I gave Morales the guideline that his comments shouldn’t make up more than 20% of a thread (and he seems to be following the suggestion). That’s a good guideline for everyone — the goal is to have some healthy back and forth in the discussion.

“Why does algebra put letters into numbers?” Carlson asked.

“I think just to f**k with you,” Elofson said.

“So you deal with math in your job every day. You’ve already, I think, demonstrated your grasp of math is high”

“I mean, functional math. Yeah, yeah, for sure.”

“Well, if you can build a wood-fired kiln, you understand math,” Carlson said. “But you didn’t add letters to numbers in the process of doing that?”

“That’s the weirdest thing,” Elofson replied. “Nowhere did I find any letters in my math to calculate the size and structural integrity of a catenary arch. Isn’t that weird? Oh, that was weird. Because every math teacher was always like, you need to know some algebra. I’ve yet to encounter a single person in my life that uses algebra.”

“Actually?” Carlson asked.

“Have you?”

“Yeah, but I mean, I live in a fake world,” the former Fox News host said.

“That’s why you use fake math with letters. Congratulations to everybody out there in the matrix. Good job. You’re good little goy slaves,” Elofson said.

“That’s amazing.”

I use algebra automatically all the time, and even teach people how to use it. You can’t do physics or chemistry or biology or cooking or art or construction without it. How does he calculate how much brick he needs given a certain size of kiln he’s building, to use a simple example?

I don’t think Elofson’s grasp of math is at all high. He wouldn’t meet the minimal requirements for admission to my university. But then, I live in the real, physical world that requires some understanding of relationships and numbers and proportions and ratios, unlike these two guys who can get by on elementary anti-semitism.

American education is failing, given the example of these two gomers.

The pink thing is a knitted octopus tied to a leather strap, and it’s very, very important. It is the evil cat’s one toy, the one thing she has fixated on since we first adopted her. She often talks to it. It’s weird: she will yowl and babble and have long conversations with it. Some nights I’ll be sleeping in my bed and wake up to hear these eerie noises in the living room or kitchen or wherever she has dragged her little pink pal — they’re more than just “meows,” they have a kind of grammar and structure and contain sounds we don’t hear from her in any other context.

I should probably record it sometime, because I think we’re actually hearing the dark tongue of Hell.

Blecch.

The latest architectural horrors dictated at us by a man with no taste is the Trump Arch, which is being built real soon now with no authorization from any of the officials in charge or preserving the city and its history.

The proposed arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington, including renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, building a huge new White House ballroom, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on X, “befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.”

Along with the announcement on X, Burgum posted artistic mockups of the planned 250-foot-tall (76-meter) memorial arch, which will stand between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Those capitalization choices were Burgum’s, which should put you on alert. Morons think that capitalizing Crap makes it majestic.

The administration really is just rushing ahead with Trump’s nightmare vision.

Historic preservation experts have long criticized the Trump administration for seeming to rush the arch approval process, including by moving to weaken protections for historic sites altogether. This latest development raises concerns that the White House seeks to sidestep the process, which it denies.

“Work will begin that does not require approval, but rather helps in the process,” the White House told NPR in a statement on Friday. “We will of course continue on our path of seeking final approval from all applicable entities.”

Surprise: they won’t. You know it and they know it.

Our capitol is going to be wrecked and left with cheap glittering gilt garbage, demolished historical sites, and hideous monuments to an asshole’s ego. He is going to die, eventually, and we’re all going to be left with the clean up. What shall we do?

Simple solution: BLOW IT ALL UP.

The author has been touring Germany, and seeing what the German solution to the ugly history of the Third Reich has been. Hitler’s bunker has been paved over and is a parking lot. The site of the Nuremberg rallies has been allowed to crumble and “looked like garbage.” They dynamited the Berghof and “flattened Göring’s house, Bormann’s house and the rest of the Nazi colony, hauled away the rubble and planted trees over the site.” And, of course:

Unfortunately, the latest German elections suggest that there’s more yet to be done.

Blundell has specific recommendations for what the next administration must do. Unfortunately it’s a long list.

Believe in the Directive. Not a review. Not a blue-ribbon commission on the future of the ballroom. A firm belief, stated in the campaign and executed on day one, that a monument built by a President to himself is not a public work and does not get grandfathered in as one. Germany was handed this belief at gunpoint. America has to choose it.

