Because otherwise those damned Dutch giants will crush you.
Because otherwise those damned Dutch giants will crush you.
The headline says, “Giant spiders the size of rats make comeback in UK after nearing extinction, RSPB says“. Nah, I know these spiders. That’s Dolomedes. We call them fishing spiders here in the colonies.
Fen raft spiders starting to appear on the Dyke networks of the Lower Waveney Valley. This one was battling the wind even on this sheltered Dyke line. @suffolkwildlife @WaveneyCott @BBCCountryfile @HeritageFundM_E @SWTCarltonMarsh pic.twitter.com/pbMh8oGC2W
— Suffolk Wildlife Trust North East Reserves (@SWT_NE_Reserves) April 9, 2024
They are large spiders, but not as big as rats…unless you’ve got nothing but stunted, runty, starveling rats out there in the UK, scarcely big enough to put onna stick.
I’m surprised that they (the spiders, not the rats) were endangered — they seem to be doing fine here, in a part of the country with lots of wetlands that get some protection (but not enough) because they’re a haven for game birds. It’s good to hear that Dolomedes is making a comeback, though, in part because the zoos are raising more spiders.
That looks familiar, that’s how I raise my spiders. I hope they have many more vials than that, if they’re hoping to repopulate the whole of Britain.
I don’t think even minuscule UK rats would fit in those vials, you know.
…the answer is “ADORBS”. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there.
I uploaded a test clip of a short 8mm film recording, with some minimal processing to make it presentable (little tweaks of the white balance, contrast, a tiny bit of smoothing, etc.) If you have suggestions about how I can clean it up further, let me know.
This is Christmas Eve, 1960. You all remember it well, I’m sure.
I’ve been scanning these old 8mm recordings I inherited from my grandfather, and it’s been a rather distressing experience. It’s the combination of extreme nostalgia and resurrected regret, and the hardest part has been all the memories of my grandfather himself. We had this complicated, shifting relationship that changed for the worse as we got older, in particular, as he degenerated in terrible, tragic ways. He was an important part of my childhood, but when he died in 1989, I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. Yet now, as I see these old recordings, I miss him and wish I could see him again, and also wish I could have done something to prevent his self-destruction.
One constant reminder of our connection is our name. I was named after my grandfather. I was his first grandchild. Strangely, no one called me “Paul” when I was born — I was PZ. I didn’t learn my full name until I was 5 and was sent off to school with a nametag that stated my proper name, and told that I have to answer to “Paul” or I might miss the bus to take me home, which sounded like a terrible threat. After that, my family started calling me “Little Paul” — Grandpa was Big Paul, of course — so now I was facing diminution on top of risking not being able to come home. I have always been confused about my name, my self, and my identity, and I don’t mentally attach a name to myself at all. I’m always just the bewildered narrator trying to figure out who I am.
I did not resent my grandfather at all, though. I thought he was a pretty cool guy. He served in WWII, but he did not like to talk about that at all. He’d deflect, and talk about his aspirations before the war, instead. He grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, but what he wanted to be was an architect or an engineer. He had kept a big dossier of designs and skillfully drafted plans for houses that he’d done as a high school student in the 1930s, and he kept them for his entire life, stored away in a drawer, and only brought out when I’d ask to see them. He did not get to be an architect or engineer.
His family was poor, and could only afford to send one child to college, and that was Lyla, his older sister, who went off to become a teacher. One day when I was very young, I overheard Lyla tearfully apologizing to my grandfather, saying he should have been the one to go to college, that he was the smart one with high promise (I think this was at a point in his life where it was becoming obvious that he was swirling down the drain.) That’s always stuck with me, that education is important if you want to better yourself, and my grandfather is an example of what happens if you’re denied it.
He instead went to work as a farmhand, got married to my grandmother, Nora Berg, and had a daughter, his only child, my mother, Darlene Westad. He enlisted in the army in 1944, where he was recruited as a “Skilled craneman, derrickman, hoistman, and shovelman” and was shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he drove a bulldozer and built airfields under perilous conditions. He never talked about the war, except a few times to mention the horrible conditions and barracks full of lizards and snakes. But then, most veterans don’t like to talk about the war, I’ve noticed.
