You shall not pass, dog. // Gear sphere. // Romanian salt mine tourist magnet. // Ants versus molten aluminium. // Experimental search engine ignores the obvious. // The crap-o-matic gift generator. (h/t, Kurt) // The roaring Twenties. // Knitted facehugger, $150. // Cliff Richard’s inner sadness. (h/t, Paul) // New York City snow plough tracker. // A fist-sized piece of the planet Mercury. // Wholock. // Night in London. // Tree frog rides beetle. // Beware dinosaurs. // Cardboard headphones. // And what if everyone was buff?

Ugh. Am felled by Man Flu, the deadliest flu of all. However, further to this discussion, I feel compelled to share this. 

If I don’t make it through the day, tell them I died heroically and handsomely. In an ocean of snot.

Update: 

Theodore Dalrymple on the intrigues of communist micro-cults: 

The Balakrishnans, however, had a falling out with the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) over small doctrinal questions such as how many class enemies could be shot on the edge of a mass grave. Such differences over tiny matters led to immediate expulsions and excommunications. The Balakrishnans were expelled from the CPE(M-L) for “conspiratorial and splittist activities,” splittist being a technical term for anyone who disagreed with the leader of the groupuscule from which he was allegedly producing a split. Considering that the groupuscule always viewed itself in the vanguard of the whole world’s proletariat, splittism was a very serious offence: It risked confusing the world proletariat and leading them to mistake its own interests by following the splittist faction instead of the true, real Marxist-Leninists.

FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate on policing speech and the redefinition of “liberal”: 

The thing that makes me laugh the most is that I am considered a right-winger by people on the academic left. Only people on the academic left are sufficiently narrow-minded to call me a right-winger. In fact, I’m a liberal, but I’m a civil libertarian liberal, an old-fashioned liberal, who not only believes in the decent society that helps its most unfortunate members survive, but who also happens to believe in freedom. So much of the left today doesn’t believe in liberty, especially the academic left. There’s something wrong with calling the academic left liberalism – they’re not liberals at all. They’re really leftist totalitarians. 

If that last line strikes you as unfair, you may want to revisit this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or… hell, just click the tag marked academia.

Marc Sidwell on the bloat and dysfunction of the Arts Council: 

The Arts Council was designed as a short-term expedient, operating on a modest budget carefully spent and with costs tightly controlled, as they had been in wartime… It was not designed to serve as a permanent substitute for public initiative and taste, and certainly not to administer a budget almost 80 times larger than it initially enjoyed.

And from 2008, Heather Mac Donald on the feminist inflation of rape on campus:  

[If true,] the one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency — Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behaviour radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic. None of this crisis response occurs, of course — because the crisis doesn’t exist. 

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

I’ll just leave this here, shall I? Mr Mason, you’ll recall, is a former member of the Trotskyist group Workers’ Power, a fan of “class war,” a booster of Occupy, and more recently the BBC’s Newsnight economics editor and the culture and digital editor of Channel 4 News. He is of course a champion of the great thinker Laurie Penny.

X-rayed couples cuddling. // Grand Canyon clouds. // Ice drumming. // Dreams. // Macy’s inflatables. // Faces in things. // Giant snail facials “eliminate wrinkles and scars.” // How to draw butts. // William Burroughs croons. // 18th century mechanical blogger. // Baffle teenagers with a gallery of blank tape inlays. (h/t, Things) // At last, vagina toast. (h/t, Dr W) // Where in London? // Dancing robot spider. // Diving suits and pressure suits. // Race and dating. (h/t, Andrew Rowe) // And via R S McCain, don’t drink the Kool-Aid.