As I was pushed for time this week, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. However, I’ll set the ball rolling with a demonstration of stealth, how to deal with lawn pimples, a life lesson, some marble and acrylic furniture of note, and the ball that didn’t fall. 

Oh, and if this isn’t serendipity, I don’t know what is. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

But Why Aren’t People Rushing To Buy My Art? 

In which we brave the bleeding edge of conceptual performance.

For those who may be confounded by the profundity of the piece, a handy walk-through guide points out that the performance will encourage among onlookers “a deeper level of critical thought.” The guide notes, rather earnestly, that the first attempt, by Mr Carvalho, to envelop his head in bread, string and assorted meat products, prompted more amusement from the tiny audience than the subsequent repetition of it by Ms Cochrane. This is presented as an invitation to “a fundamental shift in paradigm” and some allegedly profound insight into gender politics. Or, how “different actions are read on different bodies.” Our artistic deep thinkers are seemingly unaware of the concepts of novelty and diminishing returns.

An Eighteen-Year Project. 

Proud feminist Polly Dunning shares her experience of motherhood.

Thank goodness that Ms Dunning, who “felt sick” at even the thought of “something male” growing inside her, is totally opposed to all that “casual and ingrained sexism.” 

Insufficiently Swiped. 

Immense, frustrated love machine Caleb Luna wonders why his Grindr profile attracts so little interest.

The option of weight loss isn’t explored, at all. Instead, it seems, we should all “interrogate” and “expand” our desires via immersion in intersectional dogma: “You can start by diversifying the range of bodies you allow into your pool of sexual possibilities,” says he. Thus empowered, we will overcome our “phobias,” which is to say our preferences, and consequently start lusting after “alternative bodies.” Specifically, bodies like Mr Luna’s. 

Further to this video of the hat-stealing, drunk-driving, threat-making racist and Angry Studies devotee Edith Macias, Jennifer Kabbany has more: 

Peers of the young Latina woman who swiped the hat, Edith Macias, have rallied to her defence, demanding the university protect her from any charges and even pay her rent in a “solidarity” document released Oct. 1.

The “statement of solidarity” is the usual dumpster fire of hyperbole, dishonesty and pretension, and makes no mention whatsoever of Ms Macias publicising her own behaviour and urging others to copy it, complete with hashtag. We do, however, learn that Tucker Carlson is a “far-right white supremacist.” With almost charming obliviousness, the statement also demands that Ms Macias be provided with free mental health counselling, due to the “emotionally and physically taxing nature” of being outed, not least by herself, as a thief who indulges in racial diatribes and threats of violence, both verbally and in writing.  

As noted in Friday’s thread, and in light of these demands for further cossetting and exemption, the odds of Ms Macias reflecting on her own behaviour and assumptions, and how they result in the dramas of her life, seem vanishingly slim.

Jim Goad on rappers, shootings and bullet-hole cred: 

In late October 2005, a rapper named Cam’ron took three bullets in an attempted DC carjacking. When a reporter asked him for a quote as he was leaving Howard University Hospital, Cam’ron quipped, “I got shot three times and my album comes out November 22.” […] Being shot is such a shot in the arm for the aspirant hip-hop mogul, a rapper named Gravy got shot in the buttocks outside a Brooklyn radio station in April 2006 before heading right into the studio for an interview. As it turns out, Gravy had one of his friends shoot him because he knew it would be good publicity.

Toni Airaksinen on more things you mustn’t think on campus: 

Angela Putman, who teaches public speaking at Penn State-Brandywine, designed a comprehensive three-day seminar on “white privilege” for her students, then interviewed 12 attendees on their belief in meritocracy and equal opportunity. To her dismay, Putman discovered that these “whiteness ideologies” were widely endorsed by students, many of whom agreed that “if I work hard, I can be successful.”

Believing in study, effort and diligence as positive things and broad prerequisites for success is, apparently, a harmful and racist ideology. Unlike cultivating resentment and then spending decades seething at how racist, sexist and hopelessly unfair everything is, which I’m sure is bound to pay off.

And Mark Steyn on the indignant librarian, The Cat In The Hat, and the great racist retcon: 

The piece argues that the Cat in the Hat’s bow tie is meant to be an evocation of 19th-century racist minstrel shows. Now, just off the top of my head, cartoon characters who wear bow ties: Porky Pig, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Huckleberry Hound. Yogi Bear doesn’t wear a bow, he wears a tie like me, but his boy sidekick Boo Boo the Bear wears a bow tie. Ambrosia, I think the name is, in ‘My Little Pony’ wears a bow tie. I’m not one of the many men in the western world who are obsessed with ‘My Little Pony’ and have ‘My Little Pony’ parties, but I happen to know this one character in ‘My Little Pony’ wears a bow tie. Cartoon characters wear bow ties. That has nothing to do the minstrel shows. We are making ourselves a society too stupid to survive.  

