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It is well known that a lot of very strange stuff lurks on the internet, but one French blogger’s ‘Gluten Free Museum’ is one of the stranger artistic discoveries.

Got that in one.

Graphic artist Arthur Coulet decided to airbrush all wheat-containing products out of classic paintings and film stills, not to make fun of the gluten-free movement, but as “a joke”. The idea first came to him when he noticed gluten-free ads, but he does not follow a gluten-free diet himself.

It would be even ‘funnier’ if he included the starved corpses of the people who depended on wheat for their daily bread. ‘ROFL’ as I believe the ‘kids’ say today.

Coulet’s Gluten Free Museum started drawing attention in April and soon, news sites began interpreting his project as a mockery of the suddenly popular gluten-free diet. “It’s art, minus the gluten. Finally,” The Huffington Post wrote, but Coulet insists there is no message behind his blog.

Yeah, having a point is just so fifteen minutes ago.

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The last few years have seen a rise in the number of specialist, trend-led accessory brands creating luxe-looking pieces from ethically sourced materials. All these bags listed here are part of the PETA-Approved Vegan scheme so contain no leather or other animal-derived fabrics. There are range of styles, from clutches and bucket bags to roomy shoppers and structured shoulder bags.

You too can be Politically Correct and fashionable at the same time.

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Student actors and the stage crew at Clarion University arrived Tuesday evening for one of the final rehearsals before next week’s campus opening of “Jesus in India” only to learn the off-Broadway production they had spent months on had been canceled.

The reason they were given was race: theirs.

Three of the five characters in the production are Indian, but on the mostly white state university campus, two of those characters were to be played by white student actors and a third was being portrayed by a mixed-race student.

Lloyd Suh, the playwright, told the university through his literary agent Monday that he was uncomfortable with any notion that he supported Caucasians portraying Indian characters in his play, said Bob Levy, chairman of the visual and performing arts department at Clarion.

I was under the impression that an actor’s job was to pretend convincingly to be someone he is not. Apparently I was misinformed.

The Korean-American playwright wanted the parts recast, Mr. Levy said, and ultimately pulled the university’s right to stage the production after being told that finding Asian replacements was not practical given the play was to open next Wednesday on a campus in rural northwestern Pennsylvania where Asian or Pacific Islander students account for 0.7 of 1 percent of the university’s 5,368 students.

Sorry, reality, you’ll have to take a back seat to the political agenda.

I think the playwright needs to be pressured to change his name from ‘Lloyd’ to something more ethnic. Suk Deep, perhaps.

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A pair of journalists critical of modern feminism have been banned from a university event that, ironically, focuses on whether feminism is stifling modern free speech.

The University of Manchester Free Speech & Secular Society is scheduled to hold a public debate Oct. 15 titled “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?” Initially, two journalists, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart and Julie Bindel of the Guardian, were invited to speak at the debate. Both have since been barred from attending because their opinions are considered too offensive.

The people at The Onion must be tearing out their hair. How do you parody something that looks like a parody?

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A Massachusetts woman this week won the right to wear a colander on her head in her driver’s license photo after citing religious reasons. Lindsay Miller identifies as a “Pastafarian” and member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which some critics call a parody religion.

Imagine that.

She tried to wear the kitchen utensil in her driver’s license photo this year but the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles denied her request. However, after intervention by the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center the RMV recently reversed its stance.

This is why it’s not a good idea to put government employees in charge of anything important, such as your health insurance or your tax money.

Ms. Miller said she was delighted that the agency allowed her to don a colander for her driver’s license, which was issued Thursday.

I have absolutely no doubt that she is. The rest of us, on the other hand, not so much.

“While I don’t think the government can involve itself in matters of religion, I do hope this decision encourages my fellow Pastafarian Atheists to come out and express themselves as I have,” Ms. Miller said.

Of course, if she had just called it an especially sturdy niqab, nobody would have dared to say boo about it.

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What I’ve been expecting to see every day is a bunch of KKK members dancing in the streets and saying ‘Told you so! Told you so!’ The backlash against all of this crap is not going to be pretty.

