These guys are way more flexible than you. // Moroccan tree goats, obviously. // Top end kitchen knives made from molten meteorite. // A calendar of tiny dramas. // “It was designed to be an enjoyable ride.” // Only rub the underside. // Bias in social psychology. // Test your ear for pitch. // Candlestick. // “The global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate.” // Meanwhile, in exploding toilet news. //“No lumps, no waste, no mess.” // Lots of Lithuanian garage doors. // Designing hideous clothes is now even easier. // The Fallout Shelter Handbook, 1962. (h/t, Things) // The earliest known fuck. // And finally, as my dear old grey-haired gran used to say, “When walking past a monkey, don’t ever give it the finger.” 

It’s not racism when people of colour are prejudiced against white people.

And,

You can’t be sexist against men.

The deep intersectional wisdom of incompetent “comic artist” Alli Kirkham.

Via dicentra, Darleen Click finds a mother whose environmentalist pieties have produced a nightmare teenager: 

I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance travelled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry and fish I serve. He questions my every move — from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?) — an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.

The mother in question, Ronnie Cohen, is a “freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area” who writes about “social justice issues.”

And Andrew Stuttaford quotes Peggy Noonan on lofty border policies: 

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighbourhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality — normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular. The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder. 

I spotted a not dissimilar attitude, albeit in a different context, while watching this BBC documentary on the preservation and listing of despised Brutalist architecture – specifically, the notorious Park Hill estate in Sheffield, which embarrassingly dominates the city’s skyline. Note the romantic enthusiasm of the presenter, architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff, for this locally infamous eyesore, which is known chiefly for muggings, prostitution and the joys of dodging objects hurled from upper floors. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Dyckhoff does not live in, or near, Sheffield.) Note too, around 18:25, the views of Martin Cherry from English Heritage, who airily dismisses the preferences of Sheffield residents and insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

The sounds made by a man playing with his nut sack. Lasts an hour. Headphones recommended. // The secret underground garage you’ve always wanted. // How to walk through walls. Do let me know how it goes. (h/t, Damian.) // Wood skins. // Books, stones and glass. // Bicycle-riding robot. // Taj Mahal made of balloons. // Hefty bells. // Free Hitchock. // Tea bag holder of note. // Bone conduction headphones. // Mozart, the hard way. // Smoke angel. // Earth View. // I think he’s being punished for not eating his vegetables. // BBC election coverage, 1955. // Hippie tree house village, 1969. Warning: hippie nudity. // The science of penis preference. // Fluid dynamics. // How to be James Bond. // And finally, via PegLeg, Yoko Ono performs the theme to The Good Life.

Marc Chacksfield steers us to this Guardian review of the film Legend, which the reviewer, Benjamin Lee, describes as “overflowing with bad dialogue,” “disappointingly shallow” and suffering from “a major lack of atmosphere and an overwhelming stench of inauthenticity.”

Oh dear.

However, as Mr Chacksfield points out, the film’s marketing team has done what it can with this somewhat unflattering two-star review.

Via Mr Eugenides. 

For newcomers, three items from the archives:  

Feel the Racial Healing. 

The Guardian’s Aisha Mirza bemoans the “psychic burden” of living among white people, which is worse than being mugged.

The more I think about it, the more this may exemplify a near-perfect Guardian article, the ideal to which all other Guardian columnists should aspire. It’s haughty and obnoxious, is ignorant of relevant subject matter, is frequently question-begging, and its imagined piety is premised on a rather obvious double standard. Specifically, Ms Mirza’s belief that people who leave London do so, secretly, because they don’t feel comfortable living among people with skin of a darker hue, which is racist and therefore bad, and her own simultaneous preference not to live among people whose skin is paler than hers, which is somehow not racist at all, and is in fact aired as the last word in righteousness.

Aesthetes, Take Heed. 

Brace yourselves for some taxpayer-funded cultural improvement.

