davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

Canned air, $19. // Cough syrup of yore. // Slow motion gargling. // Give good tongue. // Of Oz the Wizard. Because all films should be alphabetized. // How to store your bunnies. // Deter burglars with a fog cannon. // Wheeled robot climbs walls. // Mystery solved. // The Bigger Luke Wiki. (h/t, MeFi) // Meanwhile, in Iran. // Made of ice. // An app for the blind. It works on bananas and wine but not much else. // Erotic e-books sync to your sex toy. “Breathing on the screen will trigger vibrations.” // A stiff breeze. // Impress your guests no end with an Inception table. // Instant iced tea. Some travel involved. // No, after you. // Chip fingers. // Crime and correlation. // Discussing intelligence. // New Zealand has disappeared. // And finally, inevitably, moss watching is now a thing.

Today’s Word is Chutzpah

This just in: 

An artist has been given thousands of pounds of public money to simply live in Glasgow for a year.

Oh come on. There’s at least one joke in there.

Scottish Government quango Creative Scotland is giving £15,000 to Ellie Harrison after she vowed not to leave the city limits for all of 2016. The 36-year-old believes this will allow her to “increase her sense of belonging, by encouraging her to seek out and create ‘local opportunities’ - testing what becomes possible when she invests all her ideas, time and energy within the city where she lives.”

All her ideas. 

It is understood that the project will see her maintain an internet blog and that her whole life here will be a “work of art.”

How staggeringly convenient.

Harrison was born in London but has already lived in Glasgow for a number of years.

There we go.

Update, via the comments: 

Elsewhere (186)

Kevin D Williamson on Obama’s vanities: 

In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Heather Mac Donald on crime, policing, and the “Ferguson effect”: 

The media and many politicians decry as racist pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing — the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones. Under such conditions, it isn’t just understandable that the police would back off; it is also presumably what the activists and the media critics would want. The puzzle is why the activists are now so intent on denying that such de-policing is occurring and that it is affecting crime.

Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious outrage: 

Outrage supposedly felt on behalf of others is extremely gratifying for more than one reason. It has the appearance of selflessness, and everyone likes to feel that he is selfless. It confers moral respectability on the desire to hate or despise something or somebody, a desire never far from the human heart. It provides him who feels it the possibility of transcendent purpose, if he decides to work toward the elimination of the supposed cause of his outrage. And it may even give him a reasonably lucrative career, if he becomes a professional campaigner or politician: For there is nothing like stirring up resentment for the creation of a political clientele. Anti-racism is a perfect cause for those with free-floating outrage because it puts them automatically on the side of the angels without any need personally to sacrifice anything. You have only to accuse others of it to feel virtuous yourself.

And via Ace, a student recounts how he “de-converted” from the mentally dismal crab-bucket world of the “social justice warrior”: 

I realised it wasn’t going to get better. I was in a university class about feminism, overrun with SJWs, and they had worse arguments than I’d seen online. There was no smarter next level to feminism that I was just too stupid to see. That was it. I was at the top and our arguments still sucked.

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