Further to this, here’s another cavalcade of gaiety. From New York Comic Con. 

Admit it, you’re tempted.

Speaking of human nature and its denial, via The Thin Man, here’s Milton Friedman and Naomi Klein:

For more on Ms Klein’s sly distortions, see this piece by Johan Norberg. Update: Via Gaffee, there’s a longer version here. Recommended.

Incidentally, this site is two years old today. Cake and beers all round. And giant floating cat heads.

Webcam and volcano. // The Yellow Treehouse Restaurant. // How to make giant fruit pastilles. // Matchboxes from the Subcontinent. (h/t, Coudal) // Movie title screengrabs. // Opening titles of The Conversation. (1974) // Everything you should know about speech balloons. // Voice-based drawing. More. // Lovely bunkers. // It’s bacon, man, and the 5000 calorie bacon explosion. (h/t, Franklin) // Baby elephant and ball. // The Rubik’s 360. // Snow and ice. // Transformers! // Zoybar! // Taking pencils seriously. // More anamorphic pavement art. // The future of newspapers, 1981. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Jimmy Smith & Mr Elmer Bernstein.

I’ve touched on some problems of social construct theory before, more than once, and noted that its implications could appeal to unsavoury motives: 

If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase.

With the above in mind, let’s turn our attention to the feminist commentator Amanda Marcotte, whose book cover mishap entertained us so. In a recent outpouring, Ms Marcotte offered this: 

The theory that women have a natural urge to have babies is one that’s got a long and ignoble sexist history, […] None of that is to say that the urge to have children that some (but far from all) women experience isn’t real, and that’s my other giant problem with the ongoing preoccupation with [evolutionary psychology] theories to explain things that are cultural constructs… 

Note that Ms Marcotte is quite insistent on this point. The inclination to reproduce simply is a cultural construct, and a dubious one at that. Why humans should apparently be unique in this regard, untouched by biology, isn’t entirely clear. Presumably, human beings – specifically human men – have constructed elaborate patterns of behaviour to mimic almost exactly biological inclinations that are felt as real, by men and women, but which don’t in fact exist.

Some film-related items.

Attack of the remakes. Does the world really want a live-action Akira or another Logan’s Run? Can The Thing be improved upon? Flash Gordon without Brian Blessed? Er, Romancing the Stone?

A gallery of bewildering foreign film posters. Guess which films are being advertised below. And wait ‘til you see Bullitt.

And in one of Watchmen’s more disquieting scenes, Dr Manhattan turns his hand to crime-fighting. Disintegrations ensue.