Dog uses human toilet better than many children. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // At last, the suppository slingshot. // Chinese art teacher builds own full-size Hulkbuster. // Incoming. // It’s all kicking off in Lego city. // Attention, sexy ladies: “For Skype date nights, I recommend going for a minimal, but semi-glam look.” (h/t, Insty) // Foetal development. // The international flag of planet Earth. // The untold story of Industrial Light & Magic. // Monsters from Mars. // The museum of pocket calculating devices. (h/t, Coudal) // A visit to a Tokyo stationery shop. // Trek gnomes. // The news, summarised in gifs. // Police sketches alongside actual mugshots. // Baby bees. // The Bluetooth-enabled KFC Tray Typer. // And finally, from sodding to bollocks, how to swear like a Brit.

Meanwhile, in criminal genius news: 

A man has been charged with stealing his own barrister’s mobile phone during an appearance at Bexley Magistrates’ Court. Bobby Heath, 25, was appearing in court to plead guilty to charges of possession of cannabis and driving without insurance… He has been bailed to appear again at Bexley Magistrates’ Court on June 2 regarding the alleged theft of the mobile phone.

Swiped from Julia, who has an eye for the adventures of our criminal classes. 

Jim Goad on the “microaggressions” hustle: 

That’s what’s ultimately dangerous about this concept of “microaggresions” — even the demented fanatics who insist that such things actually exist will concede that the perpetrator may not harbour or exhibit any malice whatsoever… Under this framework, bigotry is solely in the eyes of the accuser. No matter how pleasant your demeanour or how generously you act, you can still be bludgeoned over the head with baseless accusations of unconscious racism, and your accuser will feel like a good person for doing it.

And no vain, vindictive soul would ever exploit that kind of leverage for purposes of their own, would they?

David French on academia’s racial quotas and ideological cleansing: 

If Americans broadly understood how the process works, support for affirmative action would diminish even further. First, few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favoured minority groups. If students were black or the ‘right’ kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals. Second, these dramatic breaks rarely go to poor kids who are overcoming the challenges of ghetto schools.

And Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have been mining the naked cronyism and deep comedy of Australia’s taxpayer-funded art world:  

The finest grant of them all occurred in 2011, when Sydney artist Denis Beaubois received $20,000 from the Australia Council. Beaubois simply piled the cash into two stacks, put a glass box around it and called the resultant piece Currency. The arts grant and the art were one and the same. Then he put the money up for sale at an auction – where someone actually paid $21,350 to buy $20,000. ‘’The money I make will be used to finance part two of the project, which is a series of performance/video works on the division of labour, and capitalism,’’ Beaubois said. There is a much easier way for Beaubois and all Australian artists to study capitalism, and that is by participating in it. The Australia Council should be shut down, along with just about all arts funding. This would save close to $700 million per year and – absolutely guaranteed – would result in better art.

Artists making things that customers might like and wish to pay for directly, voluntarily? Why, the very idea.

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

If Thomas Sowell had a Twitter account it would look something like this.

By all means share any Sowellisms that catch your eye.

Via dicentra. 

Ultrasound for the blind. // Mud brick high-rise, Yemen. // Jack Kirby spreads. See Big Barda’s giant nutcrackers. // Cubes of food. // TypeDrummer. // Jetpacks over Dubai. // A catheter’s journey. // Iron Panda. // Those floaty things in your eyes. (h/t, MeFi) // How to fold a T-shirt. // “You can actually, physically, press her breasts together.” // Bach’s crab canon on a Möbius strip. (h/t, Randall) // Lollipops of note. // Chinese crowd shots. // Sandwich knife of note. // Van Gogh, animated. // Gravity. // It’s an advert for gardening. // The chemistry of gin. // 100,000 stars. // 20. // Tornado versus rainbow. // “I was told she wouldn’t live long so I set about filming her every day.” // SwimFin. // Sky Sharks. // And finally, via Ted, an underground bee mishap of note. 

