Friday Ephemera

Branding decision of note. (h/t, Damian) || They do this better than you do. (h/t, Dicentra) || Baby barn owl hears thunder. || Bus terminal rotation. || Abductees. || Objects in ice. || Mobile phone sales, animated. || Flat-lay inventories of emergency vehicles. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || A drone, some cheesy music and a roller-coaster. || Today’s words are impulse control issues. || Walking in the rain. || “A camera took images of a corpse every 30 minutes. The corpse showed signs of movement.” || Sanitation worker’s museum of trash. || Toilet-mirror note of note. || Heh. || Also heh. || At last, herbal tea on a lollypop stick. || And finally, when your headline includes the words “massive semen explosion.”

Comments

[pst314]

J. S. Bach's Crab Canon on a Moebius strip.

[Daniel Ream]

massive semen explosion

Band name.

[Hal]

Objects in ice.

Fish, and plankton, sea greens, and protein from the sea.

[Hal]

Flat-lay inventories of emergency vehicles.

From the comments: Batteries not included. Some assembly required.

[Pogonip]

My aunt was trained in classical Thai dance but hulaed professionally. There’s not much demand for Thai classical dance.

Someone on Twitter said the dance shown was Chinese. I don’t know who’s right.

[Hal]

massive semen explosion

Band name.

Rainbow Kitten Surprise

Actual band.

[[+]]

'Someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place'

https://o.canada.com/news/spain-builds-submarine-70-tons-too-heavy

[Clam]

Branding decision of note.

I had to check it was real. (It is.)

[David]

Morning, all.

This made me laugh.

But then, as you know, I’m a terrible, terrible person.

[David]

Andy Ngo interviews Douglas Murray.

[sH2]

This made me laugh.

"Warning"

https://twitter.com/Holbornlolz/status/1174938880853700608

[Peach]

https://whdh.com/news/islam-is-right-about-women-flyers-spark-concern-in-winchester/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAip2O0-k10

[Xas7wcrg9e]

"The corpse showed signs of movement"

E_VIDEO_NOT_FOUND

[Zombie Dodge]

"British rapper Slowthai has sparked controversy after he held up a replica of Boris Johnson's severed head at the Mercury Prize ceremony on Thursday evening.

Brandishing the dummy at the end of his performance, the 24-year-old rapper said:

'F*** Boris Johnson, f*** everything and there ain’t nothing great about Britain.'

Members of the audience greeted his stunt with rapturous applause at the event in the Eventim Apollo in London."

https://www.indy100.com/article/mercury-prize-slowthai-boris-johnson-dummy-head-brexit-prime-minister-9112981

[Pst314]

Members of the audience greeted his stunt with rapturous applause”

Not our countrymen.

[Kevin B]

A drone, some cheesy music and a roller-coaster.

What sort of cheese was that?

[Mags]

Toilet-mirror note of note.

Sounds like the start of a horror film.

[Charlie Suet]

I wonder if Mr Slowthai knows the name of his MEP.

[Sam Duncan]

“Bus terminal rotation.”

Ah, but is it chewy?

“some cheesy music”

I think the word you're groping for there is “awesome”. Although they need to re-shoot in the dark with more neon and dry ice.

“Warning”

I can't help thinking of the Monty Python sketch: “And now, a massage from the Swedish Prime Minister...”. This is surely the new dividing line in politics: people who find this “scandal” utterly ridiculous and the sour-faced scolds working their knickers into a twist over it.

[TomJ]

Would it be fair, in this instance, to say, "Lefties project"?

[Darleen]

'Someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place'

"Measure twice, cut once." doesn't translate into Spanish?

[Darleen]

"What are witnessing is not the imminent extinction of the planet. It is the extinction of reason."

[Governor Squid]

Islam is RIGHT about women.

The sign itself is poetry; to squeeze so much meaning into five short words is a work of art. Honestly, it causes a deeper reaction and spurs more consideration than most of the performance art our gracious host shares with us here.

Also, I'm delighted by the social media posting from the woman who was interviewed in the news segment:

Conversation Starter

I'm all for free speech, but this is just awful.... Please tear them down if you see any more! :( :( :(

As the kids are so fond of saying: "Anything written before the word "but" is meaningless."

