Menfolk, avert your eyes.

The 23-year-old ended up in hospital where his penis had to be drained of two pints of blood – after suffering from an erection lasting 17 hours.

Blimey. 

Jason first woke up with the condition last Friday morning and initially didn’t worry about it. However by lunchtime he was beginning to get concerned and tried to address the situation by… 

No, don’t. Bad dog.

taking an ice bath and then going for a jog.

When these measures failed, 

He went to the hospital where his condition was diagnosed and doctors drew off two pints of blood to try and reduce the pressure. They also had to inject medication 24 times to restrict the blood flow. 

Mercifully, this tale has a happy ending.

All is now well with Jason, who described the pain of his treatment as “ten out of ten.” “It is completely normal now,” he added, “apart from the fact that it looks like it’s been through a war. It’s all a bit black and blue.”

Via Chris Snowdon. 

And so, again, we visit the pages of the Guardian, where Felicity Lawrence looks forward to the downfall of big supermarkets. You know, those dark, forbidding entities that have “marched across our food and shopping landscape,” casting shadows so vast and terrifying that “it seemed there was no part of our consuming lives they did not want to capture.”

Tightening her moral corset, she says,

People are in revolt against Big Retail… The fall of this empire looks as though it will be fast… It is hard to mourn.

It seems I’d missed these dramatic events, this fall of empire and popular revolt. Perhaps, like many others, I was busy buying groceries at a reasonable price in a pleasant, airy supermarket with polite and helpful staff. But apparently the “supermarket model” is not only accompanied by “social destruction,” it’s also a “colossal market failure.” And so we – that’s thee and me – will somehow find both the time and enthusiasm for “smaller baskets” and “more frequent provisioning,” several times a week from righteous local suppliers – where they exist, that is, and regardless of the weather and any scheduling commitments. Their prices may be higher and their supplies less varied and reliable, but at least their moral aura will meet Guardianista standards. And so never again will dark forces “make us buy things we never intended to buy.” Never again will we be seduced by discounted biscuits and that sinful Pot Noodle.

As is the custom at Kings Place, Ms Lawrence then goes on to tell us what it is “we” think:

We don’t want the illusion of “choice” that 30-40,000 lines offer, especially when so many of them are just variations on the same theme of highly processed fats, sugars, and salt disguised by additives.

That’s all supermarkets sell, obviously. Damn their glowing eyes. And even if it wasn’t, we mortals have no ability to make decisions regarding how we spend our money. We, it seems, just drift down those supermarket aisles, no shopping list in hand, scooping things at random into our baskets. Yes, dear reader, we all shop by poundage and volume. Didn’t you know?

If Ms Lawrence’s pieties sound familiar, you may be thinking of Friday’s column by Deborah Orr, who told the nation – or the tiny part of it that reads the Guardian unironically – that the big supermarkets are “in trouble” because they’re,

viewed as having helped to impoverish town centres and are now looking horribly antisocial.

You see, the entire nation – not just a subset of well-heeled Guardianistas – is raging against the convenience of the local supermarket, where cheap food is plentiful and easy to find. Instead, says Ms Orr, we’re all spending our weekends in joyful protest at the nearest out-of-town farmers’ market, where securing a week’s food shopping is a more ambitious task and generally more expensive. And we’re doing this because – yes, because – “people don’t have as much money to spend.” This is what we’re all doing, apparently. Just like her.

Update, via the comments:

Eric S Raymond on crime, reporting and “black privilege”: 

No conspiracy theory is required to explain the silence here. Reporters and editors are nervous about being thought racist, or (worse) having “anti-racist” pressure groups demonstrating on their doorsteps. The easy route to avoiding this is a bit of suppressio veri – not lying, exactly, but not uttering facts that might be thought racially inflammatory. The pattern of suppression is neatly explained by the following premises: Any association of black people with criminality is inflammatory. Any suggestion that black criminals are motivated by racism to prey on white victims is super-inflammatory. And above all, we must not inflame. Better to be silent. I believe this silence is a dangerous mistake with long-term consequences that are bad for everyone, and perhaps worst of all for black people.

KC Johnson reflects on the Duke lacrosse scandal and those left unscathed by it: 

Higher education is perhaps the only product in which Americans spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars without having any clear sense of what they are purchasing. Few parents, alumni, legislators, or prospective students spend much (if any) time exploring the scholarship or syllabi offered by professors at the school of their choice; they devote even less effort to understanding hiring patterns or pedagogical changes that have driven the contemporary academy to an ideological extreme on issues of race, class, and gender. At most, there seems to be a general —incorrect— impression that while colleges have the occasional “tenured radical” who lacks real influence on campus, most professors fall well within the ideological mainstream… The lacrosse case provided a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the mindset of an elite university — and the look was a troubling one.

More glimpses here, here and here. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on policing speech: 

In [philosopher François De Smet’s] view, some opinions have been responsible for so much mass murder that it is quite permissible, perhaps even essential, to ban them. But as with all such proposals, the question is where the limits should lie. For example, it is a moot point whether racism or economic egalitarianism was responsible for more deaths in the last century… It occurred to me that, on the above author’s principles, there would be every reason to ban egalitarian discourse, which has the effect and often the intention of promoting hatred and resentment of the rich, who in the not distant past have been massacred horribly, especially when rich means above averagely endowed with worldly goods, however gotten. Monsieur Hollande, for example, President of the French Republic, should be taken into preventive detention (and heavily fined) for having said that he did not like the rich, a statement clearly intended to bring the latter into hatred and contempt. The same applies to Mr Miliband, the silencing of whom would at the very least add to the gaiety of the nation.

In fairness to Mr Hollande, he doesn’t seem to like the poor much either. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

This just in: 

A zoo in Japan has been forced to admit that it tried to mate two male hyenas for four years, after mistakenly thinking that one of them was female… After the two animals struggled to reproduce, the zoo conducted a gender test under anaesthesia.

I’m tempted to ask just how valiantly they struggled. No laughing at the back. 

Unnecessary explosions are totally unnecessary. // Undulating clouds. // No likes yet. The unloved of Instagram. // At last, your very own wearable drone. // People on a mountain, arranged artfully. // Cross the Alps by tightrope, in a hammock. // Volcanic shockwave. Watch the clouds. // Very loud indeed. // An archive of earthquake data and a map of quakes across the world. // AutoCompleteMe. // Mongolia’s golden eagle hunters. // Rock band stage configurations. // Big and curvy rides. // Big cats divided on the charms of Marmite. // “Human Be-In,” San Francisco, 1967. // Earthworm-eating leech of note. // Japan in colour, 1886. // “I think computers was far enough. We didn’t need to go beyond that.” // How Big Bird works. // And finally, I think these cats are broken.