How odd that I have to get info about university policy from a TV news site rather than from our administration.

University of Minnesota professors are mulling a work stoppage if the university refuses to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to American Association of University Professors meeting minutes and documents obtained by 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. More than 500 faculty and students have signed on to a letter endorsing a vaccine requirement.

Hang on there. I haven’t heard even a whisper of a threat of a work stoppage from my colleagues or the university listserv. One way to look at it is that we are generally obliging sheep who will march to our doom without hesitation. A better way to look at it is that we take our responsibilities very seriously — our students are making a 4 year commitment to a structured, cumulative program of instruction, and we don’t want to compromise their advancement at all. A year and a half ago, we shut down classes on campus and scrambled to keep the students going with online instruction, at great personal cost, and we’d do it again. A work stoppage isn’t in the cards, a workload increase is.

I also expect that the prospect of students dying on campus is a more potent incentive to impose a vaccine mandate than the idea that professors might walk out. I hope. You never know with university administrators. My university doesn’t employ many adjuncts, so the idea of using adjuncts as front-line cannon fodder is off the table, anyway.

At least this part of the story is accurate.

AAUP members say they are frustrated by governing bodies of the university making decisions without consulting affected faculty and staff, who came to the following agreement:

“The consensus emerged that we should bring pressure for a vaccination mandate to bear through the media as well as through organizations like Council of Graduate Students, Minnesota Student Association, and college and university governance. Public pressure could give the administration cover to alter the present policies. Our targets and objectives are twofold: the U president, for mandating vaccinations; the U provost, for mandating versatility in instructional modality.”

Frustrated is right. The faculty as a whole have not been consulted on pandemic policy. We just get messages from on high. “No vaccine or mask mandate!” Then, “OK, mask mandate! But you’ll be teaching in a classroom!” Or, “Get tested!” But then, “we’re shutting down testing facilities! And the campus vaccination service!” We’re not asked, we’re told.

But there aren’t even rumors of work stoppages. At least, not until our classes are drained by the death or quarantining of mass numbers of students. I draw the line at asking students to die for their biology degree.

Well, this story was quite informative. Today I learned all about “poppers”, or alkyl nitrites, and it tells you everything you need to know about me that I’m so straight that I had no idea that they were popular in the gay community. I never saw ads like this, or they made no impression on me at all.

I have heard of Tom of Finland, however, I’m not totally clueless.

Strangely, the leading manufacturer of poppers in the US is another straight guy, like me.

Everett Farr, 65, is not the person you might expect when you think of nitrites and queer history. For one thing, he says he’s never tried poppers. For another, he’s straight, married, and has two adult children. He lives in a big home in a ritzy Pennsylvania county and owns a few cars, including a Corvette the same yellow as a bottle of Rush. But he’s not exactly flashy. When he met me at the train station near Philadelphia to drive me over to his plant in the last week of June, he was wearing shorts and sneakers and driving a modest, cluttered blue passenger van. The Corvette was parked inside the factory, covered in a layer of dust.

Except I don’t own a yellow Corvette or live in a ritzy place in the country. But like him, I’m not going to try alkyl nitrites — people with heart disease probably should avoid potent vasodilators. I see no problem in making them available to healthy people who want to experiment, though. I agree with this fellow:

Canada has required prescriptions for alkyl nitrites since 2013, and both the UK and Australia have come close to doing the same in recent years — moves that prompted backlash in those countries’ gay communities. One conservative British MP, Crispin Blunt (uncle to actor Emily Blunt), gave a speech in Westminster “outing” himself as a poppers user and calling a potential ban a “fantastically stupid” idea that would only fuel the black market. In Australia, the LGBTQ media dubbed it “an attack on gay and bisexual men” and a “war on bottoms.”

Zmith, the British writer, doesn’t believe the regulations governing poppers are motivated by anti-gay sentiment, but instead by “the complete madness” with which Western governments approach drugs — tolerating some dangerous substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, but cracking down on others.

Complete madness is right. You know that bans on these drugs are motivated solely by the fact that gay folk use them, not about health or safety — it’s all about Puritan hypocrisy.

I haven’t had the slightest interest in the games, and haven’t watched a single minute of them. But now I learn the Russian artistic swimming team had a spider theme, so now I’m regretting missing it.

Has the Olympic committee considered requiring all of the events to have a spider motif? How much would I have to bribe them to get them to consider it?

It’s incremental progress, I guess. The University of Minnesota will require masking in the Fall — actually, as of now.

The Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus appears to be much more easily transmitted, resulting in new CDC guidance on masking announced this week. This guidance recommends that in any county where the COVID transmission rate is shown to be substantial or high, individuals wear facial coverings while indoors, whether vaccinated or not.

