Watch the strings.

No computer graphics or slow-motion effects were used in the video. There is, however, some debate as to what it is we’re seeing…

Photographs by Hengki Koentjoro. Via Coudal. 

Steve Rogers gets buff, fights Nazis. // Steve Reich’s Clapping Music as performed by Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. // Seahorses being born. // Hand-painted chocolate ladybirds. // Chocolate heart. // There are microbes on your cheese. // The catacombs of Paris. // Cockpit panoramas. (h/t, MeFi) // Unseen Star Trek. // Half-pound gummi bear on a stick. // Mechanised shoes make piss-poor art. // Snowflakes and microscopy. // Microscopy and alcohol. // Objects, exploded. // The future isn’t what it used to be. // The apologetic robber. //X-Men rebooted. // “Researchers have managed to make an entire paper clip invisible.”

Further to recent comments regarding Laurie Penny and her struggles with reality, let’s turn to the New Statesman, where, thanks to Laurie, “pop culture and radical politics” are given a “feminist twist.”

This latest trend shows that female sexual shame remains big business.

Which heinous trend would this be? Why, vajazzling, of course:

The burgeoning celebrity craze for shaving, denuding and perfuming one’s intimate area before applying gemstones in a variety of approved girly patterns. The end result resembles a raw chicken breast covered in glitter.

It’s not for everyone, then.

As the name implies, this one is just for the girls – nobody, so far, has suggested that men’s sexual equipment is unacceptable if it doesn’t taste like cake and sparkle like a disco ball.

Ah. I fear some presumptuous rote feminism may be lurking in the bushes. As it were. But wait a minute. Who’s suggesting that an unadorned ladygarden is now “unacceptable”? Are husbands and boyfriends nationwide lecturing on the woes of unglittered panty parts? Do the manufacturers of vajazzling kits put ominous hints of inadequacy on their packaging? (Incidentally, any male readers in search of a sequinned sack or other “dickoration” will find suitable products online, and New York’s Completely Bare Spa does, I’m told, oblige.)

Surely it can’t catch on. Surely, no matter how ludicrous, painful and expensive consumer culture’s intervention in our sex lives becomes, nobody is disgusted enough by their own normal genitals that they would rather look like they’ve just been prepped for surgery by Dr Bling. Or are they?

I hate to be a nuisance, but I do have more questions. How, exactly, does “consumer culture” – i.e., a faintly silly fashion product – intervene in “our” sex lives? Aren’t vajazzling kits bought by women voluntarily – for amusement possibly? Are women everywhere, or anywhere, being coerced into vajazzling – and if so, by whom? And why should we assume – apparently based on nothing – that the obvious motives are insecurity and self-disgust?

Suddenly, my teenage friends are popping off to get vajazzled.

Thank goodness for Laurie’s friends, to whom she turns, conveniently, whenever evidence is needed. No doubt they too are mere playthings of the all-powerful vajazzling conglomerates.

As this blog is now four years old – and despite conventions of modesty and good taste – I thought I’d air some of the kind words aimed this way during that period. (The unkind words, a much longer and more expressive list, can wait for another day.)

One of my favourite blogospherical institutions is David Thompson’s Friday Ephemera. No matter what else may be happening in the world, there, every Friday, they are… A couple of clicks will get me to things like… a horse in a car… a sex toys chess set… a cat with bionic legs… (Brian Micklethwait, Samizdata.)

Brilliantly analytical stuff. Go there now. (Libertarian Alliance.)

Particularly astute. (FIRE.)

Inestimably wonderful… Thompson has the Olympian detachment to see the posturing of radical academics for what it is. (Pirate Ballerina.)

David Thompson has done yeoman work in documenting some of the worst excesses of PC thought disorders in education. (Shrinkwrapped.)

Cool, cultured and cynical. (Fabian Tassano, Mediocracy.)

Brilliant skewering. (Nick M, Counting Cats in Zanzibar.)

Intelligent, funny and very sharp. (Paul Saxton.)

If you’re my kind of conservative, you should really be reading David Thompson (this post is a killer), who was pointed out to me, strangely enough, by none other than Canada’s favourite pinko, Dr Dawg.  (Olaf Raskolnikov, Prairie Wrangler.)

David Thompson, a British ‘muscular liberal’ commentator (on the right, where I sit, although he objects to that description), runs one of the most elegant blogs in the ‘sphere, truly a thing of beauty. I agree with barely a word the man says, but he says it so well. (Dr Dawg.)

David Thompson’s blog is a consistently interesting read, but where I think he really outdoes himself is with his weekly ‘Friday Ephemera’ slot. Today is no exception; you can meet the man who’s collected his own navel fluff since 1984 (and see pics of 25 years of lint and the jars he stores them in); video of the International Space Station, eerily floating 360 km above the camera; a rundown on the world’s most impressive bank vaults; and a mirror made of wood. Actually made of wood… Utterly sound, consistently fascinating, never predictable. (Mr Eugenides.)

The artful, applied essence of incisive, muscular, game-changing ridicule. You could spend a year of weekends in his archives. (EBD, Small Dead Animals.)

Oh, and during his time at Protein Wisdom, Dan Collins saw fit to compare your host, favourably, with Kate Beckinsale in a skintight leather catsuit – a comparison that has more than once robbed me of a good night’s sleep. If you’ve found this rickety barge at all entertaining over the last four years, please note that it’s kept afloat not by advertising or a secret private fortune, but by readers’ donations. Regarding which, buttons can be found below.