[pst314]

'Someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place'

I was under the impression that it was standard engineering practice in such projects to always have such work checked by a second engineer.

[David]

I wonder if Mr Slowthai knows the name of his MEP.

I see what you did there.

Somewhat related.

[David]

Twenty-first century headlines.

[PiperPaul]

Checking in engineering is no longer required because we have CAD now.

[Governor Squid]

...always have such work checked by a second engineer.

I believe that the plans were sent to Sr. Maňana for review.

[Governor Squid]

Twenty-first century headlines.

Holy moly! Turns out there's poetry everywhere around us!

[Darleen]

Heh.

[David]

Heh.

As someone notes in reply, “Not yer call, lady.”

Very much related.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

https://unherd.com/2019/09/why-ive-reported-douglas-murray-to-the-police/

[Henry]

"but you know who *really* tells it like it is...? Judith Butler!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzVc7s-_e8

[Henry]

Very much related

The problem, to my mind, with the word "bitch" is that a) it doesn't really mean an awful lot and b) it sounds angry to the point of bitter. As if you've allowed the cow (hehe..) to get to you. As such it's in danger of saying more about the person using the word than the person being..um..described.

More powerful surely, to calmly & pithily spell out the full extent of someone's shortcomings. You're usually rather better than me at that sort of thing, David, I'm sorry to say - your sentence about the "common little motives" of the people in question, for example.

Or one could say that some people, instead of using physical violence, " manage to poison the world with their vindictiveness and resentment". All a bit more creative, if also prolix.

[WTP]

Henry, you prolix little bitch...

[JuliaM]

Just seen someone on Twitter refer to Trudeau as 'the Canadian Prime Minstrel' and now I can't stop laughing...

[David]

‘the Canadian Prime Minstrel’

A scenario presents itself.

[David]

All a bit more creative, if also prolix.

Am I being chastised?

[David]

Further to the Douglas Murray tweet in the post above, this, on the dishonesties of the gay press, seems apposite:

On Monday morning I went on the BBC’s Today programme. My fellow guest was the British writer Afua Hirsch who is the author of a memoir about her own upbringing, in which she describes how she managed to flee the badlands of Wimbledon only to suffer in the hood of Oxford University.

Anyhow, during the conversation I mentioned the idiotic recent case of Sam Smith. This is the pop singer who came out as gay a few years ago, came out as ‘genderqueer’ a couple of years after that and last week came out as ‘non-binary’. As I said in the Telegraph on Monday, and reiterated on the BBC, I do not believe there is any such thing as ‘non-binary’. In particular I think it is impossible to tell what the difference is between coming out as being ‘non-binary’ and simply shouting ‘Look at me’. If there is a difference, then nobody (including the Smiths) has yet been able to explain it.

When this came up Afua accused me of ‘bullying’ Sam Smith. Because of course everything is about power and I am definitely in a position to bully the downtrodden, multi-millionaire crooner Sam Smith. Despite berating me for not using ‘they / them’ pronouns for Sam Smith, Afua then herself outrageously and unfortunately ‘misgendered’ Sam Smith, referring to him as ‘him’ and ‘his’. Not as easy as it looks, this woke stuff, is it?

Do read the whole thing.

[Captain Nemo]

On the subject of Douglas Murray, this must surely be one of the classiest insults I think I've seen recently:

https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1174629362861314054

[TomJ]

On cutting ripostes of note:
https://twitter.com/timfarron/status/1175035971068452864

[Mike]

the badlands of Wimbledon

Band name.

[Henry]

Chastised? Not a bit of it. Maybe I'm a bit of a sledgehammer, and not in the Peter Gabriel sense.

Anyway I'm hardly the biggest feminist in the world, am I? I just like your pointed descriptions more is all

[Ted S, Catskill Mtns, NY, USA]

Regarding the anti-Murray screed, who's Lily Allen? A brief Google search suggests she's a musician, but nothing about why somebody would include here with Mahatma Gandhi.

[Ted S, Catskill Mtns, NY, USA]

"British rapper Slowthai has sparked controversy after he held up a replica of Boris Johnson's severed head at the Mercury Prize ceremony on Thursday evening.

