Most mornings, I get up a few hours before my wife does, and shortly afterwards I carry out the morning ritual of Making the Coffee, and I dutifully deliver a cup to her bedside, where the sweet strong smell gently awakens her. I’ve been noticing an odd thing, though: we have lots of cups, and a place in the kitchen cupboard where we put them, but on many mornings, the cups are not there. Thus begins another part of the morning ritual, the Quest for Coffee Cups. I tend to find them in the dining room, in the living room, and in our bedroom, strangely always on the table near her side of the bed, and also, they have often collected tea bags in their interiors.

From my observations, I have determined that these ceramic cups undergo a daily migration, and that they wander the house to prey upon teabags. I am pretty sure there’s a complex hidden ecosystem at work here. For instance, I’ve noticed that if I take off my socks in my office and leave them by my slippers, sometime during the day they will mysteriously disappear. My first hypothesis was that the hungry coffee cups were snatching them up, but I’ve never found a cup with a sock in it, suggesting that there may be some other medium-sized predator prowling about the house. I’m eyeing the casserole dish. Or maybe the toaster.

The existence of a hitherto unnoticed food web operating inside my house has me vaguely worried. If I vanish some day, somebody check the guts of the dishwasher, or possibly the cabinet in my office. They’ve been trying too hard to look nonchalant lately, and could be plotting something.

I think the death of Art Bell put me in a time warp. Here’s an interesting story about an army fellow who actually was listening in on Art Bell’s broadcasts while looking for Russkis. He makes the same point I did, that he really was an enabler for the alt-right and wackaloon conservatism.

Once I learned what had happened, I could no longer listen to those favorite talk radio shows anymore. Alex Jones was not simply a funny or stupid clown now. I understood that he was not simply sharing airwaves with disturbed people and utter fanatics, he was borrowing their silly ideas, and listeners who would not otherwise accept anti-Semitic or racist material learned to accept the narrative frameworks of those ideas through him.

As Jones made it okay to believe in this alternate reality, Art Bell made it okay to believe whatever you liked, often on the same station at a later hour. Vampires and werewolves? Ghosts and goblins? Area 51 cover-ups of alien bodies and interstellar spacecraft? Subterranean lizard people controlling the banks? Maybe some of them were real, or maybe all of them were real.

Even greater weirdness: did you know the FBI was investigating those dangerous Dungeons & Dragons players while hunting for the Unabomber?

And then…oh dear.

Aren’t you glad to be living in the second decade of the 20th century when everything is normal again?

This is a list of banned words from 1995.

Two things:

• These lists are just sort of hilarious when the words are just dumped on you out of context.

• Shockingly, there are several words in there I’ve never even heard of before, and that I have no idea what they mean. I feel so naive.

…but you never know. How do you get rid of tons of rotting meat, like a beached whale carcass? The article lists four methods:

1. Blow it up with dynamite. No, don’t do this one. Florence, Oregon tried it in 1970, and will never, ever live it down.

2. Compost it. Drag it to some convenient place and let it decay. Yikes, that’s going to wreck the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in your compost heap, but OK, it’s a natural way.

3. Drag it back out to sea and let it sink. This seems like the best way to me, since whale falls are great boons to marine invertebrates. The catch is that it might take a while to sink, and could drift back to shore.

4. Treat it like garbage, hack it to bits, and bury it in a landfill. Seems wasteful.

So what would Minnesotans do? They can’t drag it out to sea. I guess we could haul it to Iowa or Wisconsin or the Dakotas and let them deal with it. Otherwise, chain saws and wood chippers?

In case you need it, here’s a Jordan Peterson resource page.

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson became famous after he spouted transphobia and refused to use they/them pronouns to address nonbinary students in his classes. He then published a wildly popular self-help book 12 Rules for Life, and has been lauded in the popular press as a leading voice for disaffected men. Center right pundits like Conor Fridersdorf and David Brooks have held him up as an honest and important thinker, unfairly maligned by the left.

Unfortunately, Peterson’s writing and YouTube videos are a bolus of nonsense, resentment, and bigotry. This page provides resources explaining the problems with Peterson’s worldview and arguments.

Also unfortunately, Peterson’s lobster swarm is fanatical and impervious to argument, so if you cross them, you’ll want some backup. I recommend just citing this page at ’em and then ignoring them.

And friends are organizing a casual, friendly get-together for Friday evening.

Anyone wishing to join PZ for dinner on Friday, April 6th at 7:00 p.m., please contact [email protected] ASAP to RSVP. Restaurant will be in downtown D.C., Metro and handicap accessible.

We’ll get together, have a few laughs…

I am not a hunter. I’ve never gone hunting. I don’t read hunting magazines. I’ve always taken the word of hunters that it’s a healthy, practical sport. Unfortunately, when I was at the gym this morning, someone had turned the television on the wall to one of those hunting shows, and I’d never seen one of those, either. It kind of ruined my morning.

It was a couple of people hiding in a blind near a bean field, when a large herd of deer gathered, browsing on the leftovers. They pulled out a big rifle, and boom, shot a big buck.

I was horrified to see it — the animal went frantic, galloping about the field in a clear state of terror before its legs buckled and it collapsed. As a biologist, I’ve had to kill animals before, but it’s always a process hedged about with ethical rules, and we’re careful to anesthetize the animal — it’s more that they quietly go to sleep and never wake up, and we do everything we can to minimize stress. This does not mean there are no ethical concerns — I wouldn’t find it acceptable to be killed myself, as long as it was done with no pain — but the murder methods in hunting were so brutal and even more terrible from the victim’s viewpoint.

There’s also the pragmatic dilemma. Deer must be culled. Their population is thriving under the human regime, and they’re becoming pests. Ideally, we’d have a balanced environment with predators that would keep the population in check…but a wolf kill is even more brutal and cruel than shooting.

What bugged me most, though, was the reaction of the hunters: fist-pumping, grinning, cheering, pridefully standing over the corpse. As I said, I’ve killed uncounted mice, lots of rabbits and cats and a few dogs and a few larger animals for research, but I never got used to it, I never celebrated their death, I regretted it. Hundreds (or more) dead animals, and I never became so inured that I could do it casually, and I certainly never smiled and laughed as I infused some helpless animal with a barbiturate overdose. Of course, I still recognize the problem with even my attitude.

Need a philosopher and ethicist, stat. I am very uncomfortable now.