It’s going to be a good day, I hope

I am no longer quarantined, so I have big plans for today.

  • I fed all the adult spiders yesterday. They missed me, I could tell, and were pleased to see dinner.
  • I’m going into the lab this morning to feed all the hundreds of babies. I’m more worried about them; the gap in their feeding schedule is more likely to have consequences on their rate of growth.
  • More egg sacs hatched while I was away! I have to sort out more spiderlings.
  • More egg sacs were made! It seems to be a common response at a certain age to start desperately producing a new generation.
  • I’m going to get a flu shot. Vaccines are good.
  • Late this afternoon, Mary and I are driving to Eau Claire, Wisconsin where my daughter and her family have moved. A 4-hour drive is manageable, and probably worth it to see our granddaughter (our grandson is 21 hours away, not a casual drive). I’ll be coming back on Sunday, but once again, my wife is leaving me for a few weeks because I guess she prefers Iliana’s company.

That’s it! That’s my day! Spiders and grandchildren, always a good plan.

It’s always nice to see some good press for the university

We were written up by the Sierra Club.

The Morris Industrial School for Indians closed in 1909, and the federal government transferred the lands and buildings to the state of Minnesota. In doing so, the federal government included a stipulation that the next educational institution built there would provide Native students free tuition.

The exact reason for the tuition waiver is lost to history, but Kevin Whalen, a Morris professor who specializes in Indigenous education, theorizes that it has its origins in treaty law. Many treaties between the US government and Native tribes contained provisions that the government would provide education in return for land. He said, too, that there were some who assumed the treaty waiver probably wouldn’t matter in the long run: Many in the US government at that time expected Native populations to disappear or die out.

When the US government transferred the lands to Minnesota, the University of Minnesota began operating an agricultural boarding school on the site. In 1960, the UMN Morris campus replaced the boarding school, and the tuition waiver requirement carried on.

Now, UMN Morris is a Native American–serving Nontribal Institution, a designation given to colleges that have more than 10 percent Native students. With the tuition waiver program still in place, nearly one-quarter of Morris students are Native American, far above the national average.

Since it’s the Sierra Club, they also play up our environmental focus.

To Olson-Loy, it is no surprise that so many alumni end up working in sustainability or serving tribal communities, or both. Native culture and environmentalism are “embedded” in everything that they do at the school.

“You get this stuff because you graduated from Morris,” Olson-Loy said. “It’s in the water here.”

If I were 18 again, I’d want to come here.

Just another morning spent cleaning up the garbage

There’s a whole ugly underbelly to the blog — the software intercepts comments from banned individuals, or ones containing banned words, and a few innocent comments that it has a spasm over, and shuffles them off into spam and trash folders automatically. It’s a sewer down there, and I have to dive in now and then to salvage mistakes and rescue them. I avoid it for as long as I can because it’s not pleasant, and mostly I have to just skim a few hundred hidden comments, say “Yep, that’s shit”, and hit flush.

But today I found a few comments that were pretty vile and deserve to be exposed to the light of day before being destroyed. These are from Bovarchist, a troll from the slymepit, and it turns out he’s a racist COVID-19 denier who supports Trump.

Let’s bury it below the fold, OK?

[Read more…]

Yet more HP

Since I mentioned my my experience with one Lovecraft movie adaptation, here’s another I discovered as I was looking for some background noise for grading: The Color Out of Space. It’s auf Deutsch, with subtitles, and it’s not bad. Slow and creepy, which was perfect for something I didn’t want to be too distracting (that other recent adaptation of the same story with Nicholas Cage? No way. Way too loud and busy).

It’s surprising how many Lovecraft stories you can find that have been turned into movies.

Now…back to the exam.

I like my monsters easily killed and their malignancy easily dismissed

I’m not going to write about last night’s debate, because a) I only saw a few moments of it and b) I cannot bear it. I spent my evening grading exams while playing a movie in the background because that was a less agonizing use of my time. Maybe you’d like to hear about the movie instead? It was crap, but it warmed my heart anyway.

The movie was Die, Monster, Die, and I first saw it when I was 9 years old. It triggers a cascade of remembrances, most of which have nothing to do with the movie itself, but with the circumstances. If I had to pick a happy moment in my life to dwell in for eternity, it would probably be being 9 again.

The context first, what came before. My family had gone through a rough patch, what we’d now call “economically distressed”, where everything conspired to increase our misery. My father was, as he was for many years, struggling to feed his family. He was on the Boeing roller coaster, occasionally getting a job with good benefits at that company, only to be laid off shortly afterwards and have to scramble to find some miserable manual labor job. My mother, with 4 kids, had tried to get a job herself, and this had increased Dad’s distress — he was a man of the mid-1960s, after all (he got better). If I had to name a moment of misery in my life, it would have been the year before when my parents were fighting and threatening divorce and I was totally bereft.

But that was all over when this movie came out. Parents were reconciled, family was stable again, and honestly, I came out of the experience with a deep appreciation of family. It was all that got me through the 1960s, and 70s, and 80s, and 90s, and 2000s, and 2010s, and it’s my only hope for the 2020s.

I also had a grand extended family. In my childhood times of trouble, I’d stay with my grandmother. My Uncle Ed lived with my grandmother, and he was one of those man-children who doted on his nephews and nieces, and had a near-total lack of ambition. He was always cheerful, though, and he seemed to have a thorough understanding of what children liked, because he was one himself.

