Mortified cow. (h/t, Damian) // Impromptu kitten rescue. // How to make squid piglets. // Ants encounter monolith. // When a first-stage engine nozzle lands in your living room. // Satlapse. // One scene, three Lecters. // Layers of paper. // That paper polygon gorilla head you’ve always wanted. // Thirteen-year-old boy is pleased to discover Portal-themed bedroom. // A short film about a ballet shoe factory. // Underwater belly rub. // Beatboxing saxophonist plays Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. // Motoring over Ben Nevis, 1911. // Drone versus ram. (h/t, Julia) // I see a straw monster. // Commuting sociably in the pre-smartphone era. // For the agoraphobic and antisocial, an app for avoiding crowds. // Gif of note. // And finally, tastily, a leech that feeds exclusively on hippo rectums. 

Just press your face down on the scanner. 

Via here, via Joan. 

Janice Fiamengo on feminist narratives and unmentioned history: 

After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn’t until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women – which of course we hear a great deal about – but to all men. So how can this be – that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don’t talk about its extension to poor and working class men?

Via sk60, Jonathan Foreman on the Tim Hunt “sexism” drama and the dishonesty and malevolence of certain key players: 

The most generous interpretation of Connie St Louis’s bizarre behaviour is that she was too intellectually limited to recognise irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

And Peter Hasson on ‘progressive’ educators and predetermined conclusions: 

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” “male,” and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” […] Students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.[…] White students in Professor John Streamas’s “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”

Imagine what such ‘thinkers’ might do if granted real power. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Fun with hydrophobic sand. // A hashtag devoted to animals’ genitals. // The Doctor meets Pan’s People. // Come play with us, children. // I denounce the cultural appropriation. // Cat purr noise generator. // Eight frying pan bottoms and one moon of Jupiter. // An interactive map of jazz collaborations. // Jog. // 12-year-old trips in gallery, causes $1.5 million in damage. // This is one of these. // Chasing storms. // 3D printing with molten glass. // Apollo guidance computer simulator. // Artisanal globe-making. // Foldable paper microscope. // It’s a flask, it’s a compass, it’s a flashlight. // “I’m calling in Veronica.” // Mom, there are bears in the pool again. // Cruise with Shatner. The cheapest bunks are only $975. // And finally, a bike horn rendition of Mambo No. 5. 

Picture the scene.

Last weekend, I camped with my family at a barn-raising party on the western foot of the Quantock hills, in Somerset. On Saturday I crept out of the tent at 5am, when the faintest skein of red cloud netted the sky. Below me, mist filled the valley floor. I slipped through the sagging fence at the top of the field and found myself in a steep, broad coomb, covered in bracken. I climbed for a while, as quietly as I could, until a frightful wail shattered my thoughts. I crouched and listened. I could see nothing on the dark hillside. It came again, from about 50 metres to my right, half-shriek, half-bleat, a wild, wrenching, desolate cry, a cry that the Earth might make in mourning for itself.

Yes, dear reader, we’re visiting the pages of the Guardian. Specifically, the latest transmission from the strange, anguished mind of Mr George Monbiot:  

Walking without a map, I reached the valley floor too soon and found myself on the main road. In some places there were no verges and I had to press myself into the hedge as cars passed. But on such early walks, almost regardless of where you are, there are rewards.

Wait for it.

Just as I was about to turn off the road, on to the track that would take me back to the barn, I found a squirrel hit by a car that must have just passed me, dead but still twitching. It was a male, one of this year’s brood but fully grown. Blood seeped from a wound to the head. I picked it up by its hind feet, and though I had played no part in its death, I was immediately gripped by a sensation so discrete, so distinct from all else we feel, that I believe it requires its own label: hunter’s pride.

Gasp ye at the dark, animal side of a Guardian columnist:

It’s the raw, feral thrill I have experienced only on the occasions when I have picked up a fresh dead animal I intend to eat. It feels to me like the opening of a hidden door, a rent in the mind through which you can glimpse a ghost psyche: vestigial emotional faculties that once helped us to survive.

Ah, the savage romance. Of roadkill. 

I showed the squirrel to the small tribe of children that had formed in the campsite, girls and boys between the ages of three and nine, and asked them if they’d like to watch me prepare it.

Creepy man waves dead, twitching squirrel at bewildered children.