How quickly everybody forgets the rodeo clown who was hounded out of a job for mocking Obama. But he wasn't stunning, brave, or trangsressive because he was transgressing against the wrong people.

[pst314]

A scenario presents itself.

From that same Twitter feed: grave medical troubles in Jordan Peterson's family:

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1175094341066514433

[Darleen]

Within this piece by Andrew Sullivan ... amazing how the mugging of reality has brought back some reasonableness on his part ... is this by an actual teacher who demonstrates how much he loathes teaching a certain demographic of his students ...

I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before. White boys who expect privilege to carry and protect them, because that’s what it does, without ever stopping to wonder if it works the same for everyone else. [...]

This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Now think if this were a teacher speaking about "Black boys".

[David]

Now think if this were a teacher speaking about “Black boys”.

Today’s words are twisted and unfit.

See also.

[ Added: ]

And let’s not forget this instructive little gem.

[Captain Nemo]

On a lighter note, Soviet soldiers and Eurythmics:

https://twitter.com/communistbops/status/1173691180967759872

[Darleen]

And let’s not forget this instructive little gem.

I came of age in the 60s/70s, my awakening to a world beyond my sippy cup included the Civil Rights movement, Watts Riots, assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. My parents, very conservative and very principled, raised me to consider skin-color just another variation of appearance in the human race. I was told - by parents, teachers, pastors - that we must consider each individual AS an individual and regard color of skin like we would hair or eye color.

Now, that "judge by character not by skin" ethos is dismissed as "racist" itself. And the best way for wypeepo to stay in positions of authority is to consistently declare their hatred of self. Whether cynically or sincerely, the self-loathing isn't going to 'cure' racism. It's just another form of it. As Sullivan points out

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy.” QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness,” or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

It's as if those "fight racism" SJWs actually want non-racist wypeepo to be racist.

[Chester Draws]

The problem, to my mind, with the word "bitch" is that a) it doesn't really mean an awful lot and b) it sounds angry to the point of bitter.

Well, sometimes one does need to express bitterness succinctly.

I would rarely, if ever, use the word "bitch" to describe someone. But the word "bitchy" is a very useful way of expressing a fairly common behaviour, and I would use it equally for men and women. "Resting bitch face" has its uses too.

Are we still allowed to use it for: "A person in a subservient sexual role, especially an incarcerated male who provides sex to another male under threat of violence or in exchange for protection"? Because in that sense the word is traditionally used of men.

[Darleen]

Funny thing ... in the late 1960's, at least in So Cal, the word bitchin meant something was just the coolest thing EVAH!

Mom picked up my jr high yearbook to read "Hey, Dar, have a bitchin summer!", and was put out wanting to know who this person with the filthy mouth was and why I was hanging with her.

[Daniel Ream]

It's as if those "fight racism" SJWs actually want non-racist wypeepo to be racist.

Historically, encouraging all white people to think of themselves as an ideologically unified bloc hasn't worked out well.

[Flubber]

Islam is RIGHT about women.

Its ok to be white.

Gotta love the trolls at 4chan, so succinctly pointing out clownworld 2019.

[Revelation]

It's as if those "fight racism" SJWs actually want non-racist wypeepo to be racist.

Historically, encouraging all white people to think of themselves as an ideologically unified bloc hasn't worked out well.

The Dems in the US are explicitly anti-white; I wonder how long even the most woke whites might take to realise this isnt going to work out well for them.

Also see the Noticer on Telegram to see who's pushing this philosophy.

[Alex]

Just trying to provide a public service.

[pst314]

Will this close the italics in the earlier comments?

[pst314]

At 3:00am, David's sleep was disturbed by nightmarish visions of malformed HTML.

[Spiny Norman]

Uh-oh. Sumbuddy's in twubbol...

[Darleen]

[unlocks bathroom door, cautiously peers down hall] Is it all clear now?

[Spiny Norman]

Yeppers. All clear.

[pst314]

FYI:
My first, failed attempt to fix Revelation's italics was text which began with a closing italics html.
My second, successful attempt was text which ended with a closing italics html.

[David]

Plan B, since you ask, involves forehead tattoos.