The arch comes down, or never goes up. If it’s excavation, fill the hole. If it’s steel, cut it. If it’s finished, do what the Seventh Army did at Nuremberg and let the cameras roll. It sits between Lincoln and the war dead. It was built for “me.” There is no version of American reconciliation that leaves it standing.

The name comes off everything. The Trump Kennedy Center reverts to the Kennedy Center before lunch on inauguration day. Any ballroom, any coin, any banner, any federal building, any portrait hung by executive fiat. Street signs came down across Germany in 1946. This is the American version, and it takes a pen.

The ballroom is the Eagle’s Nest. Ninety thousand square feet of gold leaf where the East Wing used to be, with a bunker underneath. You can raze it and rebuild the East Wing. Or you can do what Bavaria did and turn it into something so ordinary it can’t be worshipped. A visitor centre. A public cafeteria. A daycare for federal workers. Serve the pretzels in it. Either way, no one is ever allowed to say his name in that room with reverence.

Restore the referees. Reinstate an independent Commission of Fine Arts and a National Capital Planning Commission that doesn’t answer to a staff secretary. Repeal the beauty order. Write into law that no sitting President may initiate a monument to himself, ever, which is a sentence nobody thought America would need.

Preserve the evidence of the victims. The detention records ICE stopped publishing. The names of the people who died in custody. The facilities. The Germans preserved Dachau’s ovens because the alternative was letting grass grow over them. Keep the camps as museums and tear down the arch. That’s the whole formula.

Trump’s people will scream that it’s petty. That it’s revenge. That it’s erasing history. It isn’t. Germany erased Hitler’s monuments and became the country with the best memory in Europe. You erase the shrine so there’s room for the museum. Nobody in Bavaria is confused about what happened on the Obersalzberg because the Berghof is gone. They know precisely because it’s gone, and there’s a documentation centre where a tour bus used to park.

I approve. Let’s elect people who will have the stamina to implement this plan.

It’s been one of those days — long boring meeting that ate up most of my morning, and then off to the dentist. I have a cavity. I’m getting it fixed in November. My patience is a little thin today.

So this news has me shaking mad.

On September 3, Bhattacharya’s NIH signed an “interagency agreement” with Hegseth’s Department of War, transferring Congressionally-mandated NIH patient research funding into Trump’s failing war machine.

That guy doesn’t get enough attention, or hatred: he’s a rotten anti-vax grifter who coasted into a cushy position as head of the NIH on RFK jr’s coattails. He’s despicable in every way possible, and is recognized as an incompetent stooge for the Trump administration. And now, after cheerfully starving American scientists of research funds, this guy is stealing more from the budget to fund the pointless, failed war on Iran.

The U.S. Department of Defense already has a pretty healthy budget compared to the National Institutes of Health. For fiscal year 2027, the Trump administration has requested a $1.5 trillion budget for the DoD—about 36 times the budget that it’s requested for the NIH. Yet, in the first week of August, the Pentagon and the NIH quietly established an agreement that would allow even more funds—potentially billions of dollars worth—to go from the NIH to the Pentagon.

Why would the director of the NIH voluntarily cut his own budget to feed a doomed war in Iran? Because he’s a hack, a tool who only holds his position as long as he is obedient.

I have a long list of people I want to see queued up for the guillotine once Trump is out of power. Trump is first, obviously. RFK jr is second. But Jay Bhattacharya is third in line, and I will be cheering as I dip an handkerchief in his blood for a souvenir. Those three bear the most responsibility for the destruction of American science, although they also have many helpers.

No mercy.

This is the path I take to work, which is bracketed by some crabapple trees on either side, and at this time of year it is covered with little red crabapples.

It gets swept occasionally, but those are extraordinarily productive trees, and my walk is through that squishy, slippery mess. I tend to step in the barer spots, so I kind of dance my way across it, but bicyclists go straight through the middle, leaving a trail of flattened apples. What you can’t see in this photo is the sickly-sweet smell of rotting sour apples, or the tremendous swarms of flies and wasps gorging themselves in a gluttonous orgy.

It’s not pleasant, but soon enough it will be replaced sheets of snow over ice. I prefer the rotten apples.

