There’s a Jeremy Renner app? Why?

I am mystified. There’s an app you can download that will keep you up to date on all your Jeremy Renner news, which is a thing, I guess. Not a very interesting thing, I’ll admit, but apparently there’s all this drama on it, with users getting upset at censorship, which is the only unsurprising detail about it.

It made me wonder, though: is there any celebrity in the world for whom I would find an app interesting and worth downloading? You know, something where I could check in on a whim and see what they had for lunch, what they were watching on TV, how work was going, that sort of thing? And I realized…no, no one. Not the Queen of the UK, not Donald Trump, not even (or especially) people I actually like and respect. I seem to lack the hero worship “gene”.

Apparently, though, this is the core of the Instagram “influencers” phenomena — people who become celebrities by carefully grooming their appearance in photographs and cultivating mobs of people who regularly check in to see what a Kardashian is doing. It’s fine if that’s your deal, but I just find it weird and unrelatable, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there who similarly find it bizarre. But the difference is that we therefore do not aggregate and push up the popularity of certain individuals beyond reason, so all you see when you get a peek at the media landscape is the few who have been elevated by a minority of follower-types.

So, who would you follow obsessively? Anyone? No one? I do follow my grandchildren on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, because their parents post lots of photos of growing babies, but I can’t imagine caring what party some superstar model went to last night, or what they wore. Am I really missing out?

And Jeremy Renner? How strange and trivial is that? This tendency of humans to develop cults of personality is worrying.

Breaking news! The Jeremy Renner app has been shut down! Follow every detail of the tragedy by googling “Jeremy Renner” at least once an hour.

My children will be heartbroken

I have just learned that there is no legal way to leave my skull to my children.

Even if you exploit fuzzy legal arguments in your quest to get your hands on Dad’s skull, you’re still going to run into a big problem: There is currently no way in the United States to skeletonize human remains for private ownership. For the most part, skeletonization happens only when a body is donated to scientific research. Even this isn’t explicitly legal; authorities just tend to look the other way for museums and universities. But under no circumstances can you just skeletonize your dad and display his head among the decorative gourds in the Thanksgiving centerpiece.

Well, you know, if you just do nothing at all, it will eventually be defleshed. You’ll just have to live with a rotting head for a while.

It’s just as well. I only have one skull, and three children, and I wouldn’t want to inspire the kind of vicious familial in-fighting that would occur as each desperately tried to seize the goods.

Last minute rush to win the Worst Movie of 2014

It’s got Kevin Sorbo in it — there’s a man whose career has taken a swan dive into the black pit of stupid suckiness. It’s about a world in which gun rights are limited…which means everyone is blasting away with guns and everything is blowing up. Antifa are the armed and dangerous bad guys. Behold, The Reliant.

Best part: don’t blink or you’ll miss it. It’s only showing for one day, 24 October, before it vanishes into far right wing church basements, rather like Eric Hovind’s crappy Genesis movie, that only had a limited release and they actually had to lease theaters to get it shown.

Sad. I remember watching Hercules with the kids and enjoying it as campy fun. Who knew he was a soggy-brained twit back then?

I bit the bullet and joined MeWe

It’s probably futile to resist the evil juggernaut that is Facebook, but I figured it can’t hurt to leap to this alternative, MeWe. It’s just like Facebook! Without the ads and the intrusive anti-privacy crap! Without that guy with the punchable face, Zuckerberg! Also without the teeming millions of users. It’s kind of lonely and quiet there.

But now all my friends will join! Right?

Hey, I owned those books!

They look so familiar. I might still have them, buried in a box somewhere with my Ph.D. diploma and a pile of old similarly irrelevant papers.

The photo comes from an article on the history of Dungeons & Dragons that mostly takes Gary Gygax down a notch. It’s entertaining, I kind of suspect the tale of the deep dissent between the Wisconsin crowd and the Minnesota gamers is likely true, because even as a young man I heard rumors of the conflict, but mainly I took away these shocking points:

  • Everyone in the 1970s had bad hair, and it didn’t improve as they got older.
  • The main reason D&D used 20-sided dice is because Gygax wanted a reason to sell them.
  • The primary conflict was between story-tellers and rules lawyers.

I’m going to take sides with the Arneson/story-teller idea, because my exposure to D&D in the ancient of days made it clear that the rules were better as a very loose framework for the story between the players to play out.

First day back, and I survived!

I got through the first lecture, and even had an easy time prompting students to speak up and ask questions, so I’m doing OK so far. Also, I gave them my background and told them I work on spiders, and nobody passed out…in fact, after class they asked to see the colony, and about half the class was crammed into my lab. That’s a good sign, that they’re not all arachnophobes (it’s OK if they are). I also plugged all the other research going on here, in case they weren’t aware of the opportunities.

So now I get to go home and celebrate with a nice dinner. Involving tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes, and I have to cook down another batch tonight. We’ve got marinara sauce dribbling out of our ears, we had fried tomatoes yesterday, I’m going to have to come up with a lot of different ways to make tomatoes delicious. I think Mary needs to plant slightly fewer tomatoes next year. That has nothing to do with my class, it’s just that I’m drowning in tomatoes.

She also planted zucchini. I’m doomed.

Terror!

I’m normally relaxed about this stuff, but I’m going back into the classroom today, and I haven’t taught anything since May 2017. What if I forgot how? I could hardly believe it, but I woke up in the middle of the night with my guts in knots and feeling nauseous, all because I have to start teaching a course I’ve taught about 30 times before. Also, it’s really cutting into my spider time.

If you never hear from me again after 2pm today, it’s because I stood in front of 44 gimlet-eyed students and melted into the floor.

(Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine and will be swinging right into the rhythm of the course today. I’m just reminded of the stress of public speaking and performance that I normally take for granted because I’ve just had a relaxing year without that stress, and it felt good.)

My students survived the first day of advising

Classes don’t start until Wednesday, but students are all here on campus already for orientation. Part of that is having them meet their faculty advisor, which for some of the less fortunate students is me. I gave them a little pep talk and an assignment — they’re supposed to find me in my office next week, remind me of who they are, and tell me a little bit about how their semester is going. Or just say hello.

They seem to be a pretty good bunch of young people. Now I just have to make sure we get rid of them in four years. Hello goodbye! Have a great life!