If God really existed, this is what the Bible would have said

May 19, 2017 • 1:15 pm

While we’re waiting for the Big News, here’s a nice pair of tw**ts (is that obscene?):

https://twitter.com/1stClown/status/865615525208109056

h/t: Barry

Big news at 4 p.m.!

May 19, 2017 • 11:25 am

At about 2 p.m. Pacific Standard time, or 4 p.m. Chicago time, I’ll be putting up a pretty amazing post: I haven’t done anything amazing, but others have, and you’ll want to read about it. You will find it hilarious, infuriating, a mortal wound on some of those we oppose, or even an unethical act. Or all of the above.

Just watch this space in a few hours. You won’t be disappointed.

What’s the goal of “women’s studies”?

May 19, 2017 • 8:30 am

Let two feminist scholars of them tell you, via this tweet from The New Real Peer Review:

A quote:

When envisioning the future priorities for women’s studies—ones that take advantage of women’s studies as a dangerous, infectious, potentially radical force of change—we posit two new directions for the field to embrace. First, training both female and male students as viruses could prove especially useful in articulating the mission and goals of the field. There are clearly different stakes in the feminist pedagogical work directed toward female students versus male students. While female students must work to understand their own experiences as women and to deconstruct, critically analyze, and understand the ways that their identities as women map onto other privileges and oppressions, they often at least sense the impact of oppression and privilege in their lives.

Male students, on the other hand, may have had little or no exposure to thinking about their own male privileges at all, particularly for white men who may perceive themselves to be victimized by feminist critiques and classroom discussions (George, 1992). While men of color and gay men may differently understand concepts of privilege and oppression, white heterosexual men may arrive at the examination of privilege with little to no experience examining such personal aspects of their lives and identities. The danger of challenging white men, for example, to recognize and critique their own (and other men’s) privileges may be different than teaching women to recognize and critique their privileges and oppressions. Precisely because whiteness, heterosexuality, and maleness are not oppressed classes (George, 1992), and thus are not subjected to the consciousness of oppressed classes, the methods used to discover their own 947 Fahs & Karger – Women’s Studies as Virus privilege may prove critical to the virulent capacity of women’s studies programs seeking to infect male-dominated institutions.

This is one area of academia, it seems, where a scholarly discipline not only has explicit political goals, and a point of view that it must inculcate into students, but makes these things public. I can’t think of any other disciples with such a nakedly obvious agenda, except other areas of “cultural studies.”

Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, retweeted it like this:

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/865509442170667008

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 19, 2017 • 7:30 am

We have photos from three contributors today. The first photo was conveyed by Gayle Ferguson:

I’ve attached a ‘wildlife’ photo for your website. The photo was taken by a colleague of mine (Phil Battley) out of an office window.  His caption is this: “Young female New Zealand falcon [Falco novaseelandiae], Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ. Taken out of an office window!”

Reader Andrée Reno Sanborn sent beetle photos and some notes:

This is a Round-necked Longhorn (Clytus ruricola). June 21, 2016; Northeast Kingdom of Vermont:

As we made our daily bug walk, we found this long-horned beetle (which we first thought was a wasp, injured, cold or drunk) hanging out of a rolled black cherry (Prunus serotina) leaf. My husband carefully detached the leaf for photos. Inside, we found the beetle with aphids and a ladybug grub (Coccinellidae sp.).

The larvae eat rotting hardwood and prefer maple (Acer) (which doesn’t seem to be a problem in our sugar bush, since this was the first one we have found; but on the other hand, we don’t let maple sit and rot).  Adults eat flower nectar and pollen.

 

After chats with real entomologists, we figure this beetle was sipping honeydew, which, of course, is sweet like nectar.

After posing politely, the beetle flew away quite quickly. It seems to have grasshopper-like legs. This is another bug that we need to actively seek out. There is not enough life history information on the Internet. I can find no photos of larvae. I am assuming the bug is not invasive.

From Stephen Barnard, who calls this “One of my ‘Maxfield Parrish’ landscapes”:

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 19, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on May 19, 2017. The storms in Chicago never materialized yesterday, and it was warm and sunny with a high of 25° C.  It’s National Devil’s Food Cake Day, a lovely dessert, but I’m curious why such a toothsome comestible is named after Satan. In Vietnam, it’s Ho Chi Minh’s Birthday (see below), and in the U.S. it’s both Malcolm X Day (he was born on this day in 1925) and National Hepatitis Testing Day. I can assure you that I’m free of all three forms; I’ve been tested.

On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn, accused and “convicted” of adultery, treason and incest (!), was beheaded on the orders of King Henry VIII. In 1919 Kemal Atatürk landed at Samsun on the Black Sea coast, beginning the Turkish War of Independence that deposed the Ottomans and began the modernization of Turkey, reforms being quickly reversed by Thug Erdogan. Finally (not much happened on this day), in 1962 Marilyn Monroe sang her famous version of “Happy Birthday (Mr. President)” at a birthday celebration for President John F. Kennedy (10 days early)  at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The incident has its own Wikipedia entry. Here Monroe is introduced by Peter Lawford (JFK’s brother in law) before crooning her ultra-sexy rendition:

By the way, there’s no conclusive evidence that Monroe had an affair with Kennedy, though many think this sultry song is evidence for that. It isn’t. They may have had a fling, but we don’t know for sure.