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Not too long ago, shortly before our son turned 18 months old, an important document arrived in the mail. It was a revised birth certificate, reflecting our son’s new first name—Lev.

When Lev was born, we named him Liev—a name that autocorrect doesn’t think exists. But over the first five weeks of his life, my husband Dan and I realized we’d gotten his name wrong, and now we were issuing a very public correction over a single letter.

Denizens of the Crust cope with a First World Problem.

We hadn’t taken the naming process lightly. The artisanal baby name trend has prompted a sort of arms race for obscurity. Like many people, we wanted a name that was at once classic and unusual, so I went all Nate Silver on the stats, consulting the demographic trends state by state, just as I had with my daughter four years before. (Back then, trying to see around corners, I nixed one contender because it was trending in Maine, which seemed like a bellwether state.) But we couldn’t come up with a name that fit our son the way the name Olive fit our daughter—enveloping her right away when she was born, like a soft sweater.

Reported in Slate, naturally.

If they were black, of course, they could have named him D’Volve or Peeair  and just be done with it. But they’re Persons of Pallor, so the dilemma was crippling.

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A man has died and another been critically injured after the shopping trolley they were riding crashed into a car as they reached 80 miles per hour in Sydney.

The unnamed men, both 28 years old and originally from Sweden, are believed to have ridden the trolley down Coogee Bay Road, Randwick, in the Australian capital at around 12.20am on Tuesday.

Sydney police said the accident occurred after the men found the abandoned trolley, deciding to ride it – with one on the back and the other inside it – until they crossed to the wrong side of the road and struck the vehicle.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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[Who writes this stuff?]

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Sure, why not.

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The Lynx UK Trust is seeking to release the animals in two locations, examining spots in Argyll and Bute, Northumberland, Cumbria, Norfolk and Aberdeenshire, over a five year period from next year.

If the charity gains approval for a licence, the consultation period of which starts from Wednesday, they intend to release approximately six big cats into each area and then monitor the effects on local agriculture, forestry and deer numbers.

What they really need to do is capture a breeding population of Skraelings and release them into the wild in Siberia. Redress that 10,000 year old wrong!

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Sportsmen have been praising God and crediting him for their achievements since before the days of the Gipper. But now, such praise has been deemed unsportsmanlike conduct by a high school referee.

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A student group at Williams College that hosts speakers who challenge the campus’s biases has rescinded a speaking invitation to Suzanne Venker, a conservative author and vocal critic of feminism, in response to furious condemnation from other students.

The decision to disinvite Venker is steeped in irony, given that the group’s lecture series is called “Uncomfortable Learning,” and the sole reason for ditching Venker seems to be that she was a good fit.

And not one of those dimwits at Williams College gets the point.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

Check it out.

Hey, we’ve all had days like that.

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The perfect tabloid headline — and story. On to Oprah….

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So when Anderson Cooper asked Hillary, “How would you not be a third term of President Obama?” the question couldn’t have been unanticipated. Many are saying that Hillary performed well last night–I spent the evening at a conservative event and didn’t watch the debate–but this response strikes me as awful. The main difference, Hillary says, is that she is a woman. Well, all right then!

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Poodle Roo the rooster is partially deaf and blind, and he was bullied by the other birds on his farm. But now, the kind creature has found a special role as the farm’s resident nurse and provides comfort to injured animals.

I am not making this up.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Many of the movies and TV shows that emerge from Hollywood are simply unwatchable because so many people in the industry place liberal activism ahead of every other consideration.

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The University of Manchester has banned feminist activist Julie Bindel from speaking at a panel on feminism’s free-speech problem.

The Manchester Students’ Union (SU) flagged Bindel’s appearance at the event—titled “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?”—as a potential breach of the school’s “safe space” policy. “After reviewing the request in more detail, the Students’ Union has decided to deny this request based on Bindel’s views and comments towards trans people, which we believe could incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students,” SU said in a statement.