It’s Labor Day. I got 100% caught up on my work yesterday, so today…I’m going to hop into bed and read a book or two.

Later. Go away.

Although, to me, the best moment was when an earlier launch had to be cancelled because there was a fishing boat downrange. The halibut and haddock wait for no man!

The next space powers may be Norway and Scotland.

I woke up this morning to the joy of raging schadenfreude. I live in a scarlet part of the state, where despite having a vivid blue island in the middle of it (the university), the whole region happily turned out to vote for Trump. They didn’t care that he was a grifter, or that he’d bankrupted all of his businesses, or that he was a rapist, all they cared about was that he’d be sticking it to the libs and all those non-heterosexual and non-white people. They didn’t care until they discovered that he was also going to stick it to them.

I opened my internet feed this morning to discover all the MAGAs whining that that their cattle farms are going broke and that they have to sell their beef wholesale on TikTok, and all my fellow blues chortling and confronting them with the brutal question, “who did you vote for?”

Farming is important, and we should support agriculture, but we’re at this point in history where if you were a rancher, you were almost definitely a Republican and most often a hardcore far right freak. It’s an occupation that typically required only capital, and often inherited capital at that, and minimal education. And now they’ve helped elect a president who doesn’t understand basic economics and will take the farmers’ support for granted.

Dairy farmers aren’t much better. My county is about to get a massive influx of cows, to produce an excess of milk, and no one is asking who benefits. It won’t be us. We get to deal with the stench and the flies and the depleted aquifers, while someone reaps the profits.

At least I still get to chortle a little bit, since I’m a vegetarian and am not in the market for dead animal parts. We don’t drink milk at my house, only a little almond milk. I feel like my dietary habits have become an assault on Nazis.

I’m about to go to the store this morning to buy vegetables and beans…FOR GREAT JUSTICE!

Seven years ago, Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra reported on their discovery of Boquila trifoliolata (Lardizabalaceae), a woody vine from temperate rainforests of southern Chile, capable of complex leaf mimicry, when leaves of up to three different host plants were mimicked by leaves of one B. trifoliolata plant. However, according to a side-by-side published commentary, the absence of any plausible hypothesis for such a phenomenon makes this report unexplainable and mysterious.

Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra preferred some chemical volatile signals released from the host plants, which would allow the B. trifoliolata to mimic leaves of host plants. As an alternative proposal, they also speculated that horizontal gene transfer between host plant and Boquila vine, mediated perhaps via airborne microbes, might allow this leaf mimicry. They proposed this scenario because B. trifoliolata leaves mimic the nearest foliage, irrespective if these leaves are from the host plants or some other neighboring plants.

Interesting ideas, and I find them very reasonable. Sure, horizontal gene transfer, of the diffusion of morphogenetic signals — that seems plausible, initially, when I didn’t know the degree of mimicry. These plants copy the shapes of leaves, and the degree and pattern of venation. That seems a bit much to attribute to the chance transfer of multiple genes, or picking up signals that change or modify the plant’s intrinsic signals. The authors of this paper propose a surprising alternative: the plants are watching other plants in their neighborhood, and copying them visually.

No way, I thought. Plants don’t have eyes. How do they see? Let’s skip right past that minor anatomical difficulty — maybe we can return to that issue another day — and instead block the possibility of genetic or developmental signaling. They came up with a delightfully simple experiment.

we have been given a rare opportunity to test plant vision in more detail. The simplest way to test the vision hypothesis with the B. trifoliolata would be to see if it would mimic a non-living leaf shape from an artificial plant. In this study, B. trifoliolata was exposed to the artificial plastic plant with a characteristic leaf shapes. The results of this study show that this is indeed the case as leaves of B. trifoliolata mimicked leaves of the artificial plant. Hopefully, this report will stimulate more experiments in future to improve our understanding of the plant sensory abilities.

Surprise! Organic Boquila leaves copied plastic leaves to varying degrees!

Leaf shapes in Boquila trifoliolata. (a) Non-mimic leaf, with three lobes, dense vascular network. (b) Mimic leaf, with a single lobe in the apex, less dense vascular network. Red asterisks shows examples of free-ending veinlets.

