Behind the scenes. (h/t, Damian) // Boneless hamsters. // Bitty ribbit. // How to swim backwards. // A century of Holmes and Watson in cinema and TV, including Korean and Chinese interpretations. // Assorted 70s porn soundtracks. Brace for sleazy wah-wah. // You want one and you know it. (h/t, Peter) // Prism is a game. // Whatever happened to Kelsey Grammer? // Why grammar is important. (h/t, Julia) // Stock photo reconstructions of famous paintings. // 3D-printed zoetrope. // A million dots. // At last, Nadkins. // Ultimate nerf gun is exactly like you’d imagine. // Frankenstein, 1910. // All the cats. // Loud cat. // An hour of cat TV. // A tale of two small spacecraft named Voyager. // This is one of these. // And finally, alarmingly, your toilet paper is shrinking.

Retail giant Hammerson is now taking down mirrors from its Birmingham Bullring, Bristol Cabot Circus and Croydon Centrale malls in a bid to boost the confidence of female shoppers. Alex Thomas, regional marketing manager for Hammerson, said: “One of the main reasons people come to our shopping centres is to buy clothes, whether that be a brand new wardrobe or a one off item for a special occasion. We want to ensure that everyone feels comfortable and confident when trying on clothes, so that’s why we’re trialling banning the mirrors.”

Yes, you read that correctly. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Today’s Word Is Chutzpah. 

Living in Glasgow for a year is art, says taxpayer-funded artist who lives in Glasgow.

Writing in the Guardian, Liam Hainey rushes to defend Ms Harrison’s low-effort art project, denouncing “budget butchers” and asking his readers to “look at the bigger picture.” All while carefully ignoring anything that might trouble the assumptions of the freeloading arts community. Mr Hainey, a former Green councillor, dismisses the widespread mockery of Ms Harrison’s hustle as “predictable.” But he doesn’t seem to grasp that much of the mockery occurs because hustles of this type are themselves so predictable – that what we’re seeing, yet again, is a display of arrogant presumption, one that’s routine among a socially and politically narrow subsidy-seeking caste. And so Mr Hainey tells us, triumphantly, that the money isn’t in fact being wasted because it was already earmarked for art that would probably be unpopular and which nobody asked for.

Lofty Beings. 

Feminist “creative” Katherine Garcia attempts to justify her sub-optimal life choices. Things go badly wrong.

In financial terms, the lifetime return on an arts degree is very often negative and there’s something to be said for practicality, especially if your background is a modest one. Social mobility presupposes a certain realism, a pragmatism, and making choices accordingly – say, with regard to the costs and benefits of tertiary education, which is for most an expensive one-time opportunity. I’m inclined to suggest that getting into further debt for a grad school degree in Women and Gender Studies, as Ms Garcia did, is possibly not an ideal way to help one’s family economically, or indeed oneself.

Slacking for Social Justice. 

Riyad A Shahjahan says we must “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.” Because punctuality is racist and oppressive.

As the exact nature of Dr Shahjahan’s problem has been buried under rhetorical rubble, I’ll translate as best I can. You see, being expected to keep up with the pace of lessons and deliver course work on time can induce feelings of discomfort and inferiority in those less able and conscientious, thereby resulting in “exclusionary effects,” which, it turns out, are oppressive and unjust. However, armed with postcolonial theorising, and by stressing the mystical exoticness of people with browner skin, we shall set the people free from the “dominant culture of disembodiment” and the “temporal colonisation of our bodies” – i.e., expectations of punctuality, attentiveness and general competence. Yes, we must “contest the insertion of the body into the market.”  

There’s more to poke at in the updated greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar makes my phone go ping. Which is nice.

“Hey, bear.” // A brief history of beehive hair-dos. // A brief history of horror films. // A brief history of urbanisation and the building of cities, 3700 BC – 2000 AD. // Batteries of yore. // There’s a loud buzzing noise in the garden. // Great questions of our time. // The secret world of foley. // So you know. // Illusions of note. // I’m doing it with my mind. // Casting Marvel’s Avengers, then and now. // Enhance grid 17. // Go deep. // HBO’s Westworld. // What could possibly go wrong? // Ladies and their electronic music. // Cats on amps. // Las Vegas in infrared. // And finally, voyeuristically, some passions are best left unseen.

Update: Much Brexit rumbling in the comments.

Nicholas Casey on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism: 

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná… marched on a supermarket, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves. They showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food… Economists say years of economic mismanagement… have shattered the food supply. Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural centre lie fallow for lack of fertilisers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories…

In response, President Nicolás Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba. “They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.

Readers may recall this video of a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, in which shoppers are clearly both thrilled and morally elevated by the egalitarian retail experience. Taking turns to smell the one piece of grey meat available, and then leaving it where it is, was, I’m assured, a way for the proletariat to celebrate the obvious superiority of socialism.

Meanwhile, in North Korea: 

About a third of the students who go to the farms [for a month of state-mandated rice-planting duty] get out of about half the work because they work as informers for the government.

And Douglas Murray on Europe’s migrant avalanche: 

Most of the people coming to Europe who came in the last year are not refugees, they are economic migrants; they are seeking a better life. Now, Europe cannot be the place where everybody in the world who wants to seek a better life is allowed to come and settle. It’s not possible for economic reasons; it’s not possible for geographical reasons; it’s not possible for housing and welfare reasons, and it’s not possible for cultural reasons… How do we know that most of the people who are coming are not even legitimate refugees? We know it because no less a source than the European Commission itself has now told us as much. Earlier this year in an interview, Frans Timmermans, the European Commission Vice President, admitted that in his estimate at least sixty percent of the people who came to Europe last year have no more right to be here than anybody else.

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