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Victory of the Proletariat Zuckerberg has sort of a ring to it.

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When Frank Hudock, 35, a restaurant manager in the Chicago area, first told his wife, Jennifer Hudock, 30, an executive assistant, that his grandparents wanted them to name their son Frank, per generations of family tradition, her response was, “That’s never going to happen.”

They had just decided on a name they both agreed on — Max — after arguing about dozens of others, and that had been a big relief.

But then the grandparents threw in a sweetener: an offer of $10,000 in exchange for choosing Frank.

Ms. Hudock’s company didn’t have a maternity leave policy, and she wasn’t going to get paid for several months. She agreed to think it over.

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Early this past week, teacher Michael Frassetto led a walk-out-of-class protest at the Allentown (Pennsylvania) School District because of the district’s alleged disdain for minority students.

…

Frassetto, who “twice applied for jobs in Allentown,” currently teaches at the Medical Academy Charter School. He did not have his contract renewed for this year at the Roberto Clemente Charter School.

Gee, I wonder why?

He and his protesters called for “a summer employment program and a representative on the school board who is chosen by the students.” They also want Superintendent Russ Mayo’s resignation.

But a good portion of the student “activists” were more excited about missing class — and eventually heading home and/or getting some grub….

There’s a Doonesbury cartoon in there somewhere.

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Tolbert said the boys got into a staring match with a female student last school year.

“He was playing a game with her. He said she was laughing. They were engaged. When she finally giggled and said stop. He stopped,” Tolbert said.

The female student was cited in court papers as saying she also stared at the boys.

However, the Cincinnati Archdiocese said the 12-year-old boys were suspended for one day after the girl’s parents complained.

Even Catholic schools aren’t safe from the rot nowadays.

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About 140 geography professors have added their name to a “manifesto” calling on the Association of American Geographers to diversify its conference panels, decrying them as too white and male.

“Geography is still predominantly white and male, but there are far more women and people of color than in previous decades,” it states. “… Yet this shift in the racial and gender composition of the field is often not fully reflected at key sites and moments, including the composition of and attendance at conference panels, inclusion in syllabi and special issues, citations, and the hiring, evaluation, and promotion of faculty.”

Just when you think they’ve jumped the shark, they find a bigger one.

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I’m with the black guy on this one.

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Why? Because they’re “racist” of course.

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It is the drink of choice for the health-conscious, but doctors have warned of the hidden dangers of green tea after a teenage girl who drank three cups a day for three months contracted acute hepatitis.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I guess he looked at their campaigns and said ‘How hard could it be?’.

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We missed noting the story reported in the Washington Post late last week about an aspiring poet named Michael Derrick Hudson of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was having trouble getting his poetry accepted in any poetry journals. So what did he do? Pretended to be Chinese….

…

I’ve been thinking for a while that if people can self-identify as anything (gender or race) that they want, then everyone should start declaring themselves to be a racial minority (except Asian—the only officially disfavored minority) on college applications, mortgage loan applications, Census forms, etc, until this whole corrupt edifice collapses.

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Sort of a self-correcting problem.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Sort of a self-correcting problem.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

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The German college student gave up her apartment in spring. “It all started with a dispute I had with my landlord,” Müller told The Washington Post via e-mail. “I instantly decided I didn’t want to live there anymore — and then I realized: Actually, I didn’t want to live anywhere anymore.”

Instead, she bought a subscription that allows her to board every train in the country for free. Now, Müller washes her hair in the train bathroom and writes her college papers while traveling at a speed of up to 190 mph. She says that she enjoys the liberty she has experienced since she gave up her apartment. “I really feel at home on trains, and can visit so many more friends and cities. It’s like being on vacation all the time,” Müller said.

Kids, these are trained professionals — do not try this at home.

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Will Brooker is studying David Bowie by trying to live like him for a year.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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A group is advancing a plan to breed red heifers in Israel, according to a piece in the Times of Israel. That’s much more important than it may sound: Both Christian and Jewish holy books appear to predict the construction of a new Jewish Temple before the world ends. One of the obstacles has been that the ashes of a red heifer “without blemish or spot” are needed for certain ceremonies connected with it. It appears now that some embryos with the right genes are ready to go—if suitably kosher farms can be found for them in Israel.

