I think there has been some cutthroat competition in the grocery business in my small town. When we first moved here, there were two grocery stores: the big supermarket, Willie’s, and a smaller store called Coborn’s. Coborn’s abruptly closed up, to everyone’s surprise — the story was that they were denied a liquor license to allow them to sell beer, and then they packed up and moved out. This town is dominated in some ways by the apostolic church, and they’re pretty strict on the blue law enforcement.

Then a few years ago, a new grocery store, Meadowland, opened up just a few blocks from Willie’s. It’s not a high-end place, it’s got a cheaper esthetic, has a substantial stock, but it’s all a hodge-podge of brands. You’d think it would fold up in the face of competition from the established store, but it’s hanging in there. It’s run by…the apostolic church, so it’s got that advantage.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes, on the town council, in private meetings, and I know nothing about it. What I do know is that grocery prices have been steadily climbing, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we’re a small town and competition isn’t much of an option. Buy from the supermarket which basically has a stranglehold on the county, or buy from the fundamentalist church-run business that would probably be even worse if they got a monopoly? What a choice.

Mike the Mad Biologist highlights a brief comment in the Washington Post:

But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.

Yes, that’s our situation. We do not live in a food desert, other than the artificially constructed one. We are surrounded by farms — unfortunately, most of them are growing corn for feedstocks and alcohol — but we could do better. In the summer, we subscribed to a local farm service, and every week we got a big box of fresh produce. It was a bit overwhelming, since we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all, but there’s clearly a better alternative to all the pre-packaged overpriced stuff with get from the overly-familiar store.

I do wonder what Willie’s would do if local farms became a more popular source for groceries. We’d probably also be healthier.

Another social media app has opened up — you can now freely join BlueSky without waiting for an invitation. It was founded by the guy who initially created Twitter, which ought to give us all pause, but they promise to give us customizable control over the algorithm. We’ll see. I’m on most of these new social media apps, so I have opinions…amorphous, poorly formed opinions, because I’ve been distracted by too many apps.

So far, I like Mastodon best. It’s a bit of a tangled mess with the swarms of servers out there, but once you get settled in, it’s nice, especially since you don’t feel like you’re enabling some hidden corporate beast somewhere. I get reasonable engagement, the interface works, there’s a substantial volume of traffic since I’m promiscuous about who I’ll follow.

BlueSky is nice and slick and feels most like the old Twitter. Membership has been throttled for a year, and now that it has opened up, it may turn into the worst of old Twitter as the Nazis rush in. One nice feature is that early adopters included lots of scientists, who have built a lot of beachheads to science content.

You might already be on Threads if you have an Instagram account — they seem to be fusing into an unholy amalgam of text and photos. It is a stepchild of the wicked Zuck, so that’s a strike against it, but on the plus side, I am seeing more writing here — people telling stories over multiple posts, and actually taking care to build a narrative. It’s growing on me for that reason.

Of course, Twitter still exists, but I will look down on you if you continue to use it. Leave now. There are good alternatives available. We’re looking at a ‘Fall of the House of Musk’ scenario over there, and soon enough it’s going to be nothing but a crevasse populated with gibbering lost souls. (Well, it’s always been something like that, but you know what I mean, it’ll get worse.)

My recommendation for the people I used to follow: jump ship to BlueSky. It’ll be most familiar, and you’ll find ready-made groups with similar interests already building communities. Just be prepared to leap away if it becomes another xitter. You can’t make strong attachments in a time of chaos.

Stupid cat. Lately she’s taken to leaping into my lap and taking a nap when I’m trying to type.

It’d be fine if she weren’t crap at composing biology lectures.

Whoa.

That is an informative work of art. Why aren’t all labels like that?

Minnesota is shrinking? By about a millimeter a year?

I agree. Minnesota should not be squishy, and it’s going to be all we talk about around here.

In tangentially related headlines, the Washington Post announces that Tired of hostile Washington, China courts Indiana and Minnesota. I’m all for more international cooperation, but all they talk about is EV busses and exchange programs. There’s nothing about China helping us alleviate this terrible squishing.

You may have heard of the concept of retrospective coronation — the idea of looking back, and well after the fact deciding that a moment or phenomenon was the key event in history, even though at the time there was no sign of its significance. In evolution, for instance, there’s this idea of “mitochondrial Eve,” that a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years ago there was one human woman walking around who was the ancestor of everyone living today. If we had a time machine and went back to that era, though, she’d be unrecognizable, no one special, and the only thing that actually distinguishes her is future events, many of them driven by chance. That’s the retrospective part, that such a person can only be recognized with hindsight.

