Things that were banned this week, if you’re keeping track:

Tintin

 Insulting lingerie (if you're at work, don't click. Nothing NSFW, but c'mon. Lingerie.)


Things about to be banned: fried chicken in New York hospital cafeterias

The list grows ever longer. Good news, though: Tintin was unbanned quite quickly.

The reversal comes after a report in Tuesday's Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper in which Miri said the library planned to remove Tintin comics from its shelves.

 “The image the Tintin books give of Africans is Afro-phobic, for example. Africans are a bit dumb, while Arabs sit on flying carpets and Turks smoke water pipes,” he told the paper.

I hope that’s an inelegant translation, because “Afro-phobic” is a stupid word. We have to stop equating ridicule or criticism with a “phobia.” The images of Africans in the book are racist, if you want a more useful word. It’s bone-in-the-nose stuff. If you want to remove them from a library because the artist used contemporary conceptions in his work, you remove history.

It’s also preposterous to remove all Tintin because of the images in a few. Unless you want to make the argument that Thomson and Thompson were engaging in Syldaviaphobia by showing up in stereotypical ethnic garb:

 

 

SCIENCEIf your mind is need of boggling, this is boggleriffic: the most zoomed-in photograph in the history of mankind.

Titled the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), it’s a followup to the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo created in the mid-2000s. Scientists combined 10-years-worth of Hubble Space Telescope photos to create this resulting image that shows 5,500 individual galaxies, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness of what our human eyes can see.

Here’s a tiny portion.

 

 

Those dots are galaxies. They are far, far away. So one of them has Darth Vader. Well, his ashes; if you remember, Star Wars took place “a long time ago,” which means everyone in it was dead. Which is slightly depressing until you realize that includes Ewoks.

 HISTORY Today’s editorial cartoon from the 1900 Minneapolis Tribune album features that stand-by of the era, Thoughtful Uncle Sam. Hey, the Cuban situation is better now! 

 

 

 

Apparently he took to walking around the outskirts of town, followed by a small dog, when international tensions increased.

 

ART  Graphic designer Saul Bass - trust me, you’ve seen his work, if only in movie credits - did a children’s book, and Brain Pickings has some excerpts. It's been lost for a while, and now it's been found.

 

 

I suspect graphic designers may have loved it more than children.

CRIME “‘Since he ate the quarter pounder, McDonald's would not refund his money, sending Mr. Leon into a McFury,’ said Sgt. Claudio Grandjean, Gresham Police spokesman.” The problem was onions. Mugshot:

 

Maybe it’s just me, but I thought of this:

 

 

I got the link from Fark. Now I’m going to the comments to see if anyone else thought the same thing.