I am not making this up.

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Betcha he votes Democrat.

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Is this a satire? Or straight? We report, you decide.

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Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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I thought we had pretty much covered the entire waterfront on the Rachel Dolezal fraud last month, but who knew that she’d show up for an encore, granting an interview to a clearly skeptical (but in this case how appropriately named) Vanity Fair magazine.

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All together now:

FIRST

WORLD

PROBLEM

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University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point officials have advised faculty that the term “America is a melting pot” is a racial microaggression.

The common phrase was among a list of examples of so-called racial microaggressions used “as a discussion item for some new faculty and staff training over the past few years,” a campus official told The College Fix in an email.

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I fully support her decision not to reproduce.

In fact, I’ll contribute financially toward her hysterectomy just to make absolutely sure.

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It what may be the silliest expression of triumph at the Supreme Court ruling yesterday legalizing gay marriage across the United States, Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, ponders “Can gay marriage [lacuna] the Islamic State?”

It doesn’t take much to be a law professor these days, apparently. Certainly ideology substitutes for intelligence at a high ratio.

In addition to her post at Georgetown, Brooks is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and previously served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy and as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Good luck with that.

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The ginger cat was picked up by Cat Protection helpers in County Armagh last week. When animal welfare officers took him to the vet for a health check, it was discovered that he had been micro-chipped in Australia.

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She said: “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.”

Describing herself as “transracial” she added: “I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. I’m more black than I am white.”

Denial is not just a river in Egypt any more….

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“Ford Shifts Grant Making To Focus Entirely on Inequality” is the headline on the Chronicle of Philanthropy news article about the Ford Foundation, which has more than $12 billion in assets.

…

The Ford Foundation’s most recent tax return reports that Mr. Walker’s predecessor, Luis Ubinas, was paid $1,891,441 in compensation and $109,294 in benefits for his final year, a sum that “INCLUDES SALARY OF $898,571 FOR THE PERIOD FROM 01/01/13 TO 09/05/13, POST-EMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION OF $954,622 PAID IN 2013 AND PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION OF $38,248 PAID IN 2013. EXCLUDES $249,045 OF PREVIOUSLY TAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION THAT WAS REPORTED ON A PRIOR YEAR(S) 990-PF AND PAID IN 2013.”

The foundation’s staff also included a $1.3 million a year director of investment administration, a $927,148 a year director of private equity, an $889,992 a year director of asset allocation, and a $723,728 a year director of hedge funds, according to the tax return.

Maybe if the Ford Foundation is so concerned about inequality, they might think about giving away the $12 billion — not just the income it generates, but the principal — to everyone equally, and shut down themselves, their highly paid staff and their fancy New York headquarters.

Kathy Shaidle jerks back the curtain.

That Watt-Cloutier was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore isn’t something I’d personally brag about, but it gets us to the message of her book, which is basically “global warming is melting stuff up here and wrecking our way of life.” Said way of life in Nunavut amounting to paying ten times the price for groceries flown up from the part of the country where we actually grow and make stuff, then sitting in the dark half the year getting drunk.

Carrie Saxifrage, who wrote the second book in question — The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift — also changed her name in adulthood, but for pretentious, First World white lady reasons:

She and her husband named themselves after a white flower that grows on mountaintops, and, as she recounts, “Our families didn’t know what to make of our earnest explanations of how we were claiming relationship to those pure, high places[.]”

I pray that being “high” had something to do with this couple’s rejected-Portlandia-script name-change. The notion of anyone undertaking such an endeavor stone cold sober chills the blood.

…

The very notion of “climate change memoirs” provides minutes of fun. One eagerly awaits the release of Confessions of a (Locally Sourced, Organic) Opium Eater and Go Ask Alice (About Bee Colony Collapse.)

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Maybe Obama golfing is why the economy is so bad.