Notables born on this day include Johns Hopkins (1795), Ho Chi Minh (1890), Max Perutz (1914), Pol Pot and Malcolm X (both 1925), Nora Ephron (1941), and Pete Townshend (1945). Those who died on this day include José Martí (1895), my hero T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”; 1935; motorcycle crash), Charles Ives (1954) and Ogden Nash (1971).

Lawrence is one of my heroes because he was a man of thought and action as well as an excellent writer, though—or perhaps because—he was a tortured soul. When I took a week’s vacation in Dorset in 2006, I visited his cottage Clouds Hill, which he bought in 1923 and kept until his death in 1935 at the age of 46. It’s a spartan place, without electricity or windows in the front, but was near the RAF base where he had been stationed. Here’s the cottage; on the lintel Lawrence had inscribed the Greek phrase οὐ φροντὶς (“Why Worry”). No photos were allowed inside, but I snuck one.

Here’s his bathtub, with a plank to read on, also holding his shaving bowl:

After much searching along the road a few miles from Clouds Hill, I found the spot where Lawrence had his fatal motorcycle accident:

In Arabia:

On one of his beloved Brough Superior SS100 motorcycles. It was on one of these that he was killed:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the beasts are scrutinizing the property, and there’s even a title. It’s a cute picture

INSPECTION TOUR
Hili: We have to check everything thoroughly.
Cyrus: Yes, it’s very important.
In Polish:
OBCHÓD
Hili: Musimy dokładnie wszystko sprawdzić.
Cyrus: Tak, to bardzo ważne.

Here’s a Gus photo with a backstory, sent by Taskin, who’s half of his staff:

I made this sign for the door at the bottom of the stairs into our basement. The other half of Gus’s staff is a massage therapist who has his office in the basement. Gus sometimes scratches and meows at the massage room door, so we started shutting this other door to the waiting area to keep him from being a nuisance during massages. However, people coming in for their massage were then unsure whether they should go down the stairs when the door was shut. Hence, the sign. I love listening to people chuckle as they head down the stairs.

And here’s Ozzy the Weasel, a rescue weasel (DO NOT ADOPT WEASELS!):

Finally, Matthew Cobb sent a tw**t he found depicting a swell mirage, a “Fata Morgana”. Wikipedia has a detailed explanation of this phenomenon.

Would you (and will you) adopt this “bastard of a cat”?

May 18, 2017 • 3:00 pm

When PuffHo sticks to animals, it can be tolerable, and it does have the story of Mr. Biggles, an Utter Bastard of a Cat:

Pet adoption agency Cats of Melbourne, located in Melbourne, Australia, posted a darkly hilarious memo about Mr. Biggles (also known as Lord Bigglesworth) on its website this week, practically daring a future owner to take him in.

Founder and group co-ordinator Gina Brett wrote the ad, describing the shiny black cat as “an utter utter utter bastard” who throws tantrums and does not like to be thwarted.

. . . “Mr. Biggles is currently sunning himself in my backyard and eyeballing the chickens with a view to murder,” Brett told HuffPost. “This morning he played with the dog (and didn’t draw blood, I’m impressed) and savaged my brother who tried to cuddle him (I warned him but he didn’t listen).”

While Mr. Biggles’ profile is the most shared one Brett has posted since founding the agency in October of last year, the dictatorial feline with a heart of gold has not yet been adopted.

“He’s had a lot of responses since I put his profile up on Sunday but sadly no human slaves have offered themselves up as sacrifices as yet,” Brett added.

Here’s the miscreant moggie. He looks like a bastard!

Here’s the full adoption memo:

If there are any readers in Melbourne, please adopt Mr. Biggles! I will send you both of my trade books, appropriately autographed, if you do. Even bastard cats need a loving home!

Be sure to watch the video attached to this photo at Mr. Biggles’s Plea Site:

Adopt me, you st00pid human!

HuffPo’s “eulogy” for Roger Ailes

May 18, 2017 • 2:15 pm

Yes, Roger Ailes was “politically challenged” and a sexual harasser to boot, but one senses unsavory glee in HuffPo’s headline announcing his sudden death, probably from a fall in the bathroom combined with other medical ailments. Still, I can’t find it in me to celebrate Ailes’s death the way HuffPo did:

I’m not quite sure why we’re reluctant to speak ill of the just deceased, given that many of them, like Ailes, were vile people; perhaps readers can weigh in with their hypotheses. All I know is that when I hear someone say “I’m glad he’s dead,” I think less of the speaker. My one exception was Christopher Hitchens’s funny and splenetic take on the death of Jerry Falwell.

HuffPo has literally gone insane, and the headline above shows both its frenetic and kneejerk Leftism as well as its total absence of genuine humor