A group of researchers put the theory to the test, letting twenty volunteers soak their fingers in warm water for 30 minutes to get them good and pruney, then testing exactly how long it took them to move wet glass marbles and fishing weights from one container to another. On average, pruney-fingered participants moved wet marbles 12 percent more quickly than when they were tested with unwrinkled fingers. When the same test was performed with dry marbles, the times were roughly the same. Thus, it seems, the hypothesis was proved: pruney fingers do help us grip better.

From the Smithsonian magazine. 

Matt Welch on Obama’s fantasy economics:

Democrats are in denial about the true cost of their ideological commitments. If we taxed Americans enough to cover the cost (or even 90 percent of the cost) of what Democrats consider the minimal level of government, the result would be recession. That should, but won’t, give big-government apologists pause.

Somewhat related: “Tax revenue has been falling despite a sharp increase in the rate.” Despite?

Jonah Goldberg on imaginary opponents:

When will [the left] accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow? I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation… To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

And Victor Davis Hanson on the ‘progressive’ aristocracy:

The medieval concept of offsetting your sins through public penance is back in play: The more loudly you talk about helping the proverbial people, the more you are allowed to live quite apart from them without guilt… Hollywood still seeks hundreds of millions in tax breaks unavailable to small businesses without shame because it is so manifestly compassionate. Occupy Wall Street does not camp out in Beverly Hills or Malibu, although the likes of Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio make more per year than do most Wall Street fat cats… For the overpaid and pampered Hollywood movie star, calling for raising taxes, banning guns, ending global warming, and legalising gay marriage means never having to feel too bad about living on the beach and making, under our capitalist system, more money in a month than do many Americans in a lifetime.

For some, professions of egalitarianism and socialist belly fire are a kind of rhetorical chaff – a way to elevate oneself as More Compassionate Than Thou, while deflecting envy from below. (“Please don’t hate me for being richer than you. Look, over there – they have even more, or almost as much –  let’s all hiss at them!”) Vicarious philanthropy – giving away freely other people’s earnings – is a remarkably effective ruse, so much so it seems to encourage a certain disregard for dissonance, as demonstrated, for example, by the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger in this comical exchange with Piers Morgan. And by the Guardian’s imperious class warrior Polly Toynbee, whose rhetoric was contrasted with her actual lifestyle and was promptly reduced to indignant spluttering on national television. Similar obliviousness is also displayed by the millionaire actor Jeremy Irons, who denounces consumerism and asks, “How many clothes do people need?” All while owning no fewer than seven houses, one of which is a peach-coloured castle. No, you’re not allowed to laugh. Because his wife is also very Green and “deeply socialist.”

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

“The Freshette protects against unsanitary restrooms, uneven terrain, wind, rain and snow.” (h/t, Ace) // Fifty years of Bond titles. // Beet box. // Mixtape table. // Simon Beck’s snow art. // The contraptions of Dr Kellogg. // Sworn virgins. // Strange weather ahead. // Avengers effects. // At last, a robot dragonfly. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Towels and stool left on the Moon. // Lactating milk jug and other kitchen accessories. (h/t, Simen) // Inks. // Catzilla. Hey, it could happen. // Cockerels and fish. // Clever mice. // Magnetic light mine. // “This is exactly what a record made of ice sounds like.” // And remember this? It’s been upgraded.

The freeloader’s manifesto. As rjmadden notes in the comments, replace ‘capitalism’ with ‘adulthood’ and all becomes clear.

From the thinkers who brought us this:

In which the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours:

A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey… Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven.

Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!”

We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.

Do read the whole thing. It brings a tear to the eye. And tune in next week when George tries to reason with the tattooed Neanderthal burgling his house.

Update, via the comments:

What’s almost – almost – touching is the implied revelation, i.e., that members of Designated Victim Groups, with which Guardianistas feel obliged to side whatever the particulars, can in fact be obnoxious and predatory scumbags. Apparently this thought hadn’t previously occurred to George and, by golly, the news troubles him. All of which suggests a well-rehearsed imperviousness to reality. One Guardian reader praises Mr Monbiot for his “refreshing honesty,” which rather gives the game away.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

For more of George’s ideological crises, see here and here.

Update 2:

Oh dear. Mr Monbiot is now being assailed on Twitter for writing such a “racist” article. However, the people doing the chastising – including an indignant, self-described “agitator” – have yet to explain exactly why the article is racist, despite being asked. One of the chastisers is a “Marxist, knitter and student of critical theory.”

Our moral and intellectual betters, obviously.

Or, Six Years of Blogging and I Still Don’t Have One of These:

A birdsong machine, circa 1890. (h/t, Cmeej.) 

As usual, posting will be intermittent over the holidays and readers are advised to subscribe to the blog feed, which will alert you to anything new. Thanks for another five thousand or so comments this year, some of which have been much more interesting than the actual posts. And particular thanks to all those who’ve made PayPal donations to help keep this rickety barge afloat. Much appreciated. Newcomers are invited to rummage through the archives and greatest hits, where you’ll find, among other things, the thrill of public nudity, the warm glow of socialist compassion and humility, and coverage of the loftiest, most high-minded arts. 

To you and yours, a very good one. 

Attention
menfolk, you are faulty, inferior beings unless you agree with Laurie and Hugo.

Photographed by John Bulmer, whose book The North was published in November. 

“Tennis star buys world’s supply of donkey cheese.” // Ducks
cross motorway. // Arthur Scargill menswear. // Bill Whittle on unserious people. // Self-dramatizing narcissism. // Offensively hot peanut butter. // The International Banana Museum. // Inside Amazon. // Festive decorations. // The full-body sweater you’ve always wanted. // “For a fee and a stool sample, the curious can find out what’s living in their intestine.” // Solar-powered plant thirst detector. // Page turning contraption using (among other things) a hairdryer and a hamster. (h/t, Ace) // At last, a Nüdifier app. // “We have a very good system to detect penis drawings.”

Actor Sir Terence Stamp remembers the Seventies and playing a supervillain from the planet Krypton: 

For me, it was my comeback movie. I’d been out of work for eight years and living in India…. When I walked onto that set I’d been in an ashram for a year, learning to separate orgasm from ejaculation. I was rechanneling the life-force and I hadn’t been working, and when I walked on the set, it seemed like everyone was asleep, but I was so, so ready. The only guy who was really up for it was Brando – he totally understood where I was coming from. 

Via here, via Anna.