Those with a taste for even more daring and challenging work may prefer the theatrical stylings of Mr Ivo Dimchev, a “radical performer” acclaimed for his “gripping sensitivity” and whose performance piece I-ON “explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects, before showing us “how to make contact with something that has no function.” Readers are advised that the aforementioned contact-making, which was performed as part of the 2011 Vienna International Dance Festival and is shown below, inevitably includes vigorous self-pleasure with what appears to be a wig.

Strange Construal. 

In which socialists misremember a 1970s sitcom.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions. And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

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

Ashe Schow on attempts to exacerbate campus “rape” hysteria: 

One of the best tactics so-called researchers have used to conclude that fully one-fifth of college women will be sexually assaulted is to vastly expand the definition of what [rape] is… Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown dissects the [Rutgers University survey], noting the definition of “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” included everything from “remarks about physical appearance” and “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient” to “threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behaviour, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” There’s an ocean of difference between someone saying you look good today and someone physically pinning you down against your will. To include both under the category of “sexual assault” is just ludicrous, and certainly not a serious way of studying the issue.

These, though, are the standards of Rutgers’ School of Social Work.

And via Ace, Timothy Sandefur tracks the wildly changing politics of Star Trek: 

At no point in the show’s history had Kirk or his colleagues treated the Klingons unjustly, whereas audiences for decades have watched the Klingons torment and subjugate the galaxy’s peaceful races. In “Errand of Mercy,” they attempt genocide to enslave the Organians. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” they try to poison a planet’s entire food supply… Yet never does the Klingon leader, Gorkon, or any of his people, acknowledge — let alone apologise for — such injustices. Quite the contrary; his daughter tells a galactic conference, “We are a proud race. We are here because we intend to go on being proud.” Within the context of the original Star Trek, such pride is morally insane. Yet in service to Spock’s mission of elevating peace over right, the film [Undiscovered Country] portrays the Klingons not as thugs, but as misunderstood casualties of human bigotry. Kirk and his crew, says Gorkon’s daughter at the Enterprise banquet, represent a “homo sapiens-only club,” devoted to such chauvinistic values as “inalienable human rights.” “Why, the very name,” she quips, “is racist.”

The incoherent utopianism of many Trek episodes – “the pernicious ideal,” as dicentra called it – has been discussed here before, many times, along with the authoritarian types who imagine a similarly ‘progressive’ tomorrow. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Mortified cow. (h/t, Damian) // Impromptu kitten rescue. // How to make squid piglets. // Ants encounter monolith. // When a first-stage engine nozzle lands in your living room. // Satlapse. // One scene, three Lecters. // Layers of paper. // That paper polygon gorilla head you’ve always wanted. // Thirteen-year-old boy is pleased to discover Portal-themed bedroom. // A short film about a ballet shoe factory. // Underwater belly rub. // Beatboxing saxophonist plays Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. // Motoring over Ben Nevis, 1911. // Drone versus ram. (h/t, Julia) // I see a straw monster. // Commuting sociably in the pre-smartphone era. // For the agoraphobic and antisocial, an app for avoiding crowds. // Gif of note. // And finally, tastily, a leech that feeds exclusively on hippo rectums. 

Just press your face down on the scanner. 

Via here, via Joan. 

Janice Fiamengo on feminist narratives and unmentioned history: 

After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn’t until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women – which of course we hear a great deal about – but to all men. So how can this be – that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don’t talk about its extension to poor and working class men?

Via sk60, Jonathan Foreman on the Tim Hunt “sexism” drama and the dishonesty and malevolence of certain key players: 

The most generous interpretation of Connie St Louis’s bizarre behaviour is that she was too intellectually limited to recognise irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

And Peter Hasson on ‘progressive’ educators and predetermined conclusions: 

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” “male,” and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” […] Students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.[…] White students in Professor John Streamas’s “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”

Imagine what such ‘thinkers’ might do if granted real power. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.