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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last eight years, the reheated series and greatest hits are good places to start. There you’ll find coverage of the high-minded arts, along with the blistering insights of leftist intellectuals, and regular bulletins from the world of academia, where WrongThought™ is purged for a fluffier tomorrow and where lust is corrected with feminist pornography. And do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads. 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.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Further to the second item here, a musical interlude by Oberlin College Choir.

Via College Insurrection. 

From the Southern Maryland News:

A woman from Maryland was arrested last week for allegedly contaminating milk served to family members at her home with shavings of dead skin from her feet. 

And yes, there’s a mugshot of the lady in question.

Via Thomas Pauli, Brendan O’Neill on post-election bewilderment: 

The Twitterati — the time-rich, mostly left-leaning set, consisting of cultural entrepreneurs, commentators and other people who don’t work with their hands and can therefore tweet all day — were especially dumbfounded by the results. Boiled down, their pained cry was: “But everyone I know voted Labour.” […] The real Two Britains… is, on one side, the Britain of the moral clerisy, which is pro-EU, multicultural, anti-tabloid, politically correct and devoted to welfarism and paternalism… and, on the other side, the Britain of the rest of the us, of the masses, of those people increasingly viewed by the cultural elite as inscrutable, incomprehensible, and in need of nudging, social re-engineering and behaviour modification. […] 

The more Labour comes to be occupied by influential but unrepresentative middle-class professionals, the more contemptuous it becomes of the Other Britain, the lesser Britain, the stupid Britain that won’t obediently vote Labour… We have seen this already in the few hours since the results started coming in: Neil Kinnock musing over the “self-delusion” of the electorate; Polly Toynbee, grand dame of knackered Labourism, speaking of the “mind-blowing ignorance” of some of the electorate, who are “weak readers” and don’t know what is in their best interests (which is Labour, obviously).

Ace of Spades takes a big lens to “microaggressions”: 

Now I know it’s the Worst Thing Ever to try to find out if the person you’re speaking to is of Korean or Chinese, or Korean or Japanese, extraction, because, like, You Should Just Know Or Something. These questions are said to be “microaggressing” or “othering” or “exoticizing.” One could also call them a stranger taking an interest in you and your culture… Like most SJW microkvetches, this one is a bit incoherent, insisting, as it does, that Anglos should simultaneously take no interest in Asians’ heritage and also have perfect native-level fluency in cultural differences between Asian cohorts.

And Franklin Einspruch on the virtues of “cultural appropriation”: 

Akira Kurosawa studied American pulp novels, and George Lucas studied Kurosawa. Elvis is unimaginable without black-gospel music, and Jimi Hendrix is unimaginable without Elvis. I could go on. Forever. Where does new culture come from? It is copied, with alterations, from existing culture. The process is reproductive. Sexy, even. So of course, the outrage-as-a-lifestyle wing of the progressive Left wants to dictate rules for its proper enjoyment. 

Demanding constraints on such an ancient and universal process is like trying to turn the tides by yelling at them, but these particular scolds seem unaware of the folly. They have complained about straight women appropriating lesbian fashion, art students appropriating Native American dwellings, couture houses appropriating Native American garb and Latina hairstyles, a Canadian post-punk band appropriating the name “Viet Cong,” non-Asian pop singers looking too Japanese or too Hindu, and white models looking too black. […] As is the case in all examples of political correctness, it is an attempt at control masquerading as an appeal for justice.

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

Bowling in Antarctica. // Bond song on a budget. // Berlin, July, 1945. // Brought to you by Coca-Cola. // You know, that volcano down the road. (h/t, Dr W) // City layouts as rarely seen. (h/t, Coudal) // Lust Be My Destiny and other classic pulp covers. From Playgirl Pad to Orgy Ranch, a spectrum of fine literature. // When pets look at food. // At last, squid ink oven toaster pizza. // Symphonic Pokémon. // Cactus paintings. // Touch pianist. // My mutant hands. // Moon streaks. // Dry dog, wet dog. // WiFi-enabled smartbin of note. // New York World’s Fair, 1964. // Assorted foodstuffs, organised. // Jellies being jelly. // The thrill of castanets. // Self-organising robot swarm. Continue the research. // Instant muscles, only $919. // And finally, the Queen’s hats, a millinery history.