.) // Indian comics from the 1970s. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Off-duty superheroes. // Chess + boxing = chess boxing. // There are waves on Saturn’s rings. // Satellite imagery as art. // The art of the tracking shot. From Touch of Evil to Boogie Nights. // Das Rad. // The abbreviated Plan 9 from Outer Space. (h/t, Matt.) // PES: Western Spaghetti. // Caffeine usage, visualised. // Avoid cramping at crucial moments. // If you’re tunnelling to the other side of the Earth, you’ll be needing a map. // Neo-NeoCon on arguing politics. // Fabian Tassano on academic “progress”. // The art of Chris Appelhans. // The colour of money. // Translucent creatures. // Robot calligraphy. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Ray Charles. 

Some guidelines for comments, for newcomers.

I ask only that people are reasonably civil – despite appearances, this is a classy joint. The “reasonably” bit allows plenty of leeway for barbs and pith, but needlessly vile personal remarks will be deleted. As a general rule, address the writing, not the writer, and bear in mind I have a low boredom threshold. Spitting, biting and heavy petting are ill advised, and if anyone is caught dealing drugs, the house takes 20%.