davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

Evil slippers. (h/t, PootBlog) // Solar-powered cats. // Crop circle towels. // Fresh honey on tap. // 900 jars of honey and some naked models. // Head lamps. Lamps for your head. // Anatomically realistic 3D glass brain. // Bar stool of note. // Buddha statue innards. // Magnified marine life. // Now with nipples. // Made of wire. // A tale of dead whales and the bone-eating matriarchs that feed on them. // The town without wi-fi. // A tour of Tommy Boy Records, 1991. // At last, test your knowledge of car grills. // “The girl who gets gifts from birds.” An eight-year-old queen of the crows. // Augmented table. // “Car accident. Videoed myself.” // All done with CG. // And finally, scientifically, “There are a startling number of tutorials where people discuss ways to achieve good breast physics.”

Uncanny Powers Are a Feminist Issue

Commenter RY steers us to another contender for our series of classic sentences from a certain newspaper:

Witchcraft – and the embrace of “magical” practices, like reading tarot cards – has recently experienced a resurgence of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.

Ah, you didn’t see that coming.

The bearer of this hitherto suppressed knowledge is Ms Sady Doyle, who further enlightens us,

Women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a “spiritual but not religious” way to express feminist ambitions.

You see,

A popular Tumblr blog, Charmcore, purports to be run by three witch sisters; it gives sarcastic “magical” advice and praise of the female celebrities it deems to be “obvious witches.” On the more serious side, teen sensation Rookie magazine has published tarot tutorials along with more standard-issue feminist and fashion advice, and Autostraddle, a popular left-leaning blog for young queer women, has an in-house tarot columnist.

Yes, all that. And furthermore,

Tarot cards are available in trendy Brooklyn knick-knack shops and Urban Outfitters, as well as New Age stores. And these days, no one thinks there’s anything weird about herbal medicine and other potions.

Apparently, there are also “witchcore” punk bands. And – and - if even more proof were needed, a book: 

Mixed in with the spells and rituals of The Spiral Dance, you will find meditations on sexual violence, ecology and anarchist group building, and thoughts on how men can overcome patriarchal conditioning in order to participate effectively in leftwing activism.

Clearly, it’s a vibrant and thrusting cultural force, a subversive political juggernaut, one that will topple The Patriarchal Hegemon™ any day now. It’s game over, man. No, there’s no time to collect your belongings, we must flee to the escape pods. 

Apparently, Maths is Hard

Oh my. The Green Party’s Natalie Bennett has had yet another car crash interview. Your reaction to Ms Bennett’s performance and grasp of the particulars may answer the question asked recently in this Green Party poster campaign.

Previously. And previous to that. 

Elsewhere (151)

Roger Kimball on the unacknowledged charms of Swedish multiculturalism: 

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%. If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

Christopher Snowdon on why BBC documentaries aren’t always to be trusted: 

To be clear, nobody is snaffling anybody’s cake. The cake has been getting bigger for all, including those in the rest of the top [income] decile. But whilst inequality has not risen in the nation as a whole, it has risen sharply within the upper echelons. It is not the richest ten per cent who have “pulled away from the pack.” It is the very rich who have pulled away from the rest of the top 10 per cent. It is, then, the upper-middle classes who may feel that they are having their cake scoffed. If so, it may explain why there is currently such a sense of resentment and antipathy from the wealthy (a group that includes politicians, professors, television presenters and BBC editors) towards the very rich.

And Mark Steyn on the blatherings of the Most Clever President Ever: 

“Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to “the fabric of our country” for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody’s fabric, but instead tends to unravel it - as it’s doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Strange Appetites

As I’m sure you all know, watching people eat online is now a thing in South Korea. 

“Whenever I’m a bit lonely it feels like I’m eating with someone else.”

They Walk Among Us

The following is from a letter by Tony Clark of the Communist Party Alliance, as featured on the letters page of the Weekly Worker, “a paper of Marxist polemic and Marxist unity”:  

I never claimed that the future of humanity “may rest on the beneficence of extra-terrestrial reptiles.” I… referred to the reptilian control theory, which argues that for thousands of years humanity has been controlled by a reptilian race, using their mixed reptile-human genetic bloodlines, who have oppressed and exploited humans, while claiming descent from the ‘gods’ and the divine right to rule by bloodline. Ancient and modern society is obsessed with reptilian, serpent and dragon themes, possibly due to this heritage. Even the flag of Wales has a dragon on it. 

Most people have closed minds, depending on the issues. Mention the possibility of aliens secretly manipulating humanity behind the scenes and the shutters come down.

Anyone wishing to express their solidarity with Mr Clark and the Communist Party Alliance can do so here. Members of the Alien Reptile Hegemon™ are advised to use false names and adopt a human appearance.  

Via PootBlog. 

Friday Ephemera

Use of pepper spray brings forth tears, possibly laughter. // Landscapes of note. // Their lightning machine is much smaller than ours. // Man spends 52 years building own cathedral. // Dog and owl. // Potty Glo. “If lit, then sit.” // Limpet teeth. // Unappetizing cheeses. // Snacking hoopoe. // Speechless Obama. // Courtyard balcony of note. // “Beverage holders on all four corners.” // Camouflaged beverage holder of note. // That’s not a bookstore, this is a bookstore. // Some kind of rat-beast. // An object approaches Chelyabinsk. // Chairbending. // New Year’s Eve mega-rave, Wembley Stadium, 1994. I see a lot of suspicious gum-chewing. // Fog in Tokyo. // 3D-printed selfie statues. // The unseen Pakistan. // And finally, why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 12.

A Life Without Art, How Barren That Would Be

Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself - sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: 

I Didn’t See That Coming

This, I mean. 

Via PootBlog.  

Eight More Years, They Cried

Patrons are reminded that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love for this low establishment. Debit and credit cards are of course accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last eight years, the reheated series and greatest hits are good places to start.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Make Way for the Mao-lings

Speaking, as we were, of campus intolerance and the Clown Shoe Left, here’s something that may be worth half an hour of your time. In the following short film by Steve Brulé, Professor Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa talks about the assumptions and effects of doctrinaire feminism and the censorious tactics of self-imagined radicals. Tactics that are illustrated quite vividly throughout. 

Professor Fiamengo also discusses campus censorship here. Via Joan in the comments following this. 

Friday Ephemera

“For pleasure and profit.” (h/t, PootBlog) // The periodic table of sexual terminology. // Rio in 10K HD. Full screen viewing recommended. // Icelandic caves of note. // Kubrick recut. // There are mites under your duvet. // “The electromagnetic railgun can fire projectiles at 5,300 miles per hour.” // Foxes at large, doing what they do. // Dog bots are coming. // How to class up Beethoven. (h/t, Randall) // Batman, then and now. // Supersonic boom carpets. // Paper bag building. // Do not screw with a drunken gorilla. // A tumblr of glitches. // Chocolate pig. // Working with wood. // Handle tools carefully. // Teeth and tusks and necks. // Robot spins web. // And finally, “Vaginal Kung Fu is a method I teach for women to physically and emotionally reconnect to their vaginas.”