Before he was mustered out, he’d moved his family out of the frigid farmlands of Minnesota to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and he joined them in 1946. He had bought a nice little house in Kent, Washington and got a job with the state highways department, and built roads in Washington state. By all accounts, it was a very good job, paid well, gave him plenty of time to indulge his hobbies of camping, fishing, and woodworking, and he built a wonderful workshop in his backyard. He taught me how to use a table saw and a lathe and a router there, and we built simple little projects together.
Once I was born and old enough, that is. One of the side effects of the location where he bought his house is that there was this big rowdy family of rogues and rascals living on the other side of the railroad tracks, about two blocks away, and one of the fellows over there eventually seduced his daughter and eloped off to Idaho with her, when she was just 16. Next thing he knew, she was pregnant, and presto, I was born in 1957. I would get hints that Grandpa did not much care for this Jim Myers guy, but the conflict was mostly soothed away, probably because he got to be a doting grandfather. And he was! He was a great and caring person when I was a child.
But then the cracks started to appear. Sometime in the 1960s, he lost the good construction job. He later got a job as a custodian for the Kent school district, and I’d sometimes help him out — I learned how to use a buffer! We kids had no idea what was going on at first, but we figured it out. For me, the light bulb moment was the day my brother and I were left with Grandpa for a while, and he shooed us out to the car and took us on a terrifying drive across town, weaving, nearly hitting a telephone pole or skidding into a ditch, until we reached a small dark establishment on the other side of town, and he told us to wait in the car while he took care of business. We waited. We waited for a long time. We eventually got out and went to the door, which said “No minors allowed”, and we crept in anyway, and there was Grandpa, slumped over a table with three empty shot glasses in front of him.
Oh yeah, Grandpa was a very soggy alcoholic.
We should have figured that out from the fact that every morning, first thing after getting up, he’d pop the top on a can of cheap beer, light up a cheap cigar, and pour the beer with great sloppy gulping sounds down his throat. Then he’d pop another. And another. Most mornings he’d be in a bleary-eyed haze by 10am. His wood shop was neglected. His relationship with our grandmother became increasingly cold and bitter. His grandchildren were sad and disillusioned, only coming by the house to see our grandmother.
Once I went off to college and eventually a career, I became the worst grandson, rarely visiting, actively avoiding him. I missed the worst of his descent, fortunately: he became verbally abusive and hostile, cursing my sisters who still tried to get together with our grandmother and help her out. He was loudly racist and misogynistic and hateful, and even threatened violence, although at that point he could barely get out of his chair to act on it. I heard all of this second hand, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the old man.
We all expected that he was well on his way to a gradual decline and death, and I was resigned to the fact that I’d someday get a call to tell me that Grandpa had a heart attack/slipped into an alcoholic coma/choked on his own vomit, but no! Fate had a cruel twist for him and was about to send him into a new Hell.
Remember the cigar? Grandpa was a non-stop, heavy cigar smoker. It made gift-giving easy, because we’d always just get him a box or two of those cheap Ben Franklin perfectos. He’d chew on those things all day long, and we collected those empty cigar boxes, which were great as pencil boxes, or places to store my dead bug collection, or bricks for building fantasy castles. Our house was full of them!
He was diagnosed with an oral cancer, and of course he neglected to do anything about it until his jaw was rotten with it. He was hospitalized, and the only thing they could do to save his life was to completely remove his jaw. I heard that my grandmother fainted when she saw him after the surgery — he looked like some zombie ghoul from EC comics. They removed one of his ribs, sculpted it, and implanted it in his hip to grow, and would later give him a reconstructed jawbone, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
He was a chronic alcoholic who hadn’t been sober in years, and now he was going to have to dry out cold turkey! He was wrecked. He had the DTs. He suffered hellishly with the combination chemotherapy and alcohol withdrawal. I, the bad grandson, didn’t go anywhere near him at this time. Other members of the family bore the burden.
