Roller-skating monkeys and other things photographed by Stanley Kubrick. // Hardcore cough syrup of yore. // Rush hour. // Real-time aurora. // There are ruins in New York City. // The chemistry of autumn. // When elephants frolic. // The sheep have penetrated our defences. // Seen in dentist school. // Test your pitch perception. (h/t, Dr W) // Tiny paintings. // World’s deepest pool. // Parasitic worm of note. // An alternative ‘Occupy’ syllabus. // “Even though it was a trick, the reaction was pure and honest.” // The relative sizes of fictional spacecraft, updated. // Strange sexual organs. // How to attract frogs. // Coffee time. // Spoilers. //A brief history of the vocoder. // Phantom vibrations. // And finally, someone’s gone and copied your host’s own early morning exercise routine. 

A Guardian headline brings to light another pressing issue for its readers to fret about:

Why does a black butt only look good in white skin?

Our fearless interrogator, our prober of deep mystery, is Yomi Adegoke, who tells us that she “writes about race, popular culture and intersectional feminism.” Heavens, what a surprise. It’s not Ms Adegoke’s only question, though. She has more:

So the attributes that black women have so long been shamed for have finally been given the… seal of approval due to a new Aryan aesthetic?

Oh my. An Aryan aesthetic. She went there, being so fearless.

Ms Adegoke’s article is at times hard to follow and extrapolates a little too wildly from things that someone said on Twitter. It isn’t without its gems, however – candidates for our ongoing series of classic Guardian sentences. Among them, this:

The black female body is still played for laughs as butt prosthetics become the new blackface.

From what I can make out, our indignant Guardianista is upset that some white female celebrities have been happily drawing attention to their fulsome hindquarters, which are, it seems, the latest must-have fashion item among the suggestible and insecure. No, I hadn’t noticed. Possibly on account of my total lack of interest in MTV and celebrity tattle magazines. But apparently it’s a thing, the hugeness of one’s arse. And this pride in ample buttocks simply will not do. Not when ladies of pallor are the ones doing it:

White women popularising what black women have always had is the latest example of the mainstream media’s cultural appropriation… The era of the big booty has neither started nor ever stopped for black women… Despite what the mainstream media told us, black women never stopped aspiring to possess the curves society so hated.

It turns out that the well-upholstered rear has been “appropriated” in “a world where white is right.” Two ladies named Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry, possibly pop artistes, have been,

using huge novelty bottoms as performance props in a bid to appear contemporary and comedic while accessorising the black aesthetic.

A pop cultural detail that had hitherto, and regrettably, escaped my notice. Doubtless all pale women, being so determined to appropriate and oppress, will soon be turning up to work with huge foam bottoms attached to their person. And according to Ms Adegoke, larger than average buttocks are a “part of black culture” – a part that is “now deemed good enough to gain a level of mass respectability after getting a belated thumbs-up from white society.”

You heard her. Thumbs-up or not, big buttocks are black culture. So you white folk mustn’t pinch them.

Update, via the comments: 

From the Guardian, a headline of note:

Polygamist women dressed ‘like ninjas’ attack home of witness in Utah sex assault case.

I know. Polygamist Women Dressed Like Ninjas has potential as a band name. The story’s quite odd too:

Two armed “polygamist women” dressed like “ninjas” were subdued by a sword-wielding man during a home invasion, according to police in suburban Utah. Police said the two women, aged 18 and 22, were attacking the home of a witness and victim in a criminal child sex assault case against a man the women called their “husband.” The women “violently attacked one of the adult males in the house who came to see who was coming,” Ian Adams of the West Jordan police department told the Guardian. “Another adult male joined the fray in defence of the first male victim. He was armed with a sword, and using a sword… and with the other male [was] able to subdue the two women until police arrived and took them into custody.”

How humdrum your own life must seem in comparison, what with its lack of sexual triangulation, sword-wielding and suburban polygamist ninjas.

Spotted and shared by Randall Sherman. 

Scenes from yesterday’s all-purpose-protest-cum-socialist-danceathon in New York City:  

“Having less is actually very freeing.”

Klaus Kemp, diatomist, “spent 8 years researching glue to find the perfect formula.”

Filmed by Matthew Killip.