Relying on this guidance and with the advice of our University public health experts, effective tomorrow, August 3, we are reinstituting the requirement that all students, staff, faculty, contractors, and visitors to our campuses, offices, and facilities, statewide, wear facial coverings while indoors, regardless of your vaccination status. Voluntary mask wearing today, August 2, is encouraged. Masks or facial coverings are not required outdoors.

Wearing a mask or facial covering indoors has been shown to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and, as we saw as a nation, virtually eliminate other airborne illnesses like the flu. This requirement applies to all of our campuses and offices statewide, whether a given location is in a substantial or high transmission county or not.

I hope they don’t expect me to be grateful. Dragging their feet about doing the basic, obvious things and then finally taking a small step in the right direction does not earn my praise. Now do a vaccine requirement next.

It’s true. Walmart and Disney are requiring vaccinations.

“The pandemic is not over, and the delta variant has led to an increase in infection rates across much of the U.S.,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon said in a memo Friday. “We have made the decision to require all campus office associates and all market, regional and divisional associates who work in multiple facilities to be vaccinated by Oct. 4, unless they have an approved exception.”

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota is half-assing it.

The university is not requiring vaccinations. The reason? “The state of Minnesota’s law concerning requiring vaccination has a broad exemption clause that includes people willing to provide a notarized statement that they have conscientiously held beliefs against vaccination.” Right. All you have to do is say you don’t believe in vaccinations in front of a notary, and you’re exempt. It’s not as if we could say that’s fine, no jab, no classes…oh, wait, we could.

They also say, “As the situation evolves, a mandate may be considered.” OK then, the situation has evolved, consider it. Consider it right fucking now.

They’ve also dropped the face-mask requirement. “If you are fully vaccinated, no masks are required in any University building, venue, or outdoors.” But if you’re not vaccinated, “the University expects you to wear a mask indoors”. Can we ask if students are vaccinated? No, of course not.

No one (other than myself and a few others) are wearing masks on campus. Classes start in less than a month — perhaps more importantly, student parties and the bar scene start up in less than a month, with a significant fraction of the student body unvaccinated and flaunting the perceived immortality of youth. Yet if you poll the students, they’ve got concerns.

55% of students indicated they wouldn't feel comfortable until more than 80% of students were *fully vaccinated and everyone was masked*.

If masks are not required, that number increases to 76%.

(9/n)

— Daniel Gillis 🏳️‍🌈 (@DrDanielGillis) July 31, 2021

I’ve got concerns. I’ve been told I must teach an in-person class in the fall; I’ve asked the university administration if I can at least require masks in my classes, and have only heard silence.

I’ve written to both the president of the University of Minnesota warning them that they’re failing to meet their responsibilities, and to the chancellor of my campus to let them know that they’re compromising the safety of students and staff. There has been no response.

I’m just saying, if you send your child to the university, and they come down with a serious, debilitating illness (or worse), and you’ve got a lawyer looking for witnesses who told the university administrators in advance that their policies were inadequate and dangerous, well, you’ve got my name. But let’s all hope it doesn’t come to that.

Yikes. This weather. I spent the day with my daughter and granddaughter at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and before we left this morning, we closed all the windows in the house, you know, for security reasons. When I got home, it was like an E-Z Bake Oven in here. It was also raining. I opened everything up and got fans going, but here it is midnight and I am cooked. I can’t sleep through this, and I was feeling nauseous anyway — not a good sign, one of the symptoms of potential heat stroke — so I got up and doused myself with cold water to try and cool down. Did you know cold showers don’t help you sleep, either?

Oh, well, it was a good day with Iliana. Here are the favorite things Iliana found at the museum, to give you a taste of what a 3-year old likes.

• Dinosaurs, of course. Lots of mounted skeletons — I think this may have been when the sheer size of things sunk in.
• Quetzalcoatlus. Boy, those things were big. There’s a life-sized model of one standing in a corner, and Iliana liked running around between its limbs. It was like a huge tent.
• Tiny chairs. This is an odd one: there’s a display on perspective and scale that consists of just an oversized chair, a normal chair, and a tiny little chair. As it turns out, the tiny chair was exactly her size. She just wanted to sit in it. We had to go back to that exhibit a couple of times.
• Musical stairs. There are a couple of flights of stairs equipped with sensors, and each step plays a different tone. She made her grandfather go up and down that one several times.
• Rocks. I told her I’d get her something from the gift shop. She browsed and settled on this display of polished colored rocks with little bags, and you could fill a bag with rocks of your choice for just $5. Cheap! So she left the museum clutching her precious bag of colored stones. I asked if she was going to be a geologist when she grows up, and she said “Yes, I am!” with great certainty. I’m not sure if she knows what a geologist is, though.

And then I came home to roast.