Now I’m confused…how do they do that? I haven’t thought of any alternatives, yet. I welcome your speculations.

Until I have a better explanation, though, I’m going to have to cover the houseplants.

Another prediction: He won’t show any shame

I am compelled to make a prediction about Ken Paxton of Texas, who is running for the Senate.

Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes…

Stop right there. Seven homes? Who needs 7 homes? I have ONE, and I was quite proud of the fact that I have paid it off before my retirement. I figure I’m not rich, but am moderately self-sufficient and financially stable, but now I’m question that. What are people doing with seven homes?

Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes but said he earned no income from any. Yet all but one was listed for rent during the reporting periods, and some current residents and neighbors at those addresses confirmed that the properties were rented, the news organizations found. Receiving income and not reporting it is a violation of federal disclosure law, three ethics experts said.

Oh. He’s a landlord. I guess if I had 7 homes, that’s what I’d have to do with 6 of them, but I wouldn’t be proud of that.

And he didn’t bother reporting them, and further, LIED to say he received no income from them? I wouldn’t do that. I’d declare everything openly, and would maintain and pay taxes on them, which would probably mean I’d be selling them off as quickly as I could. Paxton, though, doesn’t believe in ethical behavior.

Which leads to my prediction. Ken Paxton, endorsed by Trump, will be Texas’s next senator. And by this accomplishment, you will know that Texas, and perhaps the rest of the country is well, is so corrupt that we’re going to need to plow it with salt and eject it from the Union.

Maybe Mexico could do something with the real estate.

Then you should be excited about this: the latest Humble Bundle is The Best of CJ Cherryh. You can immediately download DRM-free electronic copies of 38 of her books for, at a minimum, $18 (I paid a little bit more). I will never be bored again!

I hate you both equally, boys

How dreadful that an organization of polite, well-dressed people are experiencing a disruptive division. They’re such thoughtful people!

For a gathering of people devoted to denouncing the inferiority of blacks and sounding the alarm about civilization-threatening Muslims, the biannual conferences thrown by the New Century Foundation, publisher of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, are decidedly genteel affairs. Men dress in suits and ties, women in formal business attire, and there are no uniformed skinheads or Klansmen to be seen. Large plasma television screens, Starbucks coffee spreads and fancy linens adorn the hotel meeting hall. Epithets have no place here.

The article continues with an anecdote about a speaker, David Duke, saying There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit (you know who he’s talking about!), prompting a member of the audience to rise up and shout, You fucking Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting!, before walking out. It’s a schism between the people who hate brown people and Muslims, and the people who hate brown people, Muslims, and Jews. They’re all fucking Nazis.

This extraordinary incident marked the beginning of an open rift between those on the radical right who see blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as the primary enemy, and those who say “the Jews” are ultimately behind every evil — a split that has usually stayed just below the surface but now threatens a leading institution of American extremism. While in the past he has managed to bridge this divide mainly by ignoring it, American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor now must finally come to terms with the split. His dilemma boils down to this: Throw out the anti-Semites and try to build a larger movement with electoral possibilities like those increasingly seen in Britain and Germany; or openly join hands with the very energetic neo-Nazis even though that means the loss of any remaining shred of respectability.

I suggest that we throw out the whole deplorable, bigoted mishegoss of American Renaissance. It’s a battle between two giants of racism, David Duke and Jared Taylor, both of them contemptible and repulsive, and we’re supposed to care which one wins the struggle for dominance? Sure, Taylor is less aggressively anti-semitic, but that doesn’t matter in the long run — if the organization is shaped in his image, it will still be white nationalist, and eventually it will be purebred Nazi. There isn’t a meaningful hair of difference between the two.

A local dairy proposed building the largest herd of cows in the entire state of Minnesota right here in my county — a massive enterprise that would suck our aquifer dry and turn the water into giant stinking fecal pools that will breed more flies. Much of the local population is opposed, and Riverview Dairy has never made a case for why we need so much milk. I was motivated to attend a packed meeting of Stevens County officials where they were considering giving the dairy a permit.

The outcome of the meeting was that the county officials did not issue a permit, but adjourned to think about it. At the time, I made a prophecy.

