Adventures in enterocolitis

That wasn’t fun at all. I went to bed last night, and then at 11, like a magical evil switch being flipped, I was suddenly vomiting. I was puking all night long. Even worse was the diarrhea. I was so incapacitated that I was just lying in my slimy filthy effluvia all night as my gastrointestinal tract tried to turn itself inside out with peristalsis.

The heaving subsided by morning, but I was exhausted, barely able to think or move, and my wife told me I needed to go into urgent care right away. I said no, I’m too tired. She said yes and chivvied me out to the car and got me checked in. Good thing she did, too: my blood pressure was 60/40. That was an odd experience, to be so low on energy that I could barely move and not even interested in moving.

The doctors pumped me full of IV fluids and finally let me go home when my bp was 106/70.

I missed today’s class, I’m hoping to make it to lab tomorrow.

The lesson learned: have a partner who can kick you into gear when your engine isn’t ticking over, and who is willing to do the most disgusting load of laundry I’ve ever seen.

Death to Star Trek!

I’ve got a busy, messy morning of bottle washing ahead of me — the first fly lab of the semester is on Thursday, so I’ve got to get that teaching lab in shape. The flies are ready to go, but the glassware? Nope.

So I’m going to leave you with something important to wrangle over: Stephen Miller thinks Star Trek is too woke and wants to put 94 year old William Shatner in charge of the new show. Way to go, presidential advisor: you are stupid and wrong, and you propose a stupid solution to your imaginary problem. That is so perfectly Trumpian.

I’m going to mostly agree with this video — Star Trek has always been idealistic, to a sometimes corny degree. That’s why people watched it.

But I also kind of hope it happens. I was a huge fan of the original Star Trek, and I used to beg my parents to let me stay up late to watch it. I was 12 years old. As I got older, my taste changed, and I wanted something better — The Expanse was probably my ideal for a while (in spite of the magic engines that propelled the whole show), but I don’t even want that to continue on. New ideas are good! Star Trek has been in a rut of familiarity for 60 years. I didn’t even care much for Star Trek the Next Generation, not because it was different, but because it wasn’t different enough.

It’s been running on dual fumes from two sources: people like comfortable familiarity and will complain about any change, and in case you haven’t noticed, capitalism loves a profit-making franchise, and will keep shoveling cash at a reliable series, even if it is getting creaky and as crotchety as William Shatner. I watched about 20 minutes of the latest iteration, Star Fleet Academy before giving up. It has the good idea of galaxy-wide collapse of the old Federation, making it a total reboot…but then I could tell they were using it to reconstruct the same old framework, as if total societal collapse wouldn’t be interesting unless it was about restoring the old story.

Miller is a fool who is wrong about everything, but I think demolishing Star Trek, as his ideas would accomplish, has some virtues. Move on, please.

Related: I see HBO has created a new spin-off of Game of Thrones, a prequel set 100 years before the events in that catastrophically ended original series. Once again, capitalism wants its cash cow back. I’m not tempted to watch even a minute of that.

Also, at the end of the above video, they give a Hero of the Week award to the citizens of Minnesota. I’m one of those citizens! Thanks, I’ll wear the badge with pride and use the cash award to heat my house. There is a cash award, I assume?

Use it or lose it

I’ve been away from the habit of delivering long orations, so today in my first class returning from a long break, I suffered from wobbly knees, and worst of all, I only made it halfway through lecture before my voice started to rasp and fade. Uh-oh. I have many more hours of talking ahead of me.

After class, I ran out and bought some chamomile tea, and also some honey lemon ginseng tea. I think I’ll bring a cup to my classes so I can lube up partway through. Does anyone have recommendations for habits/chemical reagents that I should use to strengthen my voice and to help me get through hour long lectures on very dry topics?

Shadows in the snow

I was walking home from the movie theater last night, when I saw the shadows of the trees thrown on the new-fallen snow by the streetlights. I thought it was pretty.

The movie I’d gone to see was Anaconda, the bonkers ‘reimagining’ of the original horror movie Anaconda from 1997, which had been bonkers already. All I can say of the new movie is that it was a goofy bit of fluff that the actors had fun with; I wouldn’t recommend either unless you just want to escape for an hour and a half. One strike against it, though: there is some graphic, brutal butchery of two majestically large CGI snakes.

Many people are turned off if a dog dies in a movie, I hope you feel the same about vicious killings of snakes.

Stare at my wall with me

Since some complained that my atheist creed video didn’t actually show the poster I had found, here — now you can see the poster. I also take a tour of my office wall.

That’s about the most boring thing I could imagine. It’s OK, we’ve had enough excitement here in Minnesota lately.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to go to a protest nearby in Cyrus, and maybe to one in St Cloud on Sunday. You can look up ICE Out for Good near you and do something to voice your outrage. It’ll accomplish more than looking at a wall.