Cornell University’s “protest community” of around 50 or so leftist students decided to celebrate May Day by disrupting a farewell party and sitting in a road and blocking traffic for over half an hour, while sharing their wisdom with the world. Or rather, sharing it with those on whom they could impose their screeching. Among their collective insights, the following: “Destroy masculinity. Fight the straightness… It is not okay to identify as straight.” Apparently, “masculinity and straightness… exist exclusively to marginalise and profit off of other people.” The declarations of profundity are varied and confusing, and get particularly, um, emotional around 2:42.

Previously. 

Start your day with Hasselhoff. (h/t, ac1) // Homemade robots on a budget. // Assorted botanical mazes. // Chicago building age map. (h/t, Coudal) // Johnny Cash machines. // Kaleidoscopic Tokyo. // Add lots of ‘fucks’ to your favourite web sites. // At last, swerving bullets. // Bunkers. // Because you’ve always wanted big, slanting ice cubes. // Animals with cameras. // Old London. // More cardboard sculptures. // Modern drama. // Dogs with their tongues sticking out a little. // It’s a tough tongue to master. // This is one of these. // Virtual aquarium. // Play with gravity. // Promotional ephemera from You Only Live Twice. (1967) // Pretend you have friends. // Tiny food. // 19th century seal fur G-string of note. (h/t, Randall) // And finally, golfing just got extreme, dude. 

George Will on the dysfunctions of academia:  

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the amount of intellectual ingenuity that is now devoted to rationalising the disappearance of free speech… Today’s attack… is an attack on the theory of free speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech… What we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake.

The bureaucratic farces and assorted psychodramas described by Mr Will may be familiar to regulars of this parish. Though it may be news to some that Texas Tech University, with an undergraduate enrolment of 28,000 people, now confines displays of WrongThought™ to a “free speech gazebo” some twenty feet wide.

Charles C W Cooke on the cultivated pretensions of student “radicals”: 

Take a look at this farcical missive from the Oberlin Review, in which around 150 students at the college claim repeatedly that Christina Hoff Sommers was coming to campus to present not a viewpoint with which many of the students vehemently disagree but rather an actual threat to student safety. Sommers, the signatories contend, is not an academic sharing her work, but a participant “in violent movements” and an accessory to “threats of death and rape.” […] Held hostage by the twin evils of mawkishness and self-indulgence, [the protestors] have taken to masquerading as the martyrs of the piece. You will note, of course, that none of the outraged parties at Oberlin were obliged to attend Sommers’s talk, or even to be on campus while she was being hosted. Had they wished, they could have sat the whole thing out with nary a word. Indeed, it was quite by choice they injected themselves into the event at all.

Ah, but a sense of moral proportion is of no use whatsoever to an in-group of narcissists, poseurs and passive-aggressive harpies. The kind of would-be intellectuals who, instead of doing something else, turn up out of spite to jeer and interrupt – thereby drawing attention to themselves – while making theatrical displays of how “unsafe” they feel when confronted with information they do not like. The kind of would-be intellectuals who claim that theirs is a campus “laden with trauma and sexualized violence,” who pre-emptively slander those who disagree with them, and who respond to criticism with the words, “We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?”

And Darleen Click quotes the deep, deep wisdom of professor of anthropology and ostentatious male feminist, Melvin Konner: 

In addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence, they live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behaviour. And, of course, they can produce new life from their own bodies, to which men add only the tiniest biological contribution — and one that soon could be done without… There is a birth defect… called maleness… To call being male a syndrome is not an arbitrary judgment.

Yes, “a birth defect… called maleness.” Thank goodness only the finest minds educate your children.

Mostly fun, but too crammed and erratic to be a great film. It does, though, have lots of great bits. 

One for Julia, I think. From the pages of the South Wales Evening Post:  

Former alcoholic Mike Holpin, of Ebbw Vale, was criticised after admitting he did not even know the names of some of his kids.

In fairness, Mr Holpin is thought to have sired “around 40” children via 20 different women, and hence the inevitable difficulty recalling their names. Or indeed their whereabouts.

Mike, 56, has been receiving benefits for 13 years and admits to spending his £195 a week handouts on his 20-a-day smoking habit, as well as owning games consoles and widescreen TVs.

Happily, a new tenderness has blossomed in Mike’s life.

Diane Morris, 46, has a 28-year-old son from a previous relationship and met Mike through [online dating service] Plenty Of Fish in 2012. She said: “His profile on Plenty of Fish might be active but I know Mike wouldn’t dream of cheating on me. I had been single for years and I was instantly attracted to Mike. He had lovely blue eyes and he was so charming and witty.

And so,

Diane met the former fairground worker – favourite chat-up line: “Fancy a rump?” – a few weeks later.

You can’t fight that kind of magnetism.

“Mike and I have a great sex life. It used to be once a day when we got together but now we are at it like every other day.”

Good to know. 

The pair are now inseparable and spend their days watching horror films and going for long walks.

I think that covers everything. 

Via PootBlog.