Busy today, but this made me laugh.

By. Related. And. 

Further to this and the comments following this post, I mentioned the mismatch of certain leftist moral markers with aspects of traditional working class / bourgeois morality:

“When seen in context, Thatcher’s ‘society’ quote actually chimes quite strongly with traditional working class / bourgeois morality regarding personal and familial responsibility. A similar moral aspect becomes apparent in discussions of immigration, where many working class people take the view that a person should generally pay into a benefit system before taking from it. This tends to conflict with the view, most common among middle-class leftists, that a newcomer from country X can arrive and immediately make several claims without having contributed via taxation, etc. I’ve read more than one Guardian commentator dismiss the former view as ‘typical of racist little Englanders’, which rather misses the point of contention. Wherever you stand on the issue, and whatever exceptions one might imagine, my point is that quite a few middle-class leftwing commentators have casually dismissed as ‘racist’ a moral argument based on reciprocity and a sense of community.”

There’s another illustration in today’s Observer, in John Lloyd’s review of Andrew Anthony’s book, The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence:

“Anthony uses an account of his early years as a vivid, emotively charged account of a working class-born, council house-raised and comprehensive school-educated boy who came to question his parents’ outlook. In one instance cited, his mother asked her local councillor why it was that she, a model tenant for many years, had become a much lower priority for rehousing than a newly arrived immigrant family. The councillor to whom Mrs Anthony complained was Tessa Jowell, until recently Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport; she gave her complaining constituent ‘a brusque lecture on racism’.

This vignette recalls progressive, especially London, politics of the Seventies and Eighties… with an overlay of moralising political correctness which assumed prejudice on the part of a white working class and innocence on the part of those with darker skins. In a comment which must be a painful memory, Anthony observes that at university, his ‘enlightened concern was that [his mother] didn’t do or say anything that could be construed as racist … I was now outside, like an anthropologist, looking in’.”

What’s interesting here, and illustrative of a much wider phenomenon, is Jowell’s apparent readiness to frame the issue in terms of racism, and Anthony’s own apprehension regarding how a person might seem in certain kinds of company. And, again, there’s something grimly amusing about those who most loudly profess to care for “the proletariat” showing sneery disregard for the views and moral values of that same group of people.

The Shimafuji 2” cube PC. // The properties of cone snail venom. Cone snail venom in action. // SeaPhantom. “Helicopter speed. Powerboat price.” // Flying car, sort of. (H/T, Dr Westerhaus.) // Perry Mason book covers. // Perry Mason title sequence, from The Case of the Negligent Nymph. (H/T, Vitruvius.) // Perry Mason board game. More. Instructions. // How to catch a cold. (1951) // What to do on a date. (1951) // Personal ads in China. (H/T, Instapundit.) // Via Coconut Jam, paper condom envelopes of the 30s and 40s. // Beautiful specimens. (H/T, Coudal.) // Iran closes “un-Islamic” barber shops. “Police say barbers should not pluck customers’ eyebrows.” // Theodore Dalrymple on percentages, fear and self-inflicted misery. “Unemployment and lower levels of educational achievement have much to do with the ideas of Muslim immigrants themselves.” // The perils of “affirmative action.” // Soy sauce and ice cream, together at last. // Ice cream flavours from around the world. Octopus, spinach and ox tongue. // Geographical Rubik Cube. // Calculate pi in hyperspace. You know you want to. // Enormous hole found in Universe. “The void is nearly one billion light years across.” (H/T, An Insomniac.) // Tunnel House. More. // Bedside table. Ideal for greeting uninvited guests. // How to be a cult leader. “Join us and be special.” (H/T, Vitruvius.) // Frank says something stupid.

A form of ‘content-aware’ image manipulation has been developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir of Israel’s Efi Arazi School of Computer Science. Their prototype software allows images to be dramatically resized without scaling or cropping. By assigning levels of importance to component parts of an image, the software is able to shrink or stretch images while leaving key features intact and in proportion, and all in real time.

More. And. Related. Also. (H/T, Protein Wisdom and The Thin Man.) 

Thanks to the A/V Geeks, here’s Disney’s 1946 educational short, The Story of Menstruation. It’s replete with dos and don’ts on hygiene and grooming, though sexuality is oddly unmentioned. That said, and no less oddly, there does appear to be a baby wearing lipstick.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Review. The instructional booklet mentioned in the film, Very Personally Yours, can be found here.