The 28 state-sanctioned hairstyles of North Korea. (h/t, Samizdata) // Napkins of note. // Armband device controller. // Giant ice lollies as temporary art. // Chocolate lamp. // Gold boom Australia, 1872. (h/t, MeFi) // Brighton teenagers “live at a faster pace,” use words “gracious” and “fellow,” 1960. (h/t, Paul Saxton) // Vertical garden. // Cockatoos and budgerigars. // Octopus fornication. // Communist opera. // For calibrating spy cameras. (h/t, Metrolander) // Manhattan wasn’t actually invaded by aliens. // The modern oil wheel. // I assume this is performance art. It involves bananas and Nutella. (h/t, Simen) // Assorted Nazi bunkers. // Tardis fez with built-in light. // The motorized wheelrider. // I so want this car and of course a time machine. // “High school fashions, 1969.” // Suitcases of insane asylum patients. // Unforeseen consequences. 

Photograph by Zhang Kechun.
One of these. Via Mick.

Another classic sentence, this time from the Guardian’s Jill Filipovic, who tells us: 

Somehow, big food companies have convinced us that drinking a 32oz soda is a matter of personal liberty, and that the government has no place in regulating how much liquid sugar can be sold in a single container.

Apparently those evil food companies have – somehow, nefariously – made some of us consider the proper role of the state and whether it should have any business telling people what size beverage they may drink while watching a three-hour film in the local multiplex. Yes, that must be it. How else can we explain the fact that not everyone agrees with Jill Filipovic?

“Slightly rubbery, which picks up any residue off your fingers and makes the knob look dirty. The rotation is ever so slightly off axis. The click isn’t too satisfying.”

“Nowhere near enough depth, and too much weight to the rotation. Also lacking in knob grip.” 

“Great weight (not too heavy, not too light), and lovely stiffness.” 

KnobFeel.  

Via Anna, via MeFi. 

Small sandy frog makes big high noise. // Daniel Mercadante’s Yawns. // “You had one job to do…” (h/t, Paul Saxton) // Sea pigs. // Assorted landscapes. (h/t, Coudal) // Unused scenes of Alien. // The Sun is moving. // Sculpted cheese. // Some chocolate bees. // “A bacterium on a diatom on an amphipod.” // A bit random, I know. // The old subways of LA. // Just don’t call them savages. // Apollo 15 map and image library. // “How many films can you name?” // Turntable of note. // The stations of Stockholm. // A tent to be suspended. // “Every man’s semen is a precious snowflake.” // Well, I have to say, that’s not at all what I expected. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

All Pop Music Will Henceforth Be Terrible.  

The government is “waging naked class war,” says the Guardian’s Owen Hatherley. Can leftwing pop music avert catastrophe? 

Making vaguely alternative pop music is, it seems, all but impossible without indefinite subsidy, an Arts Council grant, a subsidised spell at art school and a bohemian squat to call your own. Yes, these young titans of the left need the state to make them edgy and countercultural. And there can be no better use for taxpayers’ money than indulging would-be pop stars while they become “class conscious” and find themselves, musically. However long it takes. 

Rebellion, Revisited.  

If what these educators want sounds a bit like grooming, a little predatory, that’s because it is. 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.

Which may explain the doublethink of Mr Arun Smith. 

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

San Francisco’s radical nudists are remarkably needy. Your children must, simply must, see their genitals.

Imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate. And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

Monbiot and the Morlocks.

George Monbiot encounters the exotic underclass. Things go badly wrong.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s a world of wonder in the greatest hits.