In the end, a small group of old white men, the planning commission, will retreat into a meeting room and make the decision, and I predict that they will decide that Riverview doesn’t need any more studies of their environmental impact. The county has a total population of 10,000, and this one dairy operation will be pumping out waste equivalent to the output of a city of 750,00 people, but we’ll just let them do their thing and then find out the consequences. Short-sightedness will win again.

Am I a true prophet? The Land Stewardship Project shares the latest news.

On Tuesday, Sept. 1, Stevens County officials approved Riverview’s conditional use permit for the proposed West River Dairy expansion near Morris. This decision largely clears the way for what will become the largest concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in Minnesota history. Once completed, this 18,855-cow facility will be more than 60 times the size of the average Minnesota dairy.

The county’s approval comes after farmers and other rural residents expressed deep concerns over the past several months about the potential environmental and economic impacts of this facility. More than 1,400 people submitted official public comments about West River Dairy to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), and 1,140 people signed LSP’s petition calling for a full environmental impact statement (EIS).

Despite deep community concerns regarding incomplete local water data, massive water usage (319 million gallons per year), and 250 million gallons of liquid manure storage near impaired waterways, local officials declined to impose protective groundwater conditions. We are deeply disappointed in the county commissioners’ decision.

I have a gift.

She was 92. After decades of journalism and feminist activism, she died peacefully at her home.

I have to say it: Death must be drunk. He keeps flailing around and cutting down the wrong people. Come on, Death, you’ve got one important target: he’s fat, orange, reeks of shit, and has clown hair. How can you keep missing?

I don’t look like I like it very much. I think it’s because I’m about to go teach a class and a lab.

Also, I compared it to my great-great-grandfather’s hairdo (photo from some time in the mid-1960s), and I can see my future fate.

All I need now is a pair of overalls.

The only reason they give for wanting to avoid vaccinated people is their slogan, unvaxxed are hotter, a subjective opinion that can have no evidence to back it up. Unless, that is, they mean that the unvaxxed are more likely to run a fever.

I’m not interested in dating ever again, but if I were, education and intelligence would be my major criteria for a partner, and this is a site that excludes that category.

scummy Wisconsin billionaires

Fortunately, I’ve completely tuned out of television in this election season, or I’d be even more anxious right now. Minnesota is being flooded with conservative billionaire money. You know who benefits: Republicans.

The Republican nominee for governor, Lisa Demuth, has a super PAC funded mostly by a Wisconsin billionaire — Richard Uihlein, who has spent years bankrolling right-wing candidates and campaigns in other states and nationwide. In 2024, Uihlein and his wife were top Trump donors, spending $59 million to help deliver the White House back to Trump and to support other conservative candidates.

ANow they have turned their eyes to Minnesota. The Uihleins’ dark money super PAC heavily funded the Restore Sanity super PAC, which spent nearly $3 million to ensure Lisa Demuth won her primary — more than five times the amount Demuth herself raised, and about three times more than all of her Republican opponents raised combined.

In the counties where the ads paid for mostly by this single donor didn’t air (mostly outside the Twin Cities), Demuth often lost or underperformed. In the weeks leading up to the Republican primary, Demuth bragged about the work the super PAC was doing for her. She owes her campaign’s survival in large part to one man, and Minnesotans deserve to know what kind of return on investment he’s expecting.

Uihlein is not investing in Minnesota’s elections on a whim. In other states, he and his wife have used their personal wealth to fund extreme causes that they know would be rejected without their enormous outside spending. They have bankrolled efforts to restrict abortion. They have financed organizations committed to repealing the Affordable Care Act and to privatizing Social Security. They have funded efforts to undermine workers’ rights and labor unions and have fought reforms to lower prescription drug prices.

Why are billionaires intrinsically evil? How can anyone look at their agenda and fail to realize that they are not friends of humanity?

We can blame a good part of this villainy on the Supreme Court.

Going forward, the only long-term solution is to get big money out of our politics by overturning Citizens United and passing strong, nationwide campaign finance reform. Until then, Minnesotans can do their part by holding politicians accountable when they allow people like Uihlein to try and rig the system for themselves.

Whoever the next presidential candidate is, they better put a priority on purging the corruption from the Supreme Court.

Of course it’s a fake gold color.

