I have things to do, and mojo to restore, so I’ll be largely absent for a few days. Consider this an open thread.

Play nicely. Use coasters.

Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.

The University of Bristol, since you ask, where staff are urged to perform this season’s modish contortions in “verbal introductions and email signatures.” Say, by starting each meeting and conversation, presumably every day, with an ostentatious declaration of their own pronouns, lest there be massive and widespread confusion as to which sex they actually are.

Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns,” where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.

While not mandatory, but merely encouraged, one university employee who expressed objections has been “invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager.” A nourishing mental experience, I’m sure.

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments.” The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.” Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline.” The word nyan is Japanese for “meow.”

Because if you’re bent on humiliating your employees, and unmooring them from probity and any lingering realism – and if you want to make them routinely dishonest and pander to delusions, narcissism, and competitive pretension – then hey, why not go all-in?

Bristol’s guide says that if staff make a mistake by using the wrong pronoun, “it is important not to become defensive or make a big deal out of it. Simply thank the person for correcting you, apologise swiftly, and use the correct pronouns going forward.”

Other, less dementing options are, of course, available. At the time of writing.

Also, open thread.

Attention, lowly workers. I bring you cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja.

Also, some chafing may have occurred. Previously, another double helping.

I’ve locked the doors, so don’t even try. And yes, open thread.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, a tale about the perils of noticing things:

She describes the emails as “rather polite” and “relatively kind.” Her daughter had been a Girl Guide, and she herself had done some volunteering with the organisation. “I thought it was a really uncontroversial, uncontentious email,” she says. It expressed her view that “this person should not be in charge of young people.” (The Critic has seen the email and can confirm her description of it. It does, however, refer to Sulley as a “male”…)  

And that’s when a police officer appeared on her doorstep.

Also, open thread. 

Where many things come with sliced tomato.

Via Tim Newman. Consider this an open thread.

Granted, hanging up spoons in straight rows isn’t quite as impressive as the oeuvre of Rembrandt. But if we pretend hard enough, maybe it will seem as if it were?

Steve Sailer spies some farcically woke art-exhibition notes. 

Photographs of which can be found here. This one in particular is quite a feat. 

Update:

In the comments, Joan adds, “They want to spoil everything.” Indeed, the tone of the exhibition notes is reliably sour and anhedonic. Only the contrivance is amusing, albeit unwittingly. And it occurs to me that it would save a lot of time and rhetorical straining to simply stamp each artwork with the words “BAD WHITEY.” The effect would be much the same and with little loss of meaningful content. It’s also worth pondering the term “white degeneracy,” and whether any other racial demographic would be subject to similar usage in the official display notes of a mainstream art exhibition.

Update 2:

It seems to me that juxtaposing Rembrandt’s paintings with half-arsed tat by the ungifted-but-heroically-brown – an unremarkable frame, some spoons in rows – is not a great way to establish the implied artistic parity. But in order to be woke and right-thinking, we must somehow will the equivalence into being. Or at least pretend.

And this is why wokeness is corrupting. It eats away at realism, and at honesty.

Also, open thread. 

This just in. Clown-self pronouns:

In this situation, I would make sure that I exclusively use clown pronouns to talk about Cypress, so Cypress knows that I see clownself for who clown is.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

If you would like Maybe Burke, above, to provide “personal growth trainings” – say, regarding how you may speak when transgender people both are and aren’t present – by all means, knock yourself out.

Apparently, we non-transgender people, almost the entire human race, are supposed to embrace the prefix cis and use it continually, habitually, in order to suggest that being transgender is in no way atypical, niche, or anomalous. And to erase distinctions between, say, actual women and trans women, i.e., men with mental health problems. And this is said by someone bedevilled by urges to control what others may say, even in private, and even to control what they may think. Which itself is rather noteworthy. One might say anomalous.*

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. *Added via the comments. 

Goldfish are capable of navigating on land, Israeli researchers have found, after training fish to drive. The team at Ben-Gurion University developed an FOV – a fish-operated vehicle. The robotic car is fitted with lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to collect data on the vehicle's ground location and the fish's whereabouts inside a mounted water tank. A computer, camera, electric motors, and omni-wheels give the fish control of the vehicle.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here. And yes, there’s video. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Speaking of targets acquired.

The activity in question and its devotees have cropped up here once or twice before.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Another candidate for our not-entirely-suited-to-the-job file:

The elderly couple ordered a “carefully budgeted” $50 of groceries to be delivered to their home last Sunday… Nothing was amiss until they went outside to meet the driver, Tara, for fear that she might struggle with her vehicle in their snow-covered driveway. When they opened the front door, Tara yelled at them… while rocking her vehicle back and forth in the driveway.

It turned out the issue wasn’t snow. 

The ostensible cause of Tara’s mental crisis can be viewed here.

Update, via the comments:

The individual in question, the one swollen with righteousness, is no longer employed.

Via I, Hypocrite, via Darleen. Also, open thread.