How to detect speech in the vibrations of a crisp bag. Watched from a distance through soundproof glass. 

Via Nerdcore. 

In the late ‘80s, I took part in a lot of performance art that included nudity, so I was familiar with baring my breasts in public.

So boasts Texan resident Phyllis Masters, with yet another classic sentence from the pages of the Guardian.

After all those gun-rights advocates brandished their weapons at Chipotle and Target this spring, everyone knows it’s legal to openly carry around your firearms in Texas. Not many folks know that it’s also legal for women to go topless in the state’s capital city… Since these ammo-sexuals feel it necessary to exercise their right to take a gun out for a date, [my friend] Lola and I decided to exercise our own. 

There is, I fear, video of this terribly bold breast-wielding activism. And so those with an appetite for shouting, bad signage and the breasts of two rather fleshy middle-aged women – women exercising their legal right to express disdain for other people exercising their legal rights – can indulge themselves here. I think it’s fair to say that a mutual understanding wasn’t reached on this particular outing, and the intended consciousness-raising concludes with the following exchange:

“Can I talk?”

“No.”

Ms Masters “settled in Austin, Texas in 1981 and loves it despite gentrification.” Via Julia. 

Nixon shares his knowledge of panda sex, 1972. // Opal of note. // YolkPig is for separating egg yolks. // A plan to nuke the Moon. // Six-year-old limbo skater. // Supermarket excursions of yore. (h/t, Ace) // An archive of field recordings, from a dawn chorus in London to grasshoppers in Moscow. // Why dogs sniff each other’s rears. // A sudden interest in the toilet. // Tasty cheeseburger meets hydrochloric acid. // Thirsty bird would like some of your water. // Taiwanese scooter traffic during rush hour. // 12 hours of hair dryer noise. // Oversized Spirograph. // The babes of chess. // Teamwork. // Insect jewellers. (h/t, Julia) // Communist ingenuity. // And because you demanded it, some goldfish bubble wrap. 

Or, Why Don’t More Women Care About Ant-Man’s Pym Particles?  

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon, Elizabeth Harrington tells us, 

The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist. The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopaedia. […] Noam Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times… has asserted the encyclopaedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards. “And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.

Such are the ruminations of the modern intellectual. 

Although not indulged with $200,000 of public money, the mighty blogger Ace does share a few unorthodox ideas. Ideas, I mean, that are unorthodox among many left-leaning academics and New York Times columnists:

The very fact that a site exists which gives an exhaustive, 4000-word-plus citations treatment of Ant-Man is going to skew male… Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much. I don’t care about Ant-Man, but for some reason I find comfort in knowing that someone out there does care about Ant-Man, and has digested Ant-Man’s fifty year history for me, should my life ever depend on knowing when Ant-Man married Janet Van Dyne… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of a website which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex and the City.

The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.

This time, by bringing you the vast artistic talents of Ms Jane Wang.

Ms Wang is perhaps best known for hosting the Earthdance Music and Movement Jam in Plainfield, Massachusetts, where “dance and music dialogue together” every second Sunday of the month. Often to stunning effect. Ms Wang’s areas of expertise are of course numerous and include “installation art, fluxus, performance art, phone photography” and “videotaping with her ultra-flip cameras.”

When not dazzling audiences with her fluxus, Ms Wang also collaborates with other, equally bold artists, with projects including the breath-taking Wire Man (2008) and Giant Red Ruby Shoe (2009). The latter being part of an “installation/meditation” shown during the Politics of Shoes artistic mega-event, the profundity of which can, thanks to video recordings, be pondered here and here.

If further proof of aesthetic genius is needed, I’ve managed to track down video of Ms Wang collaborating with Shizu Homma on a “guerrilla performance piece” on a bridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The length of said recording, a mighty 24 minutes, is necessary to convey the magnitude and seriousness of the work in question. Brace yourselves. Things really kick into high gear about 50 seconds in.

No, you mustn’t. They’re explorers, curators, keepers of the culture. We should be thanking them. Begging them for more.