When you browse the website of Portsmouth’s Mary Rose Museum, looking for information on artefacts from Tudor England… and this is what you get:

Because when you look at a sixteenth-century mirror salvaged from a warship belonging to Henry VIII, the first thing you want to know is how it might induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic.

And,

It’s quality stuff. Just like being there, in the mists of history. And not at all inept, or jarring, or comically incongruous.

The word indirectly is, I fear, doing an awful lot of work. And thanks to peering through this “Queer lens,” readers will doubtless find that their understanding of Tudor history has been enriched no end.

We’re told – indeed, assured  – by Hannah McCann, of the museum’s collections and curatorial staff,

A comfort, I know.

Exactly why such “queering” is underway – what its relevance might be – is not, however, made clear. An explanation for this bolting-on of irrelevant, flimsy tat – in the name of “queer theory” – was not, it seems, deemed necessary. Nor is it entirely obvious how such “queering” of museum contents benefits those who wish to know more about Henry VIII’s favourite warship.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the mysterious purpose of all this “queering” of sixteenth-century objects, Rafi adds, drily:

Indeed. That does seem to be the primary objective. That, and the modish tactic of identifying a thing that people find interesting and then inserting one’s own rather narrow and tedious politics, and by extension oneself. Looking through the catalogue notes, no other obvious benefit, for visitors, springs to mind. Unless we include the exercising of eyebrows by moving them up and down.

And the effect, the incongruity – the sheer cack-handedness of it – is quite bizarre. It reminded me of the ‘adverts’ in The Truman Show, in which Truman’s wife and neighbours suddenly, rather desperately, and often mid-sentence, draw attention to some cleaning product or chicken dinner.

Welcome to the world of queered history. It’s like actual history, but less so.

Update 2:

In the comments, John highlights a few lines from the Telegraph’s coverage of the story:

Well, you’d think that might be a more obvious line of historical enquiry, albeit more difficult to verify.

And it occurs to me that the contrived witterings quoted above – and the museum’s urge to share them as if they were scholarly and profound – says rather more about the state of our cultural institutions than it does about anything else.

Via ripx4nutmeg.

From the pages of the Guardian:

“More than 400 hairdressers have attended workshops” to “role-play how conversations might go.”

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

On the subject of ostentatious hair colouring, Emil Kirkegaard has some thoughts:

For those not into memes: the idea is that poisonous animals advertise their dangerousness by [using] bright colours to scare away predators. Humans appear to do the same, as those who are poisonous — mentally ill — colour their hair in bright, dangerous-looking colours. Since this meme was made in about 2014, we’ve seen a strong increase in the number of people with unnatural hair colours. In the same time, we have seen a rise in mental illness in left-wingers…

Is unnatural hair colour associated with mental illness, or are we being misled by a few prominent people with this hair style who appear very mentally ill? We decided to find out using the venerable OKCupid dataset.

Charts and number-crunching ensue.

The full paper – Blue Hair and the Blues: Dying Your Hair Unnatural Colours is Associated with Depression – can be downloaded here. 

An open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

As a sweetener, I’ll include a free blessing: Should you hear the news of a second lockdown, may your hairdresser send you a late-night text asking if you’d like an unscheduled cut the very next day, before said lockdown kicks in and she has to shut up shop.

Oh, and as some of you may be shopping from home a little more than usual, please bear in mind that any Amazon UK shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

It helps to keep this place here.

For those in need of further diversion, the Reheated series is there to be poked at.

Yes, it’s time to remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left, use of which almost certainly earns you a place in heaven. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last thirteen years, in close to 3,000 posts and over 100,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.

If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Also, open thread. 

When you combine an impromptu windy boat ride with fake eyelashes.

Also, open thread.

A title I’ve stolen shamelessly from Orwell & Goode:

A new superstitious belief has emerged in some areas of Mozambique – that bald men have gold in their head. However, the head has to be taken to a witchdoctor who will use magical powers to extract the gold – and make them rich. As a result, police say five bald men have been killed in central Mozambique.

Adjust those holiday plans accordingly, baldies.

Not entirely unrelated.

A student group at a California university is hosting a month-long “Body Love” celebration, which includes events about how “menstruation and environmentalism go hand in hand.”

Not, I think, an entirely happy image. But apparently, students will be “empowered” and “feel more comfort” by exploring the “intersection” – because you knew there was going to be an intersection somewhere – of “body love and Earth love.”

Students could also attend a “Self-Care for Body Hair” event that offered answers to questions such as: “What do you do with your body hair? Does your relationship with your body change when you’ve shaved recently? Do you shave at all?”

Because when you call yourselves The Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment at the University of Southern California, and proudly declare a mission to fight for those “oppressed by the patriarchy,” while “working towards intersectional, collective liberation,” then obviously you’re going to focus on the big, meaty issues of the day. And so,

At the group’s “signature event,” a “body love fair,” students were treated to “crafts, donuts, boba, music, and self-lovin’ vibes!” At that event, attendees were also invited to “release your anger at our Scale Smashing!”

Yes, students with weight issues – issues of such magnitude that they have anger to release – will be encouraged to gorge on doughnuts and thick sugary drinks containing various types of pudding and requiring an extra-wide straw, before hating themselves all over again, while pretending to be empowered and totally okay with it. You see, the way to help overweight people is to encourage the kind of high-sugar consumption that results in weight gain, and inviting them to smash objects that remind them of how unhappy they are about being fat. A situation that they’ve just made slightly worse.

It’s intersectional science, people.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Helen Dale on the massive oversupply of negligibly-talented artists and writers: 

There are too many artists, too many people who want to be artists, and most of them aren’t very good… Meanwhile, universities (yes, you can go to university, rack up student debt, and ‘learn’ to be a writer) tell some people – depending on skin tone, sex, orientation, or something else – that as a matter of routine they have an important and luminous story to tell because of what they are… These people are everywhere in the economy, living hand-to-mouth and doing idiot things like demanding “luxury communism now.”  

Via Tim, James Delingpole and David Craig on low standards in higher education: 

When we were at university, probably one out of six school-leavers went to university. Now it’s about one out of every two. The number of people going to university has gone up from about 700,000 thirty years ago to over 2.3 million now… The way we’ve achieved that is not by increasing the intellectual capacity of British youth. For example, now, around 51% of all people going to university are getting in on three ‘D’s at A-level, or worse. Leeds Metropolitan University during one year had 97 courses for which you only needed two ‘E’s at A-level… We’ve increased the number of students with a huge drop in the bar you need to get over to get a place at university, and to be able to borrow up to £50,000 of taxpayers’ money.

There are currently around £100bn in outstanding student loans, of which, according to some estimates, 83% are expected to be in default to varying degrees.

Following a number of enquiries as to why I don’t have a specific tag for items involving the cartoonish Laurie Penny, I thought I’d compile a few of my posts on the British left’s foremost unreliable narrator. It’s necessarily incomplete – there are several short posts and endless, lengthy comments I haven’t included – but it should convey a flavour of Laurie’s intermittent relationship with reality, her ongoing struggles with logic, and her delightful personality.