South Korea’s charming and subtle penis restaurant. // Pocket picnic blanket. // An Alien production scrapbook. // “Austerity” and “spending cuts.” // Spot the cuttlefish. // Cars with propellers. // Standing stones. // “The sexiest baritone hunks from opera.” Your mileage may vary. // Tree tents. // “One and you lose your reason; two and you’re on your knees.” // The smartphone case you’ve always wanted. // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 9. // Death metal construction worker. // Making scissors. // Mechanical elephants and other projects. // Small magnet with big oomph. // Clay food miniatures. // Tiny burritos. (h/t, Ian Fleming) // Paper microbes. // And finally, we must de-beef the machine. 

A Guardian poll asks,

Would working a four-day week relieve your stress?

A majority, currently 89%, say yes. We await the Guardian poll asking whether a commensurate cut in pay might also be somewhat stressful.

We’ve been here before of course. 

Not only are [young women seen as] objects, they are abject, terminally unable to cope with the exigencies of adult life, of the bewildering array of life choices modern society offers us, from vaginal butchery to jobs in the service sector.

Yes, I fear Laurie Penny is off her meds again. 

I hesitate to summarise what it is she’s banging on about in this extract from her latest book, as it isn’t particularly clear to me. Nor is it always obvious how one avalanche of hyperbole and assertion leads to the next. The joining logic is hard to pin down, let alone parse. It’s all rather impressionistic and yet terribly adamant. It’s sort of, “Self-harm-something-something-patriarchy-obviously.”

Western womankind is collectively imagined as a toddler let loose in a candy store, so overwhelmed by the range of options that it has an ungrateful tantrum and is sick on the floor. 

Collectively imagined. As so often in Laurie’s mental landscape, dark forces are at work although the evidence has been lost in a mysterious warehouse fire. We are, however, pointed to the “front pages of celebrity magazines,” on which, obviously, all sane people model their own, actual lives. We’re told that “Successful women on the verge of mental and physical collapse… is a myth that pleases the powerful,” though who the powerful might be is also far from clear. Can she mean the overwhelmingly female readership of Heat magazine?

Meanwhile, huge chunks of rhetoric fall from the sky:

Sometimes we get called rebels and degenerates and troublemakers, and sometimes we are known to the police. And sometimes, in the narrow hours of the night, we call ourselves feminists.

Because it just wouldn’t be a Laurie Penny article without some of that. 

Pallas cat finds camera outside Himalayan den. Via Coudal. 

Here’s a pretty thing. Like Christmas in space.

Its purpose, beyond eye-candy, is to draw your attention to this.