Readers are invited to speculate as to exactly when said books became so “steeped in racist propaganda,” as the librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro claims, and therefore corrupting of children. Presumably, it was at some point after Ms Phipps Soeiro was photographed proudly dressed as the aforementioned cat, at work, with children, while celebrating the birthday of one Theodor Seuss Geisel. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets on any subject, in the comments.

If you laugh at this, you’re a terrible, terrible person. 

Via Damian. 

Twist. (h/t, Holborn) || “Syrian paralysis cheese” and other translation errors. || Scenes from a small planet called Earth, specifically South Tyrol in the Alps. || Today’s word is precocious. Also, turn the bloody phone round. || Ambition. || Berlin, July, 1945. || Existential iPhone unboxing video. || Your self-driving Mercedes. || Morning glory. || Pretty moths. || Swatting flies is hard. || This. || That. || This too. (h/t, Franklin) || “Fuck your laws,” says she. (h/t, dicentra) || “On the third Friday of September, the small village of Binissalem shuts down to have dinner in the streets.” || Owl sneeze. || Kaleida. || Nigerian ladies’ hair, animated. (h/t, Coudal) || 1980s New York, a searchable photo-reference. || And finally, ladies with “manipulative cleavage” and other casting calls of note.

In case you missed it, via Rafi in the comments: 

“The performative shit is done,” says she, performatively.

Richard Bledsoe on high culture: 

Pity the poor Hirshhorn Museum. They occupy a prime piece of real estate, right on the National Mall in the wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC. And yet, as a museum dedicated to contemporary art, the institute just doesn’t seem to get much love or respect… An article about a recent acquisition the Hirshhorn made may give some insight as to why they lack esteem. Smithsonian.com is eager to explain it in this article: Why the Artist Ragnar Kjartansson Asked his Mother to Spit On Him.

As you’ll no doubt want to behold this artistic spectacle, this feat of aesthetic phlegm projection, here it is. 

Glenn Reynolds on campus radicals’ bad counsel: 

Deriding the bourgeoisie is de rigueur in the academy… But this contempt is doubly hypocritical since the academy exists largely because others still embrace bourgeois virtues of hard work, education, and upward social mobility. Relatively few students at the University of San Diego Law School are there solely to improve their minds, I suspect. Rather, they hope that they will improve their lives if they work hard and try for success. The faculty — and dean’s — salaries are paid by this phenomenon. If students only went to law school out of intellectual curiosity, there would be a lot fewer law schools. […] These same [bourgeois] behaviours… are even more valuable to people whose social and economic status is poor. Upper middle class families have a lot of social and financial capital to draw on when a kid flunks out, loses a job, gets pregnant outside of marriage, or gets in trouble with the law. For people with less, these experiences are likely to be disastrous and life-ruining. To suggest otherwise is to engage in a monstrous and damaging deception.

See also this. Examples of the aforementioned deriding, and a full-on gale of fashionable hysteria, can be found here and here. 

Or, Hysterical Woman Is Hysterical:

Hate speech… makes one wish one was dead or worse had never been born, the ultimate existential black hole. Hate speech is a speech act that can harm the central nervous system, it can result in PTSD, and when used by police and jailers to humiliate prisoners hate speech is psychological torture, a civil rights and human rights violation. In short, hate speech is an act of violence. 

So writes Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology lecturer at Berkeley. She’s referring, of course, to the recent visit by Ben Shapiro. Though quite why Mr Shapiro should be mentioned alongside psychological torture and the violation of human rights remains unclear, and Dr Scheper-Hughes takes care not to offer even a single direct quotation by way of evidence. Instead, we’re treated to some inventive ventriloquism, to the extent that readers are expected to believe that Shapiro has somewhere referred to black people, all of them, as “criminally inclined, drug addicted, homicidal losers.” Those familiar with Mr Shapiro’s actual output may find this a little bizarre. Almost as bizarre as the claim that Shapiro is not only “racist, sexist” and “misogynist,” but also “very dangerous” and a “physical threat” to students.  

Perhaps Dr Scheper-Hughes has some thoughts on whether publicly and hyperbolically defaming people – accusing them of racism and misogyny, and of being a physical menace to students, for instance – also constitutes “violence” and a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder.  

It’s a good-news-bad-news story: 

Several Hurricane Irma victims called a 1-800 number for help and were offered phone sex instead of hurricane relief assistance.

It’s very kind, I’m sure, but perhaps now isn’t the time.

The Miami Herald reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region 4 office accidentally tweeted the number Wednesday, which offered assistance to people dealing with damaged roofs. The number was supposed to be a “1-888” number, not a “1-800” number.

Via Sam.