David Neufer and his colleagues have created panoramic composites from films of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. 

(Via Coudal.)

South Park: Over Logging. Can Kyle save the internet? (nsfw) // Tetris: the Movie. // Box office receipts, 1986-2007. // Nokia’s nanotech Morph. Soon, my pretties. // Theorists, captioned in LOLspeak. Foucault, Haraway, Spivak, made to look… silly. // “A rare and precious space intended for womyn-born womyn.” // Intriguing toilet signs. // Dirty hands are a “human right” in Vancouver. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // How fingerprinting works. (h/t, Coudal.) // Caught red handed. Inevitable, really. // Gateshead Millennium Bridge. // Space junk. // A great moment in Soviet science fiction. // Beyoncé has three arms. // A brief history of LSD. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Comic book adverts. X-ray specs, ant farms, ugly rubber hands. // Hulk versus the Rain. 1, 2, 3, 4. // Nursey knows. // Astro Boy. // Tilted house, Japan. // The Japanese Uniform Museum. (h/t, Coudal.) // Posters of the USSR. // Total world domination… cancelled. // Hamas MP likes world domination too. Allah willing. // Robert Spencer on freedom of speech in an age of jihad. // Professor Guy McPherson looks forward to the Post-Industrial Stone Age. It’s for the greater good. // “If I can just focus the Sun’s rays…” // Ultimate snooker skillz. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Ray Charles.

Zoe Williams, whose search for radicalism was mentioned yesterday, previously thrilled us with her discovery that “hoodie” is in fact a “sleight-of-hand” and a “sinister” racial code word. The list of hitherto innocuous words that now, apparently, hold terrible racist significance continues to grow. Allah (pbuh) highlights an article by David K Shipler, who, like Williams, possesses some kind of racial Spider Sense and can detect heinous racist intent where none was thought to be.

[W]hen his opponents branded [Obama] an elitist and an outsider, his race made it easier to drive a wedge between him and the white, rural voters he has courted. As an African American, he was supposedly looking down from a place he didn’t belong and looking in from a distance he could not cross. This could not happen as dramatically were it not for embedded racial attitudes. “Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.

As Allah notes,

If you take this tool seriously, there’s quite literally no good-faith way to accuse a member of a minority group of being snobbish or condescending. Every road through Shipler’s copy of Roget will lead inevitably back to “uppity,” no matter how circuitous the route may be.

It is, as ever, fascinating to watch people tilting their heads, squinting and bearing down quite hard until they can see just about everything through the unreliable lens of identity politics – a gift bestowed upon them by others, very often educators, with similar paranormal talents.

It’s often struck me that Socialism in the developed world is at heart an adolescent phenomenon, insofar as it involves a contrarian bloody-mindedness, a sort of grumpy whimsy and an imperviousness to absurdity. By way of illustration, the singing Socialist, Billy Bragg, recently told Radio 4 listeners in a very serious voice that he’d learned all of his politics from pop music. Likewise, the commentary of Seumas Milne, a diehard enthusiast of proletarian revolution, rarely makes sense in terms of logic or principle or even feeding poor people. It does, however, have its own internal semblance of logic if you think of it as the oppositional pantomime of an arrested adolescent. My other half describes adolescence as a five year bad mood, and we can, I think, forgive teenagers many of their hormonal pretentions. Adults, not so much.

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams, an adult whose insights have entertained us before, today shares her thoughts on the Glastonbury music festival and its counter-cultural credentials: 

But how counter-cultural is Glastonbury? This question was last asked in 2002, when Mean Fiddler took over the security and the era of leaping the fence was officially over… You had to ask, as many did, would its free spirit survive?

So, you take a general hippy atmosphere, with all the crystals and whatnot, and there is a tacit anti-consumerism just to the smell of patchouli. But the truth is that ticket prices have been steep for years. The days of getting in for a quid and being given a free pint of milk are long gone. Michael Eavis, the festival’s founder, had no interest in returning to them either, being quite taken with the charitable side of the festival. This resulted in huge donations to CND and, more recently, to Oxfam, Greenpeace and local groups. In order for these noble ends to be realised, pretensions of rebellion had to be relinquished; the crowd had to pay…

So why does [Glastonbury] always look so radical, so unlike a V festival or Reading, so outside civilisation? I’ll tell you why, it’s because the audience is always covered with mud. The only culture this festival runs counter to is the culture of cleanliness. It’s like the whole of hippydom in weekend-microcosm – it looks like there’s a point, but turn any stone and all you’ll find is mud and earwigs.

But… the radicalism…   

Hygiene aside, what’s interesting is that, like so many of her peers, Williams assumes radicalism entails a free lunch, sorry, spirit, and a rejection of capitalism. If only all of this music, lighting, food and hippie paraphernalia could be done without money, or less money, or something that does what money does, but isn’t actually money. She also assumes, again like many others, that giving, er, money to CND is some yardstick of nobility and radical virtue. Anyone familiar with the actual politics of CND and its chairman, Kate Hudson – whose affiliations include the Communist Party of Britain and its declared solidarity with North Korea – might take a less charitable view. One might also wonder why CND excuses Iran’s efforts at nuclear armament, while opposing such weapons being possessed by Israel and the West. A logic that seems based on a belief that power is intrinsically very, very bad, except when others have it, in which case it suddenly becomes good, regardless of how it may be used. But such bothersome details would almost certainly hinder Ms Williams in her search for counter-cultural radicalism.

I’m reminded of a video sent to the 2006 Reading Festival by Jarvis Cocker from his home in France, along with an appeal to “smash the system.” (Cocker’s dislike of pretension and fondness for Socialism have been recurrent features of his catalogue and public commentary, though the possible contradictions of those positions have, so far as I know, yet to be set to music.) The video was to promote the former Pulp frontman’s single, Cunts are Still Running the World. (Subsequently renamed Running the World and edited to omit the salty language.) As the original title suggests, it’s a stirring ditty. More to the point, the song is meticulously tuned, both to a Glastonbury audience and the familiar rules of pop star rebellion, the two being closely related: “Your free market is perfectly natural. Do you think that I’m some kind of dummy? It’s the ideal way to order the world. Fuck the morals, does it make any money?” Edgy, I think you’ll agree. War is bad, being bourgeois is bad and free market capitalism – of which Mr Cocker is a conspicuous beneficiary – is a terrible, terrible thing. Such is the radical counterculture for which Ms Williams yearns.

I gather some of you are looking forward to the upcoming Iron Man film, a clip from which can be found here. Apparently, the trailers are very popular, prompting this item from the Onion.

Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

Related: Iron Man: Extremis.