For newcomers, more items from the archives. 

Something About the Tone.

Urban Studies lecturer Peter Matthews worries about the unequal distribution of litter and suggests bulldozing Belgravia. For the poor.

Our postcode class warrior links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.” But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

Please Don’t Dump Your Garbage on the Roadside. 

Performance artists Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton hit each other with pillows, thereby sharing their radicalism with the unthinking proles.

One has to wonder what our creative betters’ long-term plan is. How, exactly, were they hoping to entice employers and repay the cost of their extensive education? Is incongruous pillow flailing – sorry, “strategic refraction” – a skill in demand? Is it something the public cries out for and will rush to throw money at? What do the ladies plan to do when they’re, say, forty, or fifty? Given the improbability of such people being self-supporting in later life – at least in their chosen line, the one for which they’ve studied – do they have wealthy parents who will indulge them indefinitely? Or do they expect their talents, such as they are, to be rewarded with other people’s earnings, confiscated forcibly by the state and redistributed as artistic subsidy? And is self-inflicted dependency a thing to encourage and applaud? I ask because the ladies say they want us to “think critically.”

The Cupcake Menace. 

The Guardian’s Matt Seaton rages against tiny cakes, which are apparently exploitative and mentally debilitating, at least to womenfolk.

After telling us at length just how terrible and mind-warping these tiny fancies are, Mr Seaton adds, “I don’t want to ban cupcakes.” And yet he feels it necessary to say this, as if banning miniature sponges would be an obvious thing to consider, the kind of thing one does. And after banning them in his own office. An accomplishment that a fellow Guardianista, the daughter of the paper’s editor no less, regards as confirming Mr Seaton’s moral credentials: “I used to bring cakes into the office a lot, and Matt put a ban on it because he was worried about how much sugar we all ate. Practises what he preaches this man.” Come work at the Guardian, where the party never stops.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

When the Onion is Redundant. 

Paul Krugman and Polly Toynbee are awfully concerned by how much you earn. Themselves, not so much.

When very well-heeled ‘progressives’ decry income inequality as at the very least something to be fixed, and fixed urgently, at what point can we expect the people saying this to act as if it were true? I mean, act individually, themselves, in accord with their own professed values and imperatives. Curiously, the most typical position is to do nothing whatsoever unless the state acts coercively against everyone, thereby deferring any personal action aside from the usual mouthing. And so inevitably that mouthing looks a lot like chaff, a way to divert the envy and tribalism they’re so happy to inspire in others: “Yes, I’m loaded, but look at those people over there – the ones who disagree with us – they have slightly more, or almost as much. Let’s all hiss at them.”

Clinging to the Teats. 

Gender studies lecturer Hila Shachar doesn’t think the public should have any say in how its money is spent.

Dr Shachar is careful not to explain the “contribution to society” made by her own work, or by the humanities research projects that were highlighted as examples of non-essential spending, including a $164,000 grant for studying “how urban media art can best respond to global climate change.” Or by the boldly titled research project Queering Disasters in the Antipodes, which hopes to probe the “experiences of LGBTI people in natural disasters” and ultimately provide “improved disaster response” to gay people, whose needs in such circumstances are apparently quite different from those of everyone else. The princely sum of $325,183 has been spent on this endeavour.

Their Mighty Brains Will Save Us. 

The Guardian unveils its hot and sassy trainee journalists. A snapshot of the nation and its everyday concerns.

There’s Emma Howard, 26, who studied English in Leicester and Strasbourg and lists her credentials as “community organising” and “having fun with other social activists,” which, we learn, “can mean standing on the street with placards.” “I think about power a lot,” says she. Podcast enthusiast Fred McConnell, 27, is the sole male in a group of ten and tells us that, “After university I headed to Afghanistan to produce multimedia for a skateboard charity.” As one does. And there’s Hannah Jane Parkinson, 24, who “performs poetry” and whose areas of expertise are “lifestyle and pop culture.” Ms Parkinson is “from Liverpool, but moved to Russia to drink vodka and play at being Lara from Dr Zhivago.” She moved again, to London, “for a great job,” one in which she “got to look at cat gifs.” “I couldn’t be happier at the Guardian,” says Ms Parkinson. “It’s where I always wanted to work.”

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

The Humble Among Us. 

Novelist Brigid Delaney wants a nicer flat in order to write about those non-creative people. You, taxpayer, come hither.