On a fairly typical weekend, my brother and I would spend it with my grandmother and Uncle Ed, and get indulged. A great Friday evening would start with getting out of school, having dinner, and then going off to grandma’s house. Uncle Ed would take us to Stewart Drug in downtown Kent, and we’d buy comic books, come home, and lounge about for a while reading. Then we’d head over to the Vale Theater if there was an interesting movie playing (I’m getting to the movie, don’t worry!). After the movie, we’d get home to put on the Friday night creature feature, and stay up ridiculously late while Ed fell asleep on the couch.

Paradise, right?

So finally, this one night, the movie in town was Die, Monster, Die, irresistible bait to a 9 year old. We piled into Ed’s old Ford and trundled off across town. It was going to be a thrilling experience, even if an honest assessment of the movie is that it was fairly typical American International Pictures cheese, mainly about milking the name of its star, setting the stage with nice set full of creepy staircases and cobwebs, and throwing an occasional jump scare at us. In the 1960s, though, a jump scare was the sudden appearance of a bunch of rubber bats on strings. That was enough.

The star was Boris Karloff.

The story was based (loosely) on HP Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space”. There was another recent remake of the story, I think because it’s a classic of familial anxiety. It’s about a family that finds a mysterious glowing rock that corrupts everything — it generates monstrous growth and slowly poisons the family and leads to horrifying mutations.

It’s a metaphor for capitalism, you know.

So Karloff has a greenhouse full of giant plants and a zoo from hell, all made by tainting them with fragments of glowing green rock.

But his intentions are good! He wants to feed the world, he thinks his mysterious rock will lead to prosperity and restore the reputation of the Witley name. He continues to think that as his loyal servant, Merwyn, sickens and eventually dies, leaving a greasy stain on the floor. His wife Letitia is confined to her bed, her skin turning grey and mottled, begging her daughter and her boyfriend to escape while they can. Eventually Letitia goes mad and attacks everyone, her head covered with horrible growths, and she dies and decays in front of everyone’s eyes. That finally convinces Boris that he’s wrong, and he goes to destroy the rock with an axe, but is attacked by the family maid, also made monstrous by the malignant influence of capitalism the color out of space, and she pushes Boris into the rock, and he starts glowing and raging and rampaging, until the boyfriend knocks him off a balcony and he falls, his glowing body parts explode in blood and fire, and the movie ends with the family mansion burning down.

For some reason, this cheaply made “B” movie resonated with young Mr Myers. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time — the ghastly fate of the Witley family worried me so much and I took the deaths personally. I still remember the highlights of that otherwise nondescript cookie-cutter horror movie.

The other thing I remember is the ride home in Uncle Ed’s 1950s era car, the one with the high bench seats and no seat belts, of course. Those seats weren’t flush with the floor, and I was positive there was a monster under them, waiting to grab my ankles with malformed glowing claws, so I rode all the way home with my feet up on the seat. It was the only way to be sure. I didn’t sleep well that night, either. It was a great experience!

So I rewatched the movie last night while grading papers. It was a trifle, not too distracting, and it was bad. Not recommended unless you’re also carrying similar baggage, and unless the alternative is some ghastly shitshow. I won that evening!

Come to think of it, though, it would have been entirely appropriate to title the debate “Die, Monster, Die.” Can we please get rid of the green glowing rock imbedded in the heart of America? I want a simple solution like that, even if it ends with the entire goddamn thing burning to the ground.

Cool story, bro

Every few years, stories of Organism 46-B rise up again, and of course, I’m starting to see it again in 2020. Organism 46-B is a mythical creature of extreme inaccessibility — it lives in Lake Vostok, the freshwater lake buried 2 miles beneath Antarctic ice. You’d think that would hamper the spreading of the tall tale, since you’re not going to have drunk tourists stumbling around the edge of the lake snapping blurry photos of phenomena they call the Lake Vostok Monster, but it also prevents skeptics from dissecting the claims. They think. Except this story has Russian scientists building an elevator and sending scuba divers down to visit. Not true and not possible! A couple of holes have been bored down to the surface, but no one is going for a swim.

The scary story claims that the Russians found a giant monster down there.

Organism 46b is a species of giant octopus, but with 14 arms rather than eight.

It also spits poison and can mimic human form. I think I see a bad B movie developing here.

I’m disappointed. It’s so implausible on every level, yet I think 2020 really needs a tentacled man-eating sea monster.

By the way, one truly cool story: the existence of deep Antarctic lakes was predicted by the great Peter Kropotkin.

The late, great Catface

I am sorry to report that, on my latest scan of my house, I have discovered that our beloved feral friend, the Cat-Faced Spider That Lives Under the Eaves of our Garage, has died. She seems to have passed quietly in her web, probably due to the dropping temperatures in the area. She simply curled up quietly and died, possibly just overnight.

Internment will be tomorrow. I’m warming the body in my house in case she revivifies.

We are having a viewing on Patreon and Instagram.

The Matinee of Pain starts in about an hour and a half

At 1pm Central time, I’ll be watching … The Giant Spider Invasion. It’s good, right? It’s one of the ones you guys recommended, so I’m sure it’ll be terrific. The description says,

A black hole hits North Wisconsin and opens a door to other dimensions. Giant 15 meter spiders emerge from it, who have an appetite for human flesh! Dr. Jenny Langer and Dr. Vance from the NASA try to save the world.

Totally scientifically plausible, sure.