You wouldn’t want to miss the annual International Buffalo Bodypainting Festival in Jiangcheng County, China. 

Oh, don’t tut. You’ve been culturally enriched.  

Silvia Murray Wakefield, a “London-based feminist and mother of two,” is unhappy about a certain ongoing sporting event. Yes, that one. And so, naturally, she asks:

Is it anti-feminist to watch the World Cup?

Then the sorrow unfolds:

Still warm and fuzzy from the joy of the Olympics two years ago, I hanker to join an emotional ride with fellow spectators again, but the World Cup is different, as is the Tour de France. There’s no Jessica Ennis or Victoria Pendleton to aspire to or root for because these events include male competitors only.

Apparently conflicted about cheering on members of the opposite sex, this hitherto-neglected detail puts Ms Murray Wakefield in a quandary. 

Men’s football is loved in Britain simply because the players are men… Even the fact the men’s World Cup is not explicitly stated to be a men’s competition erases women.

Yes, dear readers. All of womanhood is being erased by a sporting event that happens once every four years.

So do we women sideline ourselves by boycotting the games or do we take up space and holler along because it is fun and exciting?

Clearly, it’s an issue fraught with political agonising.

You could argue that the FIFA World Cup is also ageist and disablist (footballers are doomed to retire as soon as their wisdom teeth fully descend and disabled people are tacitly excluded).

And so it turns out that the World Cup is not only patriarchal and sexist but also ageist and disablist. So much exclusion, it takes the breath away. It’s not so much a sport, then, as an avalanche of bigotry and sin. Though, curiously, no such concerns are aimed at the young and able-bodied ladies who’ll be taking part in the Women’s World Cup in Canada, an event mentioned pointedly, three times, in the same article. Or indeed at the Olympics, an event that two years on leaves our Guardianista feeling “warm and fuzzy,” and in which male and female athletes compete separately.

From the Sydney Morning Herald: 

Student gets stuck in giant stone vagina.

There’s a photo for the curious. 

Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer with an interest in “urban inequalities,” questions the “rosy image of mixed communities.” And yet he wants to ensure more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.” 

When trying to create a better social mix, the focus is almost always on deprived areas. Aren’t the posh bits a problem too?

You see, in his mind,

Poverty and affluence are two sides of the same coin. One would not exist without the other.  

He therefore entertains a “physically radical intervention.” Specifically, 

The idea that we must demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing is still way off the agenda. Maybe it is time this changed.

He’s so daring, our academic. And hey, what a headline. 

If we really do want to mix communities, where better to start than in west London, in the decidedly unmixed Belgravia (average house price £4.4m)? Of course, such a move is unlikely to happen any time soon. The powers that be tend to live in such areas, after all,

Unlike Guardian columnists and editors, or leftwing academics, who invariably seek out only the most humble accommodation.

and are unlikely to appreciate the deliberate urban degeneration.

Imagine those three words, in bold, on the policy document. Followed by, “It’s what you people need, good and hard.” 

As someone who grew up in what would now be considered a “deprived area,” amid lots of “social” housing and all manner of inventively antisocial behaviour, and then escaped, I’m not sure I’d appreciate a second taste of what it was I was hoping to get the hell away from. It’s hard to feel nostalgic for casual vandalism, routine burglary and bus stops and phone boxes that stank reliably of piss. 

“I was gonna put it in a box.” // Iceland, baby. (h/t, Mick) // Baby cage, circa 1930s. // Cliff-edge swing for maximum thrills. // Swing of a different type. Comes with lube and “love mask.” // Miss Sausage Queen, 1955. // Smart cups will judge you. // Eavesdropping gear. // Gourmet dehydrated meals for discernment on the go. // Koh Yao Noi. // Karen Carpenter’s voice. // What Vine is for. // For those who like their sweets in the form of a Zen rock garden. // Russian salt mining. // Switzerland’s timber bridges, all 1055 of them. (h/t, MeFi) // Bald animals. // Neighbourhood peacocks. // Dark Central Park. // “Coffee in extreme conditions.” // And finally, for the ever-so-slightly obsessive, roam the Enterprise-D with PixelTrek.