As a member of our creative caste, Ms Delaney wants to capture the buzz and thrum of city life. She wants to inspire “recognition” and above all “empathy.” It’s just that she’d prefer not to empathise too much with those non-creative people. Say, by working for a living and paying her own bills. And who will write about those ordinary people and their non-artistic lives if we don’t encourage Ms Delaney and her peers to live way above their means, at our expense, in places they can’t afford? Places they can’t afford because what they create isn’t as vital to the public as they might wish.

Pearl-Clutching Pornographers. 

Campus feminists combat “male-centricity” by making unerotic pornography and rubbing eggs on their breasts.

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description: “It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.” The finished political opus, titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop and extended scenes of floor-wiping. 

Militantly Nude. 

A San Francisco “nude-in” reveals more than intended.

Some may register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably one that’s embarrassed and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. What’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals. And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

And I’m told it’s possible, if not wise, to while away an hour in the greatest hits, now updated. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

I Don’t Think She’s Handling the Menopause Very Well. 

Rocío Boliver, a performance artist, “devotee of transgression” and author of “porno-erotic texts,” struggles with middle age.

There is of course a long and tedious tradition of self-harm in performance art. It’s hardly less common than nudity or faeces. Or anti-capitalist pablum. Though to be fair, some have embraced self-mutilation in a slightly less time-wasting and roundabout manner. In 1971 an artist named Chris Burden had a friend load a rifle and then shoot him in the arm. Mr Burden felt this would lead to him being “taken seriously as an artist.” Though it seems this colossal seriousness had to be reaffirmed three years later, when Burden felt it artistically necessary to have both of his hands nailed to the roof of a VW Beetle.

A Dining Room Comedy. 

The exquisite mealtime sorrows of the Guardianista male.

The bearer of these sorrows, David Dennis, has apparently spent an awful lot of time fretting about his wife putting food on his plate. I mean literally putting food on his plate, as when serving a typical meal. Given Mr Dennis’s rather pronounced Guardianista tendencies, it’s scarcely surprising that he’s also been fretting that other people, possibly people much like himself, may subsequently judge him for this patriarchal trespass, as if he and his wife were dreadful throwbacks to a darker, more primitive age.

Her Unspeakable Woes. 

Icess Fernandez Rojas isn’t being sufficiently affirmed by strangers, software and disposable paper cups. Something must be done.

It’s all very tragic. Our Guardian columnist just wants to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” in an “inclusive society” and her spellchecking software, the subtleties of which apparently elude her, is dashing those hopes. She isn’t being “validated” by Microsoft Word. It’s how utopias die.

There’s more to stroke and fondle in the greatest hits. 

In which we revisit the towers of academia, the intellectual boiler-room of contemporary art and various lamentations from the pages of the Guardian.

In January we marvelled at the inventive ways in which the Arts Council sets fire to our earnings:

One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. Apparently, it is much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and simply hand it over.

Our ongoing series of agonised tweets illustrated the rich spectrum of leftist emoting. From sadness and bewilderment to self-satisfaction, determined righteousness and a tearful longing for “uncomplicated anger.” We also met a student named Arun Smith, a radical saviour of the hypothetically downtrodden, who showed us just how complicated – and dishonest – anger can be:

Despite his extensive commentary on the subject, Mr Smith still hasn’t specified any actual remark that offended him sufficiently to vandalise the free speech wall then boast about it online. Regardless of its content, the free speech wall is, we’re told, “an act of violence.” A “microaggression.” And so Mr Smith feels obliged and entitled to retaliate, in order to pre-empt any hate (as defined by him) that might potentially occur at some point in the future. A line of moral reasoning that’s rather bold and which gives our saviour enormous scope for “forceful resistance” against almost anything he doesn’t like, even if it hasn’t happened yet.

February brought us connoisseurs of stiffness and axial rotation, and the pioneering work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where human endurance meets “excessive G-Force.”

March was of course the month of The Incident, a “level 3” violation of school behaviour, following which a classroom of seven-year-olds were urged to “share their feelings” about a partly-chewed pastry. Other highlights included students at the University of Tennessee being enlightened by a lesbian bondage expert, a reminder of the wickedness that is racist hair, and further evidence of the Arts Council’s discernment and competence. Qualities best illustrated by the £60 million West Bromwich arts centre, which promised to “make the arts more accessible” and two years after opening had failed to attract a single paying customer.

In April Martin Durkin aired an excellent documentary in which he made full use of his right eyebrow. There was also a breakthrough in eco-friendly parenting, and we beheld the theatrical stylings of Bulgarian performance artist Mr Ivo Dimchev.