Daniel Phelps informs me that the only president who had his portrait on a coin while he was alive was Calvin Coolidge; ominously, the Great Depression hit shortly after he left office, so let’s hope that’s not predictive. Julius Caesar was assassinated shortly after his ego prompted him to issue a coin with his face on it, so maybe that’s the correlation to hope for.

If I somehow got one of these things, I’d immediately turn around and ask for a dollar bill instead. If I couldn’t get a quick refund, if I’d have to hang on to it for a while, I have access to all kinds of acids and a Dremel tool. It would not return to circulation unmarred.

What would you do if given one of these abominations?

Joe Schmid’s new god

Joe Schmid was, I hear, a popular atheist YouTuber whose videos I never watched, except one. Belatedly, people told me he provided good philosophical support for atheism, and I was never into that philosophical angle — I’m more of a naturalist, materialist atheist who relies on science. But that’s OK! We need all kinds. Except, too late, he recently announced that he was no longer an atheist. He’s a hard-core Catholic now.

I can’t say that I regret the loss. The one time I listened to him, he sounded like a babbling philbro idiot, and he and Alex O’Connor destroyed their own reputations as far as I’m concerned. I’m not actually surprised after that performance that he has now declared himself a Catholic.

Here, you can enjoy his antic, demented announcement if you want…or skip the goofy histrionics and I’ll just summarize it.

He was brought up in a Catholic family, and attended a conservative Catholic school, and became an atheist because of evolution, of all things. He doesn’t seem to know much science, and elected to go to grad school in philosophy. He was an atheist because evolution seemed so wasteful and cruel (remember that for a minute), and he couldn’t believe a good god had created humans by virtue of that bloody meatgrinder. That’s not a good reason to become an atheist, but OK, it takes all kinds.

He has since learned about fine tuning and theistic evolution, which removed that objection to god-belief, because he’s an idiot. The fine tuning argument is just an argument from ignorance, where he can’t imagine how natural laws could generate complex life without a god rigging the rules to enable living things to arise in tiny, specific environments, like Earth. It might seem like a good excuse to those with a predisposition to believing in intelligent design, but most scientists find the arguments unbelievable and unsupported.

But hold on to your hats, the arguments are going to get worse and worse.

The next reason he gives for believing in god is miracles, miracles that he claims are supported by physical evidence and thousands of eyewitness accounts. That lots of people who share a common belief in supernatural phenomena claim that they saw a miracle like, say Fatima manifesting in the sky, or that they knew a guy who knew a guy whose cancer went into remission after a prayer was said over him, means nothing, but they’re enough to convince gullible Joe that something metaphysical, not psychological, had to have happened.

That’s weak. But then just to prove he doesn’t have a skeptical bone in his body, his next proof of god is Padre Pio, an old fraud whose schtick was to wave around bloody wounds in his hands and feet, stigmata like those that would have been present in his crucified Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We aren’t supposed to wonder why a god would poke bleeding holes into a priest, he just did. It’s about the most useless, pointless miracle ever, but it was enough to convince Joe Schmid that the Catholic god existed. What a rube.

But the next ‘miracle’ is the worst of all. He cites the story of St. Maria Goretta. Holy fuck, this is classically Catholic sickness.

Maria Goretta was an 11 year old girl, a virgin (it’s very important that she was a virgin, otherwise she wouldn’t have been sainted). She was attacked by a 20 year old man who demanded sex from her, which she refused (also important, this is a story about chastity), so he stabbed her with an awl 14 times. She survived for a little while, giving the local doctors time to operate on her multiple times, without anesthetic, and she suffered horribly a long tortuous painful death, but the doctors, all male, claim that she had said, while reduced to screaming, unimaginable pain, that she forgave her attacker. Yeah, right, and Joe Schmid would consider this a documented miracle.

Joe Schmid calls this a profound and beautiful story. Fuck you, Joe Schmid, there’s nothing beautiful about a young girl being tortured to death, you sadistic sick fuck. Recall, though, that he had become an atheist because of the abstract idea of generations of organisms dying over the long course of history, a wasteful and cruel process that he couldn’t imaging a good god presiding over; I guess it wasn’t personal and brutal enough to bring him to the joy of loving a personal, vicious god. I can tell that he had been brought up on the lives of Catholic saints and martyrs, standard training for Catholic children in the deep horrors of their hateful religion. He’s just returning to his youthful indoctrination in torture porn.

