6x6

sex-ed: acknowledging that most young people are schooled by pornography, a major service-provider is getting in the business of outreach, via Bad Ethnography

coffin nails: ironic, hypocryphal Death cigarettes were really popular with Goths

nüshu: throwing off the yoke of a patriarchal society that excluded women seeking education, Chinese women developed their own secret script to promote literacy, via Nag on the Lake

pinhologican: a nonsense word generator for the nonce that yields some very cromulent terms, via Boing Boing

you and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammal: a look at the making of Planet Earth II and the evolution of the documentary

thank you for being a friend: a Golden Girls themed café, with special emphasis on Blanche Deveraux, opens in Washington Heights, NYC

tusken raiders

Hasbro will be issuing a special fortieth anniversary edition of its iconic line of Star Wars actions figures—to include R5D4 and the other denizens of Tatooine. The poor Sand People are always made the scapegoats and get the blame for everything, like for the deaths of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and the destruction of their moisture farm. Never forget, it was done by Imperial Stormtroopers who made it look like the aftermath of a Tusken raid.

agent orange

Revoltingly—and unclear whether the US ambassador thought of this stupid cruelty himself or it was part of some State Department hazing ritual to prove oneʼs absolute loyalty to the new regime, the president of the eastern African nation and one of the seven majority Muslim countries under Dear Leaderʼs travel ban was presented with a baseball cap with a variation of the white-supremacist dog-whistle of slogan, “Make Somalia Great Again.” Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmajo” Mohamed (who happens to be a US national) was not available for immediate comment but seemed to grudgingly accept the gift—which is far more patience and poise that could be expected out of anyone in such an awkward and inappropriate situation.

italia irredenta

Advisedly, a Roman high school cancelled plans less than a day after it announced its intentions to host a grand ball with a fascist-era theme.
Perhaps officials on the planning-committee thought there was little significant difference between dressing up in a flapper frock for a Great Gatsby-themed fete or that no 80s dance party was complete without doing a lot of coke and Japanese bashing. In any case, teachers conceded that this was insensitive to the memory of those times and was especially a poor choice right now considering nationalist movements are political big-ticket items in a lot of contested election campaigns—including Italyʼs own.