Nipple fortune telling, or “areola reading.” // Probe your colon with PillCam. // Cookbook of note. (h/t, Kurt) // A squirrel attempts to hide a nut in the fur of a Bernese mountain dog. // The Bond villain lair you’ve always wanted. // B-movie titles we have known and loved. // Boy quite chuffed with $60 robot hand. // This is what £197 billion worth of gold looks like. (h/t, drb) // A mouth’s-eye view of kissing. // More animal portraits. // Painted. // Unorthodox door. // Sunrise in Chicago. (h/t, Coudal) // Spectacles in New York. // Walking City. // Photographed cities. // “The taste certainly gets richer with age.” (h/t, Ace) // At last, a nocturnal toilet landing light. // And finally, Tainted Love, the floppy disc drive remix. 

Further to the saga of the underpants statue and the subsequent swooning of Wellesley College’s liberated ladies, Fred Reed has more evidence of feminist fortitude: 

It seems that at Columbia University a rat pack of nursery feminists have got their skivvies in a knot because the library, Butler, is named for an, ugh!, man. Yes. It cannot be denied. In protest, these girls, apparently having nothing more important to do, have filmed “feminist pornography” in the library.

Indeed they have. It’s a “guerrilla action” response to “gender tension” and “male-centricity.” And “of course, it is a feminist statement.”  

Anyway, one of these drab libertines, a Sara Grace Powell, says, “Butler is an extremely charged space – the names emblazoned on the stone facade are, for me, a stimulant for resistance.” A stimulant to grow up might be more to the point. She means “stimulus,” of course, but why would a child at an Ivy university be expected to know English? To an extent I have to sympathise with Sara. I grant that seeing a horrible male name “emblazoned” would send me into a decline also. Wouldn’t it you? Never mind that if the man thus emblazoned had not made the money to donate the library, Sara wouldn’t have one in which to make pornography, presumably the purpose of libraries. 

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description:

It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.

The finished political opus, starring the aforementioned Ms Powell and titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop, extended scenes of floor-wiping and what feels like an eternity of general aimlessness. It can be savoured at length here. Those hoping for red-blooded boi-oing fuel may, however, be disappointed. One of the film’s makers, Coco Young, has stressed the intent to transgress rather than titillate:

She was happy to see one commenter note that it was “hard to masturbate to this.” After all, the girls aimed to “create a repulsion”; there were naked women onscreen, but “they’re not there to make you sexually aroused.”

Despite dashed hopes and the sheer radicalness of it all, I trust readers will somehow get over it and get on with their lives. 

Woven strips of film by South Korean photographer Seung Hoon Park. 

Above: Textus #034-1, Hong Kong. 24” x 30”, 2011. More at Colossal.

Two hot air balloons and a tightrope. What could possibly go wrong? 

Filmed by Sébastien Montaz-Rosset, the chap who made this. 

Via dicentra, Kevin D Williamson on the many heads of modern feminism: 

Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes… A useful definition is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.” Feminism must therefore accommodate wildly incompatible propositions – e.g., (1) Women unquestionably belong alongside men in Marine units fighting pitched battles in Tora Bora, but (2) really should not be expected to be able to perform three chin-ups. Or: (1) Women at Columbia are empowered by pornography, but (2) women at Wellesley are victimised by a statue of a man sleepwalking in his Shenanigans. And then there is Fluke’s Law: (1) Women are responsible moral agents with full sexual and economic autonomy who (2) must be given an allowance, like children, when it comes to contraceptives.

Walter Russell Mead on how to ruin your life: 

Enrol in a college you can’t afford. Take really easy, fun courses [e.g., Politicizing Beyoncé, or The Sociology of Hip-Hop: The Theodicy of Jay-Z]. Don’t worry about marketable skills. Blame society for the consequences (unemployment) of your attitude problem. Then demand the government (or your parents) bail you out. We guarantee you all the misery you could ever want.

Robert Stacy McCain argues with a middle-class communist: 

The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement since Marx’s ridiculous insistence that only his socialism was “scientific.” Yet such is Jesse Myerson’s egoism that he imagines himself superior even to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. At least they had the integrity to admit that the abolition of private property — the expropriation of the bourgeoisie — could only be accomplished by violent revolution, and that the victors of such a revolution would have to employ the methods of violent terror to establish their dictatorship.

And Daniel Hannan on the politics of spite:  

Ponder the graph above. Sixty-nine per cent of Labour supporters would want a top rate tax of 50 per cent even if it brought in no money… This is a blog about the mind-set of people who see taxation, not as an unpleasant necessity, but as a way to punish others.

As we’ve seen here many times, some Labour supporters are quite happy to parade their vindictiveness as if it were virtue. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.