I have no problem with people returning to the comforting faith of their youth; I can understand some of the appeal of ritual, certainty, and community. I have no sympathy for people returning to a cult because they were inspired by a horrific tale about torturing a child.

Oh well, his career as an atheist is dead at last. I’m sure his star will be ascending among primitive, psychopathic religious adherents.

Also, I thought his weirdly frantic performance in the above half-hour long video was off-putting enough, but would you believe his next couple of videos, in which he tries to provide a more detailed justification for his freaky beliefs, are 7 and 10 hours long. No, I haven’t watched them, nor will I. There’s something wrong with that boy.

I’m looking down on the opening of my grayish-black kettle, and there in the middle, it’s THE BLOB! It looked like some awful pale gray clotted slime, and I thought for a moment about what kind of contaminant was accumulating in our plumbing.

But of course you’ve already figured out what it is.

It’s just ice — apparently the cooler was supercooling the water below its freezing point and it was instantly crystallizing when it hit the kettle. I was actually able to reach in and make a slushy snowball with it.

It’s too bad that what I then did was take it to my office and heat it to boiling.

I tried watching this old BBC series with an interesting premise: strange, random anomalies keep popping up around Great Britain, providing temporary two-way passages to and from the distant past. It’s a great set up for a monster-of-the-week series, as ancient creatures pop up and terrify the locals and give the scientist protagonists opportunities to travel to the past. I like the idea!

But then, in the very first episode, Cutter, who is searching for his wife lost in the past, finds a human skeleton in the dirt, he quickly runs his fingers over the rib cage, and announces, “It’s not her. It’s a male.” Say what? Do the writers have the bad idea that men and women differ in the number of ribs? That would be embarrassingly bad.

I braved the second episode, which features giant ancient spiders! Way to sidle past my doubts, writers. These spiders have massive chelicerae which seem to be orthognathous, much like those found in tarantulas (the Aranea are labidognathous, and can pinch their pointy little fangs together.) Some people are bitten and envenomed, and some dork suggests that they can’t be spiders, they must be scorpions, which is silly, since scorpions have relative small chelicerae. I had to stop there, because the credibility of the scientific contributions of the writing team is about nil at this point.

For those of you familiar with the show, is it worth it for me to continue? I’m here for relaxing entertainment, not exercising my arm shaking my fist at the TV.

I know nothing about James Dyson other than that he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman, but I guess that’s a lucrative business, and he’s raked in a whole lot of money, so off he goes to buy an estate that includes an old castle and the ruins of an abbey, which is now his, never mind that it is a site that has been populated since at least the 6th century. It’s his, damn it, and you can stay off of it.

Templemichael Church and Castle

From the state of it, he’s not living there or holding parties in it — he has a grand manor nearby for that. I once made a trip all around Ireland, Dublin to Cork to Galway to Belfast and back again, and I loved stopping off at old ruins and soaking in the history. I don’t specifically remember stopping in Waterford, but I know my route passed through it. I may have left quickly, repelled by all the stinky billionaires moving in (Mark Zuckerberg bought a place near there, which would have made the stench quite thick). By what right does a man, and an English man at that, have the privilege to lock up a chunk of Irish history?

Well, money, I guess. The locals are not happy about this, but it won’t bother Master James, he wasn’t going to invite them to his house for a ball, anyway. He can just dance with Master Mark.

It’s not fun for me, either, but we’ll never get to the fun stuff without it. I’ve been cramming general chemistry all weekend, because I have to know it all better than the students.

Another important matter this week is that I have to get a haircut after a long summer of flowing locks. I’m trying to decide if I should bring back an old style. Here’s what I looked like in the mid-1960s.*

back row: the second wave of cousins, Tim Smith, my brother Jim, Matt Sones.
Front row: first wave cousins, Don Smith, me, Kelly Sones.

That haircut was easy to maintain, and cheap to cut — my mom would just stroke her electric hair clippers over my head, and it would be done. I don’t think I look anything like me now, just a homely, shaggy old man.

I was no prize to begin with, and it’s not fair that I got homelier over time.

I think teaching chemistry over and over aged me. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

*P.S. Only Matt and I are still alive. I should be grateful I’m still here, no matter how ugly I get.