I don’t understand how Thoughtslime can be more popular than me

You know, I just posted a happy, joyous video that should lift your hearts and make you feel good about the world. At almost the exact same time, Thoughtslime posted a miserable, depressing video that will make everyone feel bad, and he’ll get a gajillion more views than mine ever will. It’s not fair!

His video is about Amazon, rather than awesome spiders. See? You already know it’s going to be horrible.

Amazon is kind of indispensable in my part of the world. We are a small town with few retail services (well, we do have a plague pit of a grocery store), which means if we want anything but the staples we rely on Amazon. Wait, I wonder…is the ubiquity of Amazon one of the reasons we don’t have many local businesses? Maybe Amazon ought to be nationalized.

Anyway, the video does explain one thing to me. A month or so ago, I had ordered something (not even from Amazon, though), and I got an email notifying me of delivery. I went outside to check, and nope, nothing, it was mystifying. The next day I checked again, in case it had fallen down behind the shrubbery or something, and no, it just wasn’t there. So I went through UPS’s horrible lost package web site, filled out some forms, and awaited their response. I figured it had been misdelivered. This has been a common problem lately, because our county arbitrarily decided to renumber our house — I’ve gotten messages from people asking me why I didn’t answer their mail, and it’s because our old address no longer exists.

Then, the next day, a UPS driver shows up at our door with the package. Great, no worries! But she was so cravenly apologetic and so anxious to explain everything to me, I was somewhat embarrassed for her. Our house was late on her route, it was dark, she drove back and forth trying to see our address, the GPS was no help at all, she’d flagged the delivery because she’d thought she’d found the place, but it wasn’t, on and on and on. Really, I understand, I wasn’t that worried about it, I was aware of how the county had scrambled addresses, and she was so, so grateful when I signed off on the delivery and signed a note saying I was happy with the service. It was a bit wild.

Honestly, friendly UPS delivery driver who dropped off a package at my house in early March, it’s OK. I worry about you now, since it sounds like you’ve got quotas and unrealistic and maybe even dangerous demands on your time. If it takes an extra day or two to get something to me, that’s fine, I won’t give you grief about it, I’m not demanding instant gratification. Be well. If you’re not already, I hope you unionize.

Slack. More slack.

I’ve been slipping up. Our local grocery store, Willie’s, only reluctantly and belatedly started insisting on customers and staff wearing masks, which was why we’ve been driving an hour each way to do our shopping. But lately I’ve been ducking into Willie’s for quick items — like today, I was hoping for a fresh salad for dinner tonight, and taking a few hours to get that was too much. They’ve also been much better about requiring the workers to mask up.

But today…four separate clueless idiots wandering the aisles, maskless, and no one said a word. I guess we’re going back to driving long distances to find stores with responsible management, because this place is not trustworthy.

Are we ever going to get out of this pandemic mess? Not at this rate.

Could you be a little less obvious in your hints, Death?

I mentioned before that there is a company that has a “natural organic reduction” process that allows them to compost dead bodies. That’s great! Sign me up! Also, curiously, the company is based in Kent, Washington, the town where I grew up — they have a discreet warehouse in downtown Kent with 10 vessels for processing corpses.

Now I grew up in Kent. However, my parents moved to Auburn, Washington while I was away for my first year of college (they thought they were so clever, but I had a quarter of a bachelor’s degree and was so smart that I managed to track them down). My mother still lives in Auburn, as do several of my brothers and sisters, so it’s kind of a second hometown to me.

Which makes it a little weird that a second, larger composting facility has opened in Auburn.

What happens next is analogous with composting. In this case, the mix and the body reach a temperature just south of 140 degrees, which is almost cooking heat. The process is aerobic, meaning oxygen flows continuously in and out of the vessel. It takes the microbes in the body and puts them on hyper-drive, making them work incredibly fast. Typically, it takes many years to get that done, leaving behind soil.

“It’s what nature meant us to do. We just do it faster,” Truman said.

Carefully-trained technicians monitor the process. An air-filtration system informally called “The Octopus,” which is attached to all 72 pods, carries the odors to a machine where they are treated.

Within a month, the body is gone, leaving only the bones, which workers reduce and then return to the soil in the pod.

Wait, a key part of the system is called “The Octopus”? Is fate sending me a message, calling me home? But I’m not ready yet!

This could be me, in the distant future, I hope.

People, it’s not over yet

Do I need to announce this every day? The pandemic is not over. If you drop your guard, it can still get you.

New coronavirus cases in the United States continued to rise in the past week, jumping by as much as 12 percent nationwide, as senior officials implored Americans to stick to public health measures to help reverse the trend.

The seven-day average of new cases topped 63,000 for the first time in nearly a month, according to data compiled by The Washington Post, while states such as Michigan, Vermont and North Dakota reported substantial spikes in new infections. The nation appeared poised for a fourth wave of illness even as vaccine eligibility is expanding in many states.

Michigan led the nation in new cases with a 57 percent rise over the past week. The state, which relaxed covid-related restrictions earlier this month, also reported the largest increase in coronavirus hospitalizations, which grew by more than 47 percent.

