Despite the festive cheer, which I hope you’ve all enjoyed, it’s important to remember that goodwill isn’t something one should extend to all men.

The Taliban have ordered the closure of all girls’ schools in the war-ravaged Swat district and warned parents and teachers of dire consequences if the ban is flouted. In an announcement made in mosques and broadcast on radio, the militant group set a deadline of January 15 for its order to be obeyed or it would blow up school buildings and attack schoolgirls. It also told women not to set foot outside their homes without being fully covered. “Female education is against Islamic teachings and spreads vulgarity in society,” Shah Dauran, leader of a group that has established control over a large part of Swat district in the North West Frontier Province, declared this week. […] The militants have also prohibited immunisation for children against polio – claiming that the UN-sponsored vaccination drive is aimed at causing sexual impotence – causing a sharp rise in cases of the disease.

They’re freedom fighters, you see.

The musical potential of 49 microwave ovens.

To you and yours, a very good one.

Several readers have steered me towards a recent, bewildering article by Jeanette Winterson that had somehow escaped my attention. It’s a strikingly unhinged piece and has been noted elsewhere, so I’m mortified to have missed it.

However, Ms Winterson’s descent into madness hasn’t entirely escaped my notice. Radio 4’s The Food Programme is usually relatively sober and free of the tacit leftist bias that informs so much else at the BBC. The broadcast I happened to hear featured a panel of guests choosing their food books of the year. This genteel routine was interrupted by several prolonged and incongruous tirades by Ms Winterson. The particulars of the tirades are difficult to recall due to their disarray, but each outburst relied heavily for its effect on loud repetition of the words “corporations” and “multinationals”. According to Winterson, these unspecified corporations and multinationals are controlling consumers’ dietary choices in ways that are intimate and fiendish though curiously vague. (Those of you familiar with South Park may recall an episode in which the children encounter a group of college hippies, whose boilerplate “insights” they immediately assimilate and repeat. It was much like that.) Such was the vehemence and incongruity of the outbursts, I half expected one of the other guests to throw a damp towel over Ms Winterson’s head in the hope she might calm down.

But back to the article. In it, a great many things are asserted in a dense rhetorical barrage. Among the gems on offer are:

We have created a society without values that believes in nothing. Reviving the god of the Philistines – Baal, the flesh-eater – human dignity has been eaten away by the relentless drive to make money at any cost and to spend money at any cost; especially money you don’t have.

And,

We laugh at the primitive religious idea of human sacrifice – but whatever fancy words and theories you want to play with to describe this present spectacular collapse of global capitalism, it is human sacrifice on a scale undreamt of at the altars of idols.

These lurid claims have been addressed elsewhere, most notably by Norm, who observes:

Here is a woman enjoying every advantage vouchsafed by the rights and liberties of the country she lives in (the institutional expression, these, precisely of certain important moral values) lightmindedly opining that the society has no values.

Indeed. Ms Winterson is yet another well-heeled leftwing novelist and commentator – a member of the media elite – affecting to disdain the secular, capitalist society on which her livelihood and status depend. Regular readers will note how closely Winterson’s claims follow the rhetorical trajectory of that other Handmaiden of the Apocalypse, Madeleine Bunting, whose warnings of “hyper-frantic consumerism” entertained us so. I probably don’t need to point out how Winterson, like Bunting, is eerily sure that “we” share her anhedonic passion and tolerance of hyperbole. But I will, just in case. It’s important to remember how psychodrama works.

Jason Tozer’s water droplets. // How to make soap from bacon. // Burger King cologne. Because a man should smell of cheeseburger. // DIY surgery. // A sea of piety. // Assorted spinning tops and dreidels. // Albino animals. The pygmy hedgehogs we like. // Donald, deconstructed. // Herb and Dorothy are art collectors. // An appetite for vinyl. // A Betamax Xmas. // Festive cards. // The 12 days of Christmas. // Seasons greetings from Soviet aerospace. // All I want for Christmas is… // A set of ninja star fridge magnets. // A safe made from Lego. // The Concept Ice Vehicle. // SAM. It’s a car, just about. // Alphabet blocks for the mad scientist of tomorrow. // Return of the Uniqlo Grid. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Annette Lajon.

A collection of vintage slide rules for calculating the effects of nuclear weapons. 

Also, assorted film posters.  

Film of the atomic cannon test, May 25, 1953. A single 280mm shell was fired seven miles, yielding a 15 kiloton explosion.

And a gallery of toys with an atomic theme.

(h/t, Coudal)