Heineken has a new fantasy/sermon posing as a commercial which attempts to persuade us that the insane positions taken by left-wing crackpots are perfectly normal and mainstream, and that those cooler and more enlightened lefties could easily convert their boring and unfashionable reactionary adversaries into pals. Mutual understanding, respect, and comradeship would blossom if they just built Ikea furniture and drank a Heineken together.

The commercial gets it wrong early on. Ideologically-deranged misfits would, in the real world, prove to be physically incompetent and too obsessed with grievances and self-importance to cooperate. Fussing over Ikea instructions and trying to find the Allen wrench and all the little screws makes people irritable and more, rather than less, inclined to open anger. The bar would never get built. Nobody would get a Heineken.

Design You Trust:

Yes, There Is A ‘Sexy Women Holding Carp’ NSFW Calendar And, Of Course, It’s Gotta Be From Germany

The calendar is the brainchild of a certain Hendrik Pöhler, a native of Germany who sells equipment for carp fishing for a living. To get these priceless pics, photographer Raphael Faraggi runs the shoots in France over four weeks. He is assisted by “two competent caretakers,” who are charged with cleaning and polishing the carps’ scales before they are given to the models for the big pose.

“The idea for the calendar was to bring two of the greatest hobbies of men, fishing and women together. I remember the day when I was fishing with my friend and at the spot next to us were two hot girls fishing. This was the moment I decided to make this fabulous calendar.”

RTWT

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

The Free Beacon explains to the confused that a “Symbolic Hunger Strike” is a Hunger Strike in which the activist striker is allowed to take time out of Hunger Striking and get a bite to eat while a replacement striker fills in for him on the hunger line.

A group of Yale University graduate students announced Tuesday evening that they would be undertaking a hunger strike to pressure the administration into granting them better union benefits. The strike is taking place in front of University President Peter Salovey’s home.

“Yale wants to make us wait and wait and wait … until we give up and go away,” the eight members of the graduate student union Local 33 announced. “We have committed ourselves to waiting without eating.”

Yale doctoral students currently earn a stipend $30,000 a year, receive free health care, and have their $40,000 tuition paid in full, according to Yale News. The university administration said in a statement that they understood the students concerns, but “strongly [urge] that students not put their health at risk or encourage others to do so.”

As it turns out, the hunger strike might not put anyone’s health in peril. According to a pamphlet posted on Twitter by a former Yale student, the hunger strike is “symbolic” and protesters can leave and get food when they can no longer go on.

RTWT

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UPDATE:

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Two rivers meet in Switzerland. The blue water on the left comes from Lake Léman (Geneva), the turbid water comes from the Arve river, which is full of silt from Mont Blanc and the Chamonix Valley.

South Main, corner of Oak, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, 1940s, a little before my time.

Sippi remembers and yearns for the old and vanished America of yore.

I want to say hello to my neighbors. I want to send my children to school on a bus with their brethren to read of George Washington and Abe Lincoln. I want them to eat peanut butter sandwiches from a paper sack with waxy boxes of whole milk to wash it down.

I want to watch the news and not think it’s an assault on my worldview. I want to watch the news and not think it’s an assault on the worldview of people with whom I disagree.

I want to read a newspaper. I want to listen to the radio. …

I want to sit on naugahyde. I want someone to smoke. ../ I want people to make music right there in front of me. I want everybody to know the words.

I want everyone to dress as well as they can for a social occasion and still be dressed badly. I want to see dress shoes and white socks. …

I want the ballgame to be on TV. I want the TV to be on a shelf over a bar.

I want to go to church on Sunday. I want to go to a bar on Friday night. I want to go dancing with my wife of many years on Saturday. I want to be buried in the same suit I was married in.

I want to see a movie again at the Strand (burned down in the mid-1960s). I want to go to a wedding at St. George’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church (torn down by the Diocese of Allentown, 2010). I want to feel the dance floor in St. Stephen’s Hall bouncing from the people dancing. I want to walk up Center Street and see our town’s only skyscraper, the ten-story Steif’s Drugstore Building.

I want to step into the lobby of the Hotel Shenandoah, get a shoeshine, and purchase a carnation for a boutonniere. I want to buy a bag of peanuts and feed the parrot at Dominic Fersulo’s newstand along the north side of the Burke Building. I want to buy bagels Sunday morning at Harris’ Bakery on West Coal Street.