He survived, and I saw him a few times in his later years. He was still sitting in the same old easy chair, but now instead of a can of beer he’d have a can of Ensure. He wasn’t cussing anyone out, because he could barely speak with this weak, toothless, chinless bridge of reconstructed bone for a jaw. He was hollowed out and empty eyed.
He later went into the hospital for further cancer treatments, got up to try to walk to the toilet, and had a heart attack and died.
Well, that was a depressing story.
At least I still remember the good grandpa who taught me how to measure and cut wood, who gave me his old drafting tools, who had a boat and took us out fishing, who every weekend would get together with his elderly parents to play cribbage with them. And who also, most relevant right now, bought an 8mm camera in the 1950s because he wanted to record memories of his family, especially his grandkids, and who taught me how to run the projector, and how to splice and repair the film. He told me I was supposed to preserve these movies for the whole family, and now I guess I am.
I have finished watching all these 8mm recordings my grandfather left to me, which have been converted into 8 20-30 minute mp4s. At some point I have to edit these down to make them presentable, because a) they’re in random order, b) the clips within each mp4 are in random order, and c) we are not a family of cinematographers or directors. Here are a few challenges for me:
I have a 3-day weekend coming up. Maybe I’ll be able to put together a short video from a small slice of this mess over the weekend — something that my surviving brothers and sisters will appreciate, at least. I have a project!
Today, you get a blazing star against a backdrop of milkweed.
To those of us of a certain age, Chesley Bonestell is an evocative name. In the early days of the space program, he was the chosen illustrator for the future, painting spaceships and landscapes on the moons of Saturn and all those wild imaginary cities with flying cars and buildings wreathed with fins and arcing silvery ramps. There was a time when I’d lock in to magazine racks with a Chesley Bonestell cover somewhere on it, and my parents would have to drag me away.
But he also painted less enchanting illustrations. Here’s New York getting nuked in 1950.
If that isn’t horrifying enough, here’s the aftermath:
It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch would have painted.
What I find disturbing, though, is that American magazines were commissioning illustrations of American cities getting bombed, 5 years after America nuked two Japanese cities. What, reality wasn’t enough for you and you needed to fantasize about it happening at home to get people to care? The horror of this imagining didn’t stop the US from continuing nuclear testing. In 1954, the US would test the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, ‘accidentally’ irradiating a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon #5, killing one crewman and sending the others to the hospital, and inspiring protests in Japan and the invention of Godzilla.
Isn’t it nice that war can inspire interesting art?
There is a company based in Virginia that makes high-end deli meats and cheeses. I didn’t know much about them, but I heard some gross, revolting stories that made me look. Rubbernecking the accident and all that, you know. Their main page is a bit daunting right now. They have recalled a lot of their products, saying they’re potentially contaminated with Listeria.
What they don’t mention is that 57 people so far have been hospitalized thanks to their food, or that there are 69 records of “noncompliances” flagged by the USDA in the past year. But don’t worry, the company says food safety is their “highest priority.”
Do you want to read about Boar’s Head’s offenses? No, you do not, so I’ll put them below the fold. Don’t read unless you have a strong stomach.
In the 19th century, there was a different set of rules for teachers.
Among the terrible crimes: “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.” But also “Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.” Those were the old conservatives. The new conservatives are just as dictatorial and demanding, but they have some different rules.
Unearthed audio: JD Vance says teachers who do not have biological children “disorient and really disturb” him: “She should have some of her own [children]” pic.twitter.com/Rqx2PLfjT5
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 27, 2024
“And I think our conservative idea is that parents and families should determine what children learn and what values they are brought up with. It’s so many leaders of the left. I hate to be so personal about this, but they are people without kids who try to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said in the clip.“And that disorients me. And it disturbs me. Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country, doesn’t have a single child, he added.
“If she wants to be brainwashed and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
So the party that thinks all women should be traditional homemakers, and doesn’t want to invest a penny on childcare, now thinks that skilled professional teachers should be required to have children.
How about if you leave the private lives of teachers the hell alone?
Wow, but Vance sure is a creepy weird autocrat. Don’t elect him, OK?