I want you to know that I always give my spiders fresh, live flies.

I’m going to be handing out flies like candy today, because I have to have something pleasant to do when I go to work, and I’ll start with a meeting of the Latrodectus horde. This is it, the semester is starting now, and as usual, we start it with…committee meetings. We start today with a meeting of my biology colleagues, so at least we’ll be discussing stuff that matters. On Thursday we all meet with administrators, which won’t matter at all and just sucks more time away.

Maybe I should bring a couple of bottles of flies to share?

I don’t meet with any students until Monday. That’s so backwards — we should start the semester by engaging with students, and then later, in our spare time, the administrators can yammer at us.

Classes start next week. This week it’s various organizational meetings. Summer is over.

I have to get my syllabi together right away. I’m also the chair of a university committee, so I had to be the bad guy writing to everyone and summoning them to our first administrative meeting of the semester. I apologized. It was not enough.

Now we just wait for the first blizzard.

Assholes like to advertise.

You’re missing out on the ambience, though. This gomer had left his truck running in the parking lot, and he had done something to his muffler so the engine was roaring and grumbling while idling.

In case you can’t read his window sticker:

Oh, simple farmers. The people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know…

These are just a few little things I spotted and thought I’d bring to your attention.

I don’t usually mention Laura Ingraham around here, but when I do, it’s because she said something remarkably stupid.

If you know Minnesota, and I know it well, especially Milwaukee, it’s changed. It’s never recovered from 2020. It’s not the same place. And Tim Walz was empathizing with all the DEI initiatives that were swirling about the controversies.

Somebody who knows Minnesota well ought to know that Milwaukee is in Wisconsin.

I appreciate the sentiment and the spectacular sideburns, but no, I can’t listen to Nick Offerman sing this song a second time.

The two kinds of weird, illustrated.

Also weird: this is what has the Republicans upset:

Weird.

This is not weird, this is straight up normal Minnesota.

Rep. Tim Walz won the Minnesota congressional delegation’s annual hotdish contest for the second year in a row. The Democrat’s blend of bacon, ground turkey and other ingredients was declared the winner. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., started the contest four years ago.

Walz’s winning “Turkey Trot Tater-Tot Hotdish” recipe:

You’ll have to follow the link to get the actual recipe. It looks good, but it’s definitely not vegetarian. I guess turkey is not meat, but bacon is.

Would you believe it is officially International Female Orgasm Day?

I had to google for hints on how to properly celebrate. If you have better ideas, leave them in the comments.

Oh no! I’ve suffered enough with stupid lawsuits, but here I go again, annoying a litigious jerk. He hasn’t sued me (yet!), but I too have refused to advertise on Twitter and have gone so far as to not even look at ads on Twitter. Abandoning your account will do that for you. But now, Musk is suing people for violating his free speech by not advertising on his service.

Elon Musk’s X has accused a group of major advertisers of antitrust violations in a new lawsuit claiming the group conspired to “boycott” advertising on the platform.

The lawsuit claims an influential ad industry group organized “to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising from Twitter” because the group was concerned that the platform had deviated from brand safety standards after Musk’s acquisition in late 2022.

The group is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, also known as GARM, a voluntary ad-industry initiative run by the World Federation of Advertisers that aims to help brands avoid having their advertisements appear alongside illegal or harmful content.

I would have thought it perfectly legitimate to want to avoid stinky bad sites that might alienate a business’s customers. I guess I don’t understand the finer points of free speech absolutism.

OK, I’ve had enough. Yesterday, I got a fresh package of legal documents from our probate lawyer. I have to go through them all and verify stuff and set up a bank account and just generally do accounting. Also, paying money.

Today I’m getting a realtor’s estimate on a house, and have to get the wheels rolling on selling my mother’s estate.

Then, a surprise: we have some asbestos treated floor tiles in our basement (the 1940s were a carefree time), and the remediation company got an open slot in their busy schedule, and are showing up this afternoon.

I’m going to be trapped in my house all day while construction people hammer and scrape, and I have to read all these declarations from the courts of the County of King.

These are all boring things. I’d rather be in the lab feeding a hungry hungry horde of spider babies.

I am as pure as I’ll ever be. I’m a little bit ethereal today.

The colonoscopy went well, no abnormalities, not a hint of a polyp even. I don’t have to do it again for another ten years!

Oh boy. Today’s the day.

Today is colonoscopy prep day. I’m going to dope myself up with a laxative this morning, and this afternoon I start guzzling another laxative and large quantities of fluids. Also, no solid food. It’s going to be a long, long day.

Then tomorrow I’m scheduled to be rendered unconscious and wheeled into a room where I’m going to get pegged with a camera.

I don’t know whether I’m going to be furiously cranky or exasperatedly fatigued.