I want to go in and shoot a game of 8-ball in the Modern or the Majestic. I want to buy a beer at Matt Supreme’s.I want to drive deer on Opening Day with the gang from the Brandonville Fire House. I want to feed the trout in the hatchery at the Pumping Station.

I want to listen to my grandfather and the other old greenhorns argue politics, switching back and forth from Lithuanian to Polish to Russian, while playing pinochle up in Girard Park. I want to argue with my uncle Red. I want to help Adam Schadt make moonshine over in Locust Valley. I want to take long drives in my father’s Chevrolet through the Ringtown Valley and Zion’s Grove with 1950s Rock playing on the radio.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Neil Gaiman wanted to be sure that all his fans knew where exactly they could catch the soon-to-be-arriving television version of his American Gods, so he tweeted this handy chart.

No good deed goes unrewarded, of course, so a mischievous reader of Gaiman’s issued a modest proposal:

Which naturally resulted in a typical explosion of Internet creativity. Examples:

io9 has a collection.

Heat Street:

Ever feel like your job in Hollywood or your large trust fund has left you out of touch with the working class in America? Well, now there’s a new way to reconnect with the hoi polloi: Buy a pair of $425 jeans that promise to show “you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.”

Luxury fashion retailer Nordstrom was previously best known for dropping Ivanka Trump’s brand back in February—unofficially out of political spite, officially because of declining sales.

The company is now desperate to ruin its own brand further by selling a pair of working class-inspired pants, so that people with $425 to spare can feel part of the masses. Per the item’s description on the website:

Heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.

RTWT

Bill Nye the Science Guy (if anyone were ever tempted to accept this bozo as an authority on “climate change,” just refer them to this) introduces Rachel Bloom who sings (in the intrinsically annoying rap style) the bizarre recent perspective of the Community of Fashion Establishment that holds that sex is not binary, there is some kind of spectrum (if so I’m on the very extreme male end), and whatever “feels right” (boy scout uniforms, 1936 Bendix wringer-type washing machines, mashed potatoes and dwarves?), go for it!

Ethan Allen (a rebel) demands the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga, “In the Name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”

It’s easier to understand why South Carolina and other Southern States desired to secede and get away from ideologically-crazed crybully left-wing Abolitionists. The Civil War has been over for more than a century and a half. The North won. Slavery was abolished. The South was invaded, burned, conquered, occupied and forcibly Reconstructed.

The Secessionists are dead, ask a college student about the Battle of Gettysburg and he’ll say: Huh? but today, the Left has resumed fighting. Monuments to Southern heroes are being removed, the Confederate Battle Flag (now, really just an amorphous symbol of undefined Southern geography, Redneck identity, or unfocused rebelliousness) is being outlawed, and even the high school in South Burlington, Vermont, land of Bernie Sanders, has become a New Civil War battleground.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In 1961, when education leaders in South Burlington decided that a newly built high school should be nicknamed the Rebels, nobody batted an eyelash. After all, this community was founded when it split from greater Burlington about 150 years ago.

Yet this city on the shores of Lake Champlain has never seen anything quite like the current revolt under way. Three months ago, the Board of School Directors decided the Rebels moniker had offensive connotations and, therefore, needed to go.

Those Vermonters who didn’t agree with the decision reacted like, well, Vermonters.

“I don’t think constantly caving in to political correctness is appropriate in this day and age,” says Linus Leavens, a 1972 South Burlington High School graduate and the father of a student there. “I think a lot of America feels that way; there was an election recently that showed that.”

In the opinion of Mr. Leavens, a gallery manager for a fine-arts auctioneer, “Vermont has been full of rebels for a long time.”

To protest the decision, local opponents have twice helped vote down the nearly $50 million school district budget. Signs saying, “Be a Rebel. Vote No” dotted yards. Plans for a third vote on the budget are in the works.

“I can’t remember anything that has caused this much emotion and division.” says Diane Bugbee, 52 years old. She has a son who is a senior at South Burlington High and backs a new school nickname. Rebels, she says, has too much baggage: “There are just some things that can’t be rebranded.”

Photojournalist Jonathan Newton went out for the season’s final hunt this year with Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds in the scenic Brandywine Valley of Cheshire County, Pennsylvania.

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