I think I’ve found a complementary concept: retrospective invisibility. Or maybe it’s the same thing? It’s the idea that because we didn’t see something happening in the past, it isn’t real now or then. Here’s a perfect example:

Cool. Amazing. How true. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t know anyone who’d been diagnosed with autism. Not a one!

I did know lots of kids who couldn’t concentrate, or who were weird, or could never get their homework done on time, but we just called them stupid and let ’em fall through the cracks.

I didn’t know any kids with life-threatening allergies, but that was because it was their own look-out. You couldn’t expect other kids to worry about whether a peanut could kill another kid; that was their problem. I imagine there were quite a few parents who were quietly desperate about keeping their kid’s failed biology quiet while trying to insulate them from a dangerous world.

I did know kids who had chronic illnesses that kept them out of school all the time. I don’t know what the heck was wrong with them. They were just weak, I guess.

I did get exposed to some of the secret stuff, though. My grandfather was a custodian at a ‘special school,’ and I sometimes helped him out. I met a few of my peers there, kids I’d grown up with until suddenly, they disappeared. If a kid had behavioral problems, or if a young girl got pregnant, whoosh, they were whisked off to Thomas School, and all the mainstream kids could forget about them.

A few times, I talked to a girl my age there. I liked her. She’d gotten pregnant — a bad influence, so they disappeared her. They later took the child away. She stayed in the “special school,” where she suffered from depression, another of those things that didn’t exist in the 1970s for teenagers.

There was also another “special school” on the other side of town, a Catholic school for boys where all the troublemakers were sent. It had a terrible reputation. But on the bright side, all the kids who were bouncing off walls were kept there, so we could pretend they didn’t exist!

Another tremendous bonus: now people of that era can look back on their youth and proudly brag about how wonderful those days were, without a single cloud in the sky. We clearly need to bring back special schools for bad kids and juvenile halls and good ol’ sanatoriums where we can lock away our troubled youth and forget they exist. Workhouses and prisons! The wave of the future!

An American has weighed in on the proper way to make tea. The great Anglo-American War will commence shortly.

…Michelle Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania with a new book on tea, has suggested techniques for making a perfect brew that are unfamiliar to many Brits.

She advised that adding a dash of salt could help the tea to taste less bitter. She went further, recommending a squeeze of lemon, which helps to remove the “scum” that can sit on the surface of the water. She is also a fan of vigorous dunking and squeezing of the tea bag.

She’s a scientist. She can’t be wrong.

Francl seems to be serious about her tea advice. In her new book, “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea,” she documents tea-making practices that date back more than 1,000 years. She advises using short mugs, with less surface area, to help keep the tea warm, and she says warming up the cup beforehand is important as it increases the amount of caffeine and antioxidants released.

Throwing caution to the wind, Francl bravely weighs in on the Great Milk Debate and concludes that it’s better to use warm milk and to pour milk in after the tea. This, she says, will reduce the chances of it curdling.

Of course, we recognize that that is the perspective of a radical professor at a liberal arts school. We have to consult the US Embassy for the more conservative, diplomatic method of making tea.

My wife will be relieved that she has been following the recommended American protocol in making all that tea that she drinks.

Don’t tell anyone, but in addition to being a socialist, atheist, DEI-loving liberal, I also have an electric kettle in my office. I know, my list of offenses is already long enough.

Right now, I’m trying to herd 8 students taking an independent writing class into two regular meeting times, that is, I’ll run two review sessions per week with four students (ideally) in each one. It ought to be a trivial scheduling exercise, right? Except nothing is working so far. I had some of them send me their schedule, and the problem became obvious. They’re working too hard!

Most of them have collegiate athletics in there, with nearly daily practice times. Some are taking two lab courses. Some are double majors, or at least working on a minor on top of their biology degree. I’m looking at these solidly packed calendars and wondering how I’m going to fit my class in. Madness grows.

At the very least, I’m feeling exhausted looking at all that they’re cramming in, and feeling guilty that we charge them lots of money to work this hard.

Mondays are going to suck all semester long. For every Monday, I have to put together a shiny new lecture, and I have to assemble a set of thought-provoking, sophisticated questions to accompany that lecture, which students will think about during the talk and discuss afterwards. That was my day, and then I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class, which is not ready yet, but will be by 9am. Wednesday will be easier, because I’ll have done all the prep work to get that discussion going.

At least now I’m home and tired and ready to take a shower and then read in bed before succumbing to fatigue. I’ve more or less front