[Henry]

Well, sometimes one does need to express bitterness succinctly

Oddly after my speechifying, I was in town - which was very crowded with overheated folk - with my 9-yr old yesterday. A lady go off the bus and tried to push me out of the way, then did the same to my lad.

I used immoderate language, I really did - and in an angry tone. She and husband walked the other way, I'm glad to say, but an onlooker did call her a bitch, and I didn't take this occasion to quibble with his vocab, being quite grateful someone was taking my side :)

[Ping]

Funny thing ... in the late 1960's, at least in So Cal, the word bitchin meant something was just the coolest thing EVAH!

If George Lucas is accurate about his period slang, and why wouldn't he be, it's what teenage girls were saying in Modesto CA in 1962 - "Wow, that's bitchin' tuck-and-roll", "Hey, you got a bitchin' car".

http://www.unz.com/anepigone/islam-is-right-about-women/

The reporter and those he talks to are unsure who the fliers “target”. So completely does Wokeism forbid intellectual curiosity of any kind that the simple message could be making a statement intended to provoke those reading it into ponderment cannot be given any consideration. The women interviewed are merely unsure of whom the Who? is and who the Whom? is (*), and so are uncertain of how to react. Their consternation is our amusement.

(*) One news channel is framing it as "controversial signs are showing up in Winchester about Muslim women...".

[fnord]

British rapper Slowthai

You lost me at 'rapper'. There is nothing any rapper has done, anywhere, that is worth a nanosecond of my time. The fact that it's wildly popular just illustrates that there is such a thing as the Bell Curve.

[David]

So completely does Wokeism forbid intellectual curiosity of any kind…

Heh. It does reveal the cognitive dissonance quite neatly. There’s an economy, a kind of elegance.

[fnord]

Or one could say that some people, instead of using physical violence, " manage to poison the world with their vindictiveness and resentment". All a bit more creative, if also prolix

*sigh*
Life is short. Sometimes you just have to go with le mot juste and move on.

[fnord]

Now, that "judge by character not by skin" ethos is dismissed as "racist" itself.

And that's becauss it turned out not to be useful to the race hustlers in dividing up the herd.

[fnord]

The fact that they are bothered by the Islam sign shows that they instantly conclude that the relations of Islam and women is 'problematical'.

And BOOM goes the wokeling's mind like Spock defeating a computer with illogic.

*Norman, coordinate*.

[Spiny Norman]

My second, successful attempt

Actually, it wasn't. The whole place was still italics before I posted.

[Steve E]

Actually, it wasn't. The whole place was still italics before I posted.

Spiny, pst314 did end the madness with his second attempt. The "Posted by: pst314..." was in normal type. If italics were still "on" then that line would have been in italics too.

[pst314]

Actually, it wasn't. The whole place was still italics before I posted.

! So exactly what did you do to fix it? Viewing the page source, it appears that you typed the following. Is that correct?
[i][/i][/i]Uh-oh. Sumbuddy's in twubbol...[/i]
(Replace every [ and ] with left and right angle brackets.)

I'd swear that what I did worked once before, so is there anything edifying that we should know?

[Darleen]

More fallout of "Woke Knitting"

Her pattern retains the name "friend" (in a different language), but my name has been erased.

[David]

This.

[Darleen]

This

No one told them that Harrison Bergeron is not a How-To manual?

[pst314]

This

Remember "food deserts", the Left's ploy to get an army of government apparatchiks into the retail food business?

[Nikw211]

This

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions ... "

[TimT]

I left Instagram and said why. I didn't feel safe. Hatred and chaos were reigning supreme. Gossip was spreading like wildfire. I didn't want to be a part of it...

Come now, surely that's an exag

A few activists were frantically going around hunting down my followers or anyone who had designed a pattern in my yarn. They told them to unfollow me and remove my name from their patterns...or else!

F%(%^^(ing hell.

[Daniel Ream]

F%(%^^(ing hell.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever observed the social cutting that goes on in any Ladies' Auxiliary. It's like high school, but with longer knives.

[David]

F%(%^^(ing hell.

