I can’t help thinking there ought to be a word for this. // Galleries of small things. // There are dry ice pits on Mars. // Perspective and tape. // Painting without a brush. // Raincoat of note. // Moscow’s retro cars. // The Enigma machine explained. // Ed Miliband… the outsider! // The integrity of Johann Hari, moral colossus of the left. // Laurie’s babysitting skills. // Wang Wusheng. // Ostrich eggbot. // How to peel garlic. (h/t, MeFi) // People hanging over the edge of skyscrapers. // On community versus collectivism. // Carving watermelon skin. // Extreme unicycling. (h/t, Coudal) // The flow of US debt. (h/t, Jen) // Facebook and you.

Zombie pays a visit to a San Francisco “nude-in” and isn’t impressed by what she sees:

Yet no matter how successful they are in smashing cultural norms, they still can’t escape the general consensus that day-to-day urban nudity has public health consequences. The nudists’ reply is that the public health argument is merely a smokescreen to justify puritanical repression. The anti-nudity advocates are being dishonest, the protesters argue; opposition to public nakedness is not based on concern about transmissible diseases, but rather on old-fashioned prudery. While that may be true, I counter with this: The San Francisco public nudists are also being dishonest; there is indeed a sexual component to their behaviour, and they are exhibitionists using politics to justify their thrill-seeking.

Readers of a delicate constitution should note that Zombie’s report contains photos of unattractive middle-aged men in a state of militant undress (boots, cockrings and bandanas notwithstanding). And I suspect most will come to appreciate why it is that attractive people get paid to take their clothes off, while fat ageing hippies and saggy-titted old queens generally don’t.

Some of you may also register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably a clothed one, and preferably one that’s embarrassed, inconvenienced and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly laws, clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. As Zombie notes, what’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals:

These protesters and urban nudists don’t simply want to be naked in private or be naked around other naked people; they want to be naked around clothed people. Because that’s where the sexual thrill originates; violating a taboo. Being naked where nakedness is normal doesn’t count; eliciting shock or interest from unwitting strangers is the whole point.

Quite. Those indulging in their kink for being noticed are, in effect, saying: “Hey, you. Look at my bollocks. I SAID, LOOK AT MY BOLLOCKS RIGHT NOW, YOU UPTIGHT CONSERVATIVE PRUDES!” And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

Update, via the comments:

Lightning seen from above, the Earth rolling below. // A map of undersea cables. // Mostly blue. // Bathtub of note. // Does your yacht look like this? // On the merits of the Oxford comma. // When “diversity” means racism. // Flotsam & Jetsam. // Photographing the locals. // San Francisco time-lapsed. // Make way for the Panzer Soundtank. // An animated primer of the Israel-Palestine conflict. // Sakhalin Island and its inhabitants, 1894-1905. // Sponge nudes. // Engraved milk bottles. // At last, the hydraulic cocktail typewriter. // And finally, I fear there’s something under the ice. But will it be a patch on the 1982 version? 

Inspector Gadget on crime and, er, punishment:

In the last two weeks in Ruraltown, we have seen three men with a total of 78 previous convictions, convicted again for theft, domestic violence and vehicle crime… All three had previous records for ‘offences against the courts and police.’ All three had breached community sentences, been recalled whilst on licence or breached bail in the last two years. This kind of behaviour is now entirely normal for most of the criminal underclass in every town in Britain. None of these men received a single day’s custodial sentence. All three were dealt with by way of ‘community sentence.’ All three were happy to keep their freedom. One was arrested again within 24 hours for stealing cars. He didn’t even attempt to run away when patrols arrived.

Charles Crawford on the shortcomings of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

The good news is that it is pretty faithful to the original story, cramming a lot into the film while maintaining moody and sometimes tense mystery. The bad news is that it is pretty faithful to the book in having a feeble explanation of the reasons for the Mole’s treason. In fact it’s even feebler than the book’s version which also has some facile anti-Americanising: “It’s an aesthetic choice – the West has got ugly.” Aesthetic? Ugly? Compared to the way of life behind the Iron Curtain? […] The wider failure of all the Le Carré spy books is also on display here: the reek of moral relativism (“we’re almost as bad as each other”) and lack of any significant substantive beliefs. By shrinking the world down to the mutual manoeuvrings of the rival spy agencies and their messy private lives, all context and purpose drain away – just as in the Godfather films the wider victims of the mafia families’ wickedness are never shown. If all you see is presented as ugly, why indeed be loyal to such an ugly world?

The Guardian predictably downplays the role of ideology and tells us, “One of the great strengths of Le Carré’s fiction is to show how blurred the moral line was between east and west.”

Mr Crawford also notes a key dramatic defect touched on recently in the comments here: 

The film’s main storyline weakness is that the four key suspects are seen as if from a far distance. You have no idea what their Circus jobs are or why they are important or what they are like, or indeed why they might be suspect.

Indeed. Smiley’s realisation of the mole’s identity is one of the film’s key scenes – and its most obvious miscalculation. A scene that should be emotionally and dramatically charged – and which assumes it is – isn’t. It just doesn’t hit the note. The soundtrack tells us an important insight is happening but the audience doesn’t share in the process, which is rather important if you’re expecting an emotional payoff. And a big part of the problem is that we don’t get to spend enough time with the suspects to earn any significant drama when the mole is revealed. The suspects are essentially bit parts, albeit well played. And so the denouement is much too flat and subdued.

And Peter Hitchens was also displeased by Tomas Alfredson’s much-praised film: 

As for Control, is it possible to believe that the director of the Secret Intelligence Service (at one point Cornwell says that he was so secretive that his own wife believed till the day he died that he worked for the National Coal Board) would have left his London flat full of charts and notes about a mole hunt in SIS, and that it would all still be there, untouched, months after his death?

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Real-time face substitution by Arturo Castro. Wait for Mr Jackson.