My university? Cool.

Do we really need to explain that this cartoon is satire?

Although, to be fair, parts of it are pretty sweet. Free weed and the interfaith orgy look good, and I could really go for a tofu burger, but most of it is obvious mockery of conservative pseudo-issues, like “grievance studies” and the “oppression olympics”, which are all nutso concepts promoted only by far right wackaloons.

The beginning of the end

I haven’t been sleeping well — every night I wake up, look at the clock, and see that it’s 3am, and know that I’m going to be in a fog all day — and tonight at midnight is the deadline for all my Genetics students to turn in their take-home exams. So I got up this morning, glanced at my inbox, and discovered that many of those industrious little rascals had turned in their exams early. That’s good, but I need to drink a lot more coffee to get my brain into action. I have to get this dealt with by Thursday, because Thursday at midnight is the deadline for my intro biology take-home exam. This scenario of deadlines catching me unwilling and unprepared is going to go on all week.

There is a light at the bottom of the pit of despond, though! The plan is for me to be a good boy and get all this paperwork done, then to take a day to recover and get rested up, and then to hop in the car and drive for 12 hours straight to finally see Mary again in Colorado! And Iliana! And Skatje & Kyle! Then we’ll spend a restful couple of days in the company of a busy 1½ year old before Mary & I hop in the car again and drive north for 12 hours. Everything will be back to normal, as it hasn’t been since she flew away at the end of February.

I do have this nagging dread in the back of my head that the instant my circumstances are restored, that’s the moment I come down with COVID-19 and die. Or worse, the moment I run to her arms I wake to gasp out my last breath on a ventilator, a morbid twist on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Man, a lack of sleep messes with your head.

The real Lord of the Flies

What a pleasant story to read! We’re all familiar with the entirely fictional story of Lord of the Flies, in which ship-wrecked boys revert to the natural savagery of all humans and set up a brutal regime and start oppressing and killing each other. It makes for a good story, I guess. Except that similar events happened for real in 1965, with a half-dozen 13-16 year old boys ‘borrowing’ a fishing boat, a storm disabling the boat, and then the boys were stranded on a rocky island in the Pacific for over a year. It all turned out differently.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

I imagine it could have gone badly if there’d been even one psychopath in the group, but then there would have been a year of chaos and self-destruction instead, and the fishing boat that eventually rescued them would have found nothing but bones and maybe some starving kids. Instead, we see that natural selection favored the population that cooperated, shared labor, and protected the weak and injured.

It’s curious that this optimistic true story of survival fell into obscurity, while the more pessimistic, cynical, and fictional story by William Golding sold 10s of millions of copies.

Anyone want a cat?

I’ve got one I could spare.

I had a suggestion to help with her general pukiness — to provide her with a puzzle feeder to giver something to do. So I did. How did she react? She puked all over it. When I discovered that, I just left and went for a long walk around town.

When I got back, she’d left me a colossal wad of slimy puke in the middle of the kitchen floor.

First come, first served, she’s yours.

I have a doctor’s appointment today?

I was scheduled to get a routine physical a while back, cancelled for obvious reasons, and last week Stevens County Medical Center called me to come in for it today, which feels odd. I guess our local clinic has not been overwhelmed — there have been zero reported cases of COVID-19 in Stevens County, perhaps because the closure of the university meant we had a net outflow of residents as the pandemic hit — but I’m a little nervous about visiting a place that could be a disease vector.

Also, I was called in on this specific day because it is “reserved for senior citizens”. What? But I’m a young buckaroo! Oh, well. I guess they’re just doing what they must to separate susceptible populations, so I’m not going to complain. I’m also thrilled at the possibility I might actually talk to a human being face-to-face, something I haven’t done in a month and a half.

Corruptin’ the Youth

Fortunately, I haven’t been made to drink hemlock yet, but I did get this nice message.

Over a decade ago, I found your blog. I was an English major at the time, but I found the debate over science more intriguing and changed my major to biology. The course work was so fun, I sailed through to an MS in ecology still in love with the field and unable to shake the feeling I never “earned” my degree. Now I work in epidemiology and just got half-pulled from a cohort study to help on COVID research (actually, I still have to do all the cohort stuff, so…).

I’m happy that I can now use the job you helped inspire me to to offer you this small return, and I hope you continue to inspire.

In addition to the science, you made me rethink, and improve, I hope, my ideas on sex, gender, race, and human rights in general. So now I get to work in a very prestigious lab while very vocally supporting diversity and equality.

There’s nothing wrong with being an English major, I may have just tweaked him in the direction of his true calling. I’m not in the right discipline to do anything about the pandemic, but it’s good to know that maybe some of my students and readers are going to be better able to contribute.

OMG! I’m caught up in one class!

Finally, I’ve waded through the entire backlog of grading for my genetics class, and have sent every student a personal email stating where they currently stand, what assignments are missing (I’m offering amnesty on all the homework), and what they can do to improve their grade this week — lab reports, for instance, can be revised to correct errors. There is still a gigantic take-home final looming ahead, which constitutes about a quarter of their total grade, and I’ve warned them about that. That does mean that this is only the lull before the storm, though, but at least I’ve got a couple of days to work on bailing out my lifeboat. I expect to be swamped by the end of this week and early next week, again.

It also means my class content for this last week is taken care of. I get to deal with students’ concerns about their grades, and also review the entire semester to prepare them for the final.

Now to celebrate this fleeting triumph by…uh, I dunno. What do we do to party anymore? I know, maybe get started on wrapping up my second class.