Not a great weekend

It’s unhappy news all around. This weekend was the time of the Big Cleanup, when I go through all the spiderling vials and cull out the sickly and the spiders who did not make it — I don’t if it’s me or just the expected mortality for any species that spews out progeny hundreds at a time, but I’ve only got a 30% survival rate. It was kind of expected, but it still hurts when you’re going through all the babies you nurtured for over a month, and well over half are dead. At least the survivors got bumped up to larger living quarters and get more flies to eat.

Then, going through my adult colony, two of them had died, for no discernable cause. I think they looked up, noticed we’re almost to December in Minnesota, and decided it was totally unnatural for them to live through this, and decided it was time to die. I saw this last year. Midwinter is like the expiration date for these northern spiders.

Then, just to add more misery to the tragedy, my camera is acting up — it refused to take any pictures, told me it had lost communication with my lovely Tokina macro lens, and ordered me to clean the lens contacts. So I did. It didn’t help. I’m going to tinker with some other lenses and see if the problem is in my favorite lens (oh no, I would cry) or the camera body (more crying — there is no good diagnosis here). Maybe this is a sign that it’s time to upgrade to a full frame camera, like the Canon 5D mk IV? No it is not, because I looked at the price and went into shock.

It was also bad because the spiders were hungry and happy with their new clean quarters and I had so many opportunities for good, dynamic action shots, but no go.

OK, I’m just going to go grade papers for a bit, as a kind of gravy for sorrow.

It is done — I am boosted

Other than the +5 disease resistance, I’ve observed no significant side effects.

That is, other than my voice acquiring a new resonance — I sound like a Decepticon now — and I occasionally emit a kind of warbling screech, like a 1990s modem, which I’m sure will clear up once the nanobots have sufficiently matured and manage to make a connection to my peers. If you’ve got the shot, we ought to try to make a borg-like hookup.

This is the flibbertigibbetiest

I swear, this abomination reads like it was written by a 15 year old sorority girl high on meth, but it’s actually by Boris Johnson’s sister. Really, try reading it — it flits about from topic to topic, from her dog having puppies to prating about her mother’s maiden name to weird complaints about not being sufficiently conservative while saying…

It has been a source of mystery to me and no doubt many others that I manage to host a radio show without landing in the soup more often. I’m always saying things like, ‘But are we allowed to say Liverpool Women’s Hospital any more?’ and ‘I only want to see someone in a surgical face mask in an operating theatre’ and ‘If lockdowns work, why are we having another one and if lockdowns don’t work, why are we having another one?’ But then I realise I am a mere soggy centrist snowflake compared with some.

Don’t worry, strange lady, you’re a right-wing asshole, no question.

And then she drops this on us:

Wow. Humble bragging, name dropping, and casual sympathy for a procurer for a pedophile. I felt like throwing up over everything between the headline and the final line.

She has a radio show and publishes in the Spectator? Man, the United States isn’t the only country parasitized by a colony of superficial twits.

Minnesota is working hard to achieve northern shithole status

We are so special!

My wife got her COVID booster shot today, and I’m scheduled to get mine tomorrow. Just in time, too, because we just learned of a signal distinction: Minnesota is now the #1 COVID-19 hotspot in the United States! And within Minnesota, the east central and west central regions (where I am) are the very worst areas for COVID hospitalizations and with the lowest vaccination rates!

I’ve mentioned before how lazy and awful the locals here are about wearing a mask. Do you believe me now? I’ve got to get the booster, as well as wear the mask every time I go out, because this place is a plague pit.

In related news, the Department of Defense is now flying in military medical teams to provide relief to overwhelmed health care professionals. Our useless governor, who is more concerned with appeasing the rabid outstate yokels than in preventing citizens from dying, asked them to come in and help, because he sure as hell isn’t going to re-invoke the safety measures, like a mask mandate, that he cancelled months ago.

Help me! I’d like to escape, but I’m stuck here with a Spring teaching load that is going to require that I teach all of my courses in-person, because the university administration is similarly blasé about an ongoing pandemic. FML.

The pandemic is not over, you know

If you’d like to have nightmares, Christopher Stolarski has written up an account of his month of treatment for COVID-19. He was young and healthy, so he survived, but it sounds hellish.

Get vaccinated.

I’d also say, “wear a mask,” but I guess that ship has sailed. We require them at the university and in the hospital, but outside of those places, I never see anyone else wearing them anymore. Does anyone know how to read a graph?

The incident in the night with the onions

Curious. I got up at a ridiculous hour again this morning, and cautiously walked into the kitchen. Why cautiously? Because our cat likes to leave us little presents, like a puddle of puke or a dead mouse. I flicked on the light and saw…onions. Onions on the floor, onions on the countertop, onions on the stove, onions in pots. The source was obvious — we had a mesh bag of onions hanging from a hook — and the material cause was clear — the mesh was slit wide open, from the knot at the top to the bottom of the bag. It was no longer a bag, but more of a useless mesh sheet. But how? Who, or what, committed the act of bagicide that liberated all these onions?

My first suspect is the evil cat, except that she has heretofore exhibited an irrational fear of the stove and the kitchen counters. The criminal mind is a superstitious mind, and she is definitely the kind of super-villain you’d find in a Batman comic book. But the bag was neatly slit, not raggedly torn, as a beast would do.

Also near the bag was a butcher block of knives that I’d sharpened to a razor edge yesterday. They must have played a role, somehow.

My keen deductive mind is forced to conclude that the cat, while practicing to overcome her fear of kitchen appliances, has learned to wield a knife and slash viciously at objects in her environment. That may seem unlikely, but when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth*. I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on her now. First the onions, then the master, you know.

*By the way, I detest that dictum — it’s typical Holmesian illogical BS. You can never eliminate all the impossibilities, you can never even know all the alternatives. What if it’s something I didn’t even think of?

Isn’t Sunday supposed to be a day of rest?

It never is.

Today I

  • Assembled an exam I’ll hand out to one class tomorrow
  • Put together a bank of practice problems for another
  • Graded a bunch of papers…which I can’t post yet (I’ve learned that putting up intermediate, incomplete results prompts squawks of protest from the remaining students, who fear I lost their work)
  • Got my lecture notes for class tomorrow together
  • Posted the presentation for the class on Canvas
  • Bought some supplies for this week’s lab
  • Didn’t take a nap
  • Neglected FtB’s Sunday social backchannel gathering
  • Drank 2 cups of coffee and a quart of Diet Dr Pepper
  • Sharpened the kitchen knives
  • Made soup, it’s simmering right now
  • Maybe I’ll get to bed at a reasonable hour and sleep through the night (ha ha)

Tomorrow, Spring semester advising continues on top of the usual workload.

Hey, this week is busy, but next week is only a half week, and there’ll be no lab! I’m going to need that to make it to the end of the term.

2,000,000th comment achieved!

The TWO MILLIONTH comment on Pharyngula (caveat: we lost many comments in various moves, so really it’s the two millionth surviving comment — we practice natural selection on our commenters here) has been made. It’s here, and was made by the esteemed Lynna, OM in the Infinite Thread. Congratulations! Good work! Keep it up!

Sorry, I don’t have any prizes. Maybe I can save up for the 3 millionth comment.