And thank you.

Skeletons made of light. // “How large would they be in the sky?” // Storm on Saturn. // Ann Althouse has shrunk. // Neutrino observatory under Mount Kamioka, Japan. // Pilots, scripts and pitches – from BSG and Doctor Who to The West Wing. (h/t, MeFi) // A whole heap of John Wayne films. // Zombies, robots, aliens. // Portable death ray. // Grow Cannon. // There are things inside your belly button. // Nostrils. // Wristwatch of note. // Residence of note. // The uterus piñata. // The UK explained for readers overseas. Look, we’re complicated, okay? // The complete McBain. (h/t, MirandaM) // 22 manly uses for an Altoids tin.

By Deutsch Inc.

Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I’ve been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be… This has stretched my objectivity to its limits. I have had to work and rework the article to make sure I was constructing an accurate portrait.

So says Laurie Penny, reporting from “the front line of student activism.”

Readers familiar with Ms Penny’s brand of activist journalism – in the pages of the Guardian, New Statesman and the communist Morning Star – may find her use of the words “accurate” and “objectivity” inadvertently amusing. This is the same Laurie Penny who tells us that, while “not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist,” football is nonetheless “commodified nationalism” played by “misogynist jocks” indulging in “organised sadism.” The World Cup is apparently not about football at all, but “only and always about men.” It’s a “month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia,” one that “violently excludes more than half the people.”

Like so much in Laurie’s world, it just does, okay?

Writing for Red Pepper, Ms Penny tells us that, “capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women” and that women are reduced to “reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.” The same article rails against “US state governments [that] compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination.” 

It is, I think, fair to say that Laurie Penny enjoys railing against things, generally things that aren’t entirely obvious but which are framed as both terrible and somehow self-evident. A typical Laurie Penny article is long on assertion, short on facts and coherent argument, and invariably written in the highest possible gear. She rails against the Conservative Party (“hordes of drooling poshos”) and its “brutally intolerant moral agenda.” The details of this brutally intolerant agenda are, alas, somewhat vague. She rails against “the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control,” the particulars of which also remain unspecified and mysterious. She rails against a “heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses all of us.” (What, you didn’t know?) She rails against “brutal repression” by an impending police state that no-one else can see, and she rails against protestors “not being heard,” as if being heard must entail being agreed with and obeyed. Ours, she says, is a world “on fire.”

When not railing against a heteronormative police state that’s brutal, intolerant and also on fire, Ms Penny likes to share with us an extensive menu of personal miseries, along with other aspects of her fascinating self:  

It’s getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It’s getting harder to stay angry… That terrifies me more than anything… The centre-right have taken back my country… Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world’s only superpower.

Very few people surf in the dark. // This product is endorsed by the Guild of Evil. // Matchstick insects. // Tape measure tesseract. // The dog dung vacuum. // Contemporary coffins. // For cat enthusiasts. // 100 years of IBM. // The Adventures of Sexy Batman. // Heroic but avoidable film character deaths. // Shelley Duvall says hello. (h/t, MeFi) // “The membrane is tens of times thinner than a human hair.” And it’s somewhere overhead. // Destination Moon, 1950. // Make your own planet. // “The goal is to show how hard and frustrating it was for an average person to simply do their shopping.” Yes, it’s communist Monopoly.

Kay Hymowitz outlines the tensions between institutional / academic feminism, in which the state is pivotal and must always expand, and the “Mama Grizzly” feminism of Sarah Palin and much of the Tea Party, in which budgets and bureaucracy are major issues too:

The Palinites, then, have introduced an unfamiliar thought into American politics: maybe a trillion-dollar deficit is a woman’s issue. But where does that leave expensive, bureaucracy-heavy initiatives like universal pre-K, child care, and parental leave? Consider a recent feminist initiative, the Paycheck Fairness Act, passed in the House but scuttled in November by a few Republican Senate votes. Feminist supporters, saying that it would close loopholes in previous antidiscrimination legislation, didn’t worry about how redundant or bureaucratically tortured it might be or how many lawsuits it might unleash. But chances are that the Grizzlies, in keeping with their frontiersy individualism and their fears about ballooning deficits, would see in the act government run amok. After all, it would come on top of the 1963 Equal Pay Act; Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination; the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; innumerable state and local laws and regulations; and a crowd of watchdogs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The ideological tension is perhaps best summarised by this contribution from the bewildered novelist Amy Bloom:

There is no such thing as free market/anti-legislation… feminism. 

Helen Smith notes a study by Daniel John Zizzo and Andrew Oswald on the cost of malice:

Are people willing to pay to burn other people’s money? The short answer to this question is: yes. Our subjects gave up large amounts of their cash to hurt others in the laboratory. The extent of burning surprised us… Even at a price of 0.25 (meaning that to burn another person’s dollar cost me 25 cents), many people wished to destroy other individuals’ cash.

And, via Mr Eugenides, Jonathan Rauch on intellectual pluralism and its opponents:

The modern anti-racist and anti-sexist and anti-homophobic campaigners are totalists, demanding not that misguided ideas and ugly expressions be corrected or criticised but that they be eradicated. They make war not on errors but on error, and like other totalists they act in the name of public safety – the safety, especially, of minorities… For lack of anything else, I will call the new anti-pluralism “purism,” since its major tenet is that society cannot be just until the last traces of invidious prejudice have been scrubbed away.

Feel free to add your own.