Meanwhile, in where-to-go-on-that-foreign-holiday news: 

One of the most senior members of the Turkish government sparked an outcry on Tuesday, after declaring that women should not laugh loudly in public. The deputy prime minister, Bülent Arinc, one of the co-founders of the ruling Islamic Justice and Development party (AKP), made the comment while lamenting the moral decline of modern society. “A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent,” Arinc said in a speech on Monday, in the western Bursa region for the Bayram holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. “She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times,” he added.

Mr Arinc also shares his wisdom on other matters.

He denounced the excessive use of cars, saying that if even the “river Nile was filled with petrol” there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Arinc also slammed the excessive use of mobile phones in Turkish society, with women “spending hours on the phone to swap recipes.”

An equally pious Guardian reader adds this, 

Right up there with… keeping [women] barefoot and pregnant, oh wait, that’s only in America.

Any forcibly barefoot American women are welcome to respond. 

Christopher Snowdon on Derby Council and its proposed ‘Tesco Tax’: 

A hundred years ago, they would have been in favour of taxing the electricity companies to subsidise the candlestick makers. Forty years ago, they would have been throwing money at British Leyland… And what is the justification for this looting? Essentially it boils down to a rose-tinted nostalgia for high street shopping by reactionaries, protectionists and the kind of people who insist that supermarkets are unpopular despite the fact that they are always full (due to our old friend ‘false consciousness’, no doubt). These are the people who hated Woolworths and HMV until the day they went bust, at which point they tearfully mourned the end of an era.

Simon Cooke on the same: 

Seeking to rescue the traditional town centre by this [‘Tesco Tax’] route merely replaces trade with subsidy. The independent retailers and town centres become dependent on the money that flows from the levy. This doesn’t really make those businesses and those centres viable; it merely acts to ossify a failed model. The future for high streets… doesn’t lie with mere shopping but with being places of leisure and pleasure. This probably means fewer shops and smaller centres but it also means a different approach starting from what people want – not defined by opinion polling but rather by what people actually consume.

And Tim Worstall on telling certain politicians to take a running jump: 

We’re going to have a law now where a willing purchaser cannot negotiate with a willing supplier to gain 600 calories in return for folding money instead of 400 calories for a smaller amount? What? Here’s how things work in a free and liberal society: you don’t get to decide what we would like to have. We get to decide what we would like to have.

The MP in question, Sarah Wallaston, “formerly a doctor and teacher,” is “now bringing a love of South Devon to Westminster.” And hoping to dictate your default portion size. The state, says Ms Wallaston, has “a duty to intervene” by telling you what it is you “don’t need” when buying drinks and snacks at the local cinema. Because you simply can’t be trusted near those sweet and shiny objects. At which point, I’m reminded of the Guardian’s Jill Filipovic, who also struggles with the concept of personal liberty and, specifically, with why “every socially conscious person” doesn’t agree with her. Being “socially conscious,” so defined, and therefore better than us, doesn’t seem to entail any reservation about spending, or indeed wasting, other people’s earnings on imposing state-dictated portion sizes. Or any reservation about embracing a condescending relationship with those of whom one is supposedly being conscious. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Meanwhile, in furnishing news: 

Gigi Barker, a London-based designer, has designed a leather chair with a pheromone-impregnated silicone base that makes it feel and smell like you’re lounging in the fleshy, comforting folds of a man’s belly. Barker spent two years perfecting the disturbingly realistic texture and colour, which is pink and lightly mottled. The scent comes from the aftershave of the anonymous man whose form the chair is modelled on.

That would be this gent, presumably. 

The loveliness of Ms Barker’s fleshy furniture, and her artistic process, can be savoured more fully here. The ‘skin chair’ is available for £1,500, while the matching pouffe with optional leather cover is a mere £880. 

Via Ace. 

Bonsai in space. // Fava beans and a nice Chianti. // Reg Kehoe and his marimba queens. // Human-sized kaleidoscope. // A wheel for cats. // “A Quinn Martin production.” // Made of light. // That’s not an earthworm, this is an earthworm. // This is this. // Place names of note, from Bollock to Anus. // Baby’s first baby. // No, children, no. Don’t play there. // X-rayed toys. // A day in the life of a New York taxi. // He had too many teeth. // “Thunderstorms make antimatter.” // An interactive timeline of the Marvel cinematic universe. // Petting. // Paperweight. // Fighting phantom pain. // FingerReader, a prototype. // On the ageing of cheese. // And finally, obviously, a high-speed chase involving Japanese ninja schoolgirls. 

It’s been a while since we’ve had a classic Guardian sentence. Thank goodness, then, for Tracy Van Slyke, who can conjure elaborate grievance from a cartoon about sentient trains: 

For the record, all the “villains” on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I’d like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it’s not hard to make the leap into race territory.

You see, that “leap into race territory” isn’t hard to make because dirtier cartoon train engines producing darker cartoon smoke obviously constitutes a “message about race.” When she’s not explaining the devilish racial subtext of animated puffer trains, Ms Van Slyke “writes about the intersection of social justice and pop culture.”  

Via Tom Foster in the comments here.