The virus is still circulating everywhere. You’re swimming in it. The prevalence is still high, so even if you personally have been vaccinated, the virus still has tentacles of infection everywhere. We aren’t really safe until almost everyone is safe. Right now, I’ve got students going into quarantine and dropping out of our ongoing genetics experiment, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can take a few weeks to recover and pick up where you left off — the flies keep doing their thing whether you show up to analyze them or not. So I’m suddenly faced with a need to make all kinds of accommodations, and hope that enough students stay healthy that we can carry through to the end. This does not feel like the pandemic is over. It feels a lot like March of last year, when so many students were getting sick that we had to shut down the lab for the remainder of the term.

Meanwhile, we got people like the Libertarians of Kentucky, who make odious comparisons between more pandemic safety and the Holocaust.

Right. We’ve got a country full of assholes who consider the ability to spread disease to be an essential part of “human liberty”.

Everyone who is not a selfish, entitled git: get vaccinated, get tested, wear a mask, maintain social distancing, don’t start partying in bars just yet.

Conspiracy theorists are getting desperate

The conspiracy theories are never going to end. Here’s a new one:

Right. The big ship snarling up the Suez Canal right now is the Evergreen; Jen Psaki founded a company called Evergreen Consulting; therefore…? They don’t say. The feeble connection is enough. Here, let me help you out, loons. Washington is also nicknamed the Evergreen State; it’s liberal and voted for Biden. Evergreen State College is the hyper-liberal college that drove beloved IDW professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying away. “Revenger” is an anagram of “Evergreen”, with only one “e” left over. Green is the color of envy, and everyone knows the Demonrats are jealous of Trump. Therefore, Joe Biden owns a container ship that he’s using to confound global trade.

How about another one? The QAnon kooks are very excited about a video artifact that seems to show Joe Biden’s hand passing through a reporter’s microphone, which they say means he was a green screen projection (“green” makes another appearance!). It was just a common glitch, a trick of perspective, but Jack Posobiec, that fucking loon, and Nick Fuentes, that evil racist clown, have declared that it means Biden wasn’t actually there: he was a deepfake or projected digital avatar…which sounds like an awful lot of work to go through to record a guy talking to a group of reporters, who also recorded the “incident” from multiple camera angles.

Now these deranged fanatics are endlessly rewatching a 10-second clip of Biden, dissecting it frame by frame, and breathlessly noting things like a mole appearing on Biden’s right hand that wasn’t there before. They’re declaring now that it was either a digital model or recorded body double of Joe Biden, which means that Biden is actually dead, or never existed, but is definitely not the president, and he’s a puppet controlled by the New World Order, or maybe by Trump, they really aren’t sure.

I want you to know I sure turned up a lot of bizarre websites, which I will not be linking to, in order to find out if there actually are people promoting such patent nonsense. There are. Also, I have now wrecked my search engines and am getting a lot of extremely strange ads, so that was all a big mistake on my part. I should have gone incognito to scout these things out.

By the way, another peculiarity: the majority of the conspiracy theory sites I saw are also packed full of Bible quotes. Religion sure is the mother of bad, lazy thinking.

I have a talent for inspiring people to hate me

Way, way back in 2007, a guy in Morris decided to generously donate a great big fancy electronic carillon to the cemetery near my house, which was nice. Except that he programmed it to play hymns and patriotic tunes loudly, every 15 minutes, all day long, every day, from 5am to 10pm. He lived nowhere near his giant cheesy loudspeakers. I did. I complained. Other people in the neighborhood complained. Nothing was done, because this is small town America, and how dare you question a person’s right to screech Sousa marches and Lutheran hymns into your ears all day long are you some kind of commie pinko atheist or something? It went on for a few years (millennia?) with constant complaints & letters to the paper & some brave hero cut the wires & it was repaired & the guy left town in a huff & took his precious colossal beep-boop Nintendo away with him & donated it to a more grateful town in Arizona where the residents appreciate his contributions to the spiritual life of the community.

He has retired and moved away, but he still writes in to the Morris paper to tell us how much the carillon is loved in its new location, or how he visited some other town that had one and they adored it, and how Morris is full of philistines and liberals.

Well, Ted Storck is back in the paper again.

He’s still nursing his resentment. His account is accurate, as far as it goes. The bit where he says Things then got even worse… and refuses to say how is a little misleading, though. What happened, as I recall, is that town officials finally asked him to turn his music down and maybe play it a little less frequently, which I think is what prompted his hissy-fit and his decision to take his toys away.

It’s silly and stupid, but I have to note that Ted Storck has been seething in rage for fourteen years now and is focused on me as the source of his impotent grudge. That’s not good. I’ve had many obsessed haters over the years, but they all tend to be far away and more into railing at me over the internet. This goon knows where I live, and apparently visits the area now and then. I’m a little worried that some day I might open my door and there’s Ted Storck with a shotgun, and that’s how my story ends, blown away over a petty, small town dispute by an “insufferable self-important Christian” who can’t even spell “Pharyngula”.

Glory! Welcome the Jubilee!

I drove by the local grocery store, and there, on the other side of the street, was a…was a…you won’t believe this, but I actually saw a…

TACO TRUCK!!!

In Morris! I don’t know if it’ll be here for long, but we were promised this way back in 2016. At last it has been accomplished, at last it is done.

(I didn’t actually stop at the taco truck — there were several people in line, but I don’t do that anymore.)