As noted previously,

One small mercy is that the more unlikely the context – in this case, the world of knitting – the more obviously contrived and dysfunctional the woke-lings seem. This doesn’t appear to inhibit them, of course – they seem quite shameless - but it does make their behaviour, and motives, easier to spot…

Viewed objectively, there isn’t anything to be offended by. Ms Templer describes her excitement and says that for her, a young woman with little experience of global travel, the opportunity to fly halfway around the planet is “like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars.” That’s it. But for those inclined to recreational grievance-seeking, that’s the appeal. The less basis there is for indignation, the more pleasurable the scolding becomes. It’s a twisted power dynamic, a form of gaslighting. And for a certain kind of person, making someone anxious and confused, and then making them prostrate themselves in public – when there’s no reason to do so – is the sweetest triumph. It’s a game for budding sociopaths.

You’d think some parents might object to what their children are being turned into. At considerable expense.

[Farnsworth M Muldoon]

Yes, this is a conference but my safe space badge says I don't want to talk to you.

[David]

Yes, this is a conference but my safe space badge says I don’t want to talk to you.

Formalised neuroticism, the signature of the woke world.

[WTP]

F%(%^^(ing hell.

A similar feeling...not that it's gotten that far but on FB there's a group called Pittsburgh Beautiful. Yeah, I know, but the 'Burgh is a very picturesque town in fits and starts and pretty much every photo that gets posted on that page is well conceived and beautifully produced. Hardly ever does a bad shot get posted. So a couple days ago, there was an otherwise very nice pic of the stunning fountain located where the three rivers meet. Otherwise nice except for some explicable reason, and I'm fairly certain the photographer could have found different angle if s/he tried, there were two sloppy, overweight, slobs sitting/lying on the edge of the fountain. I thought it rather odd, especially in context of the hundreds of other shots that were posted, but WTH. Though the spidey sensors started to tingle. Then I notice a few days later, after I had been following this page for a year or two or three, that the guy running the page has now been putting his face out there on a few posts. OK, whatevs. His page. No biggie. But then this weekend, posted with one alleyway with fire escapes (though nicely done and framed with a city church in the background) shot, was a picture of some "climate justice" protest. Even in the context of a news photo, it was crap. Because we can't have nice things without politics.

[Birn]

Islam is right about women

What did we see in those news reports - women demanding that the police protect them from words on a piece of paper, women expressing their boredom and confusion at having to think about difficult ideas, women unwilling to accept the existence of intractable conflicts that can't be solved by being nice, women wishing that everyone could just accept the multikulti future our betters have planned for us.

Those kinds of women are drawn to Islam, to the idea that women need the protection of assertive, authoritative men so that they can live out their gifts of nurturance and modesty in a safe space that's protected from the rough public sphere. They're seeing something about themselves that goes against their feminist indoctrination, so there's a bit of confusion. But that confusion can be made to go away by binge-watching Handmaid's Tale.

in the absence of mass immigration, "Islam is right about women" is a fun ideological koan. But feminism is no real competition for Islam. Islam wins in the long term because its women are having babies and its men are willing to stand up for their beliefs.

It's a hate crime for us to express our objection to Islam in terms of we live here, our ancestors lived here, our culture and society is intertwined with Christianity, church steeples belong in our cityscapes in a way that minarets don't. It's not yet a hate crime to express concerns about Islam's treatment of women. So that's where the ideological battle is fought, and will be lost, because women don't find Islam as objectionable as all that.

[David]

ideological koan

I may have to borrow that one.

[Chester Draws]

because women don't find Islam as objectionable as all that.

Come on now! Most women find Islam quite objectionable in regard to its treatment of women, including many that have been born into it. Women don't have the power in many Islamic countries to do anything much about their status, but that's largely because of concerted action by the powers that be to prevent them.

The non-authoritarian Islamic countries aren't much worse in the treatment of women than a whole pile of non-Islamic countries. The difference in the way women are treated in Georgia and Azerbaijan, for instance, shows that culture and history over-rides religion. Arab countries tend to treat women very badly, but not all Moslems are Arab.

Most people are happy to let other people live their lives any way they want (provided it doesn't impinge on them directly). That's quite different from women -- or men for that matter -- finding the treatment of Islamic women as acceptable.

Maybe you know different types of people, but all the women I know would be horrified if it was suggested that they had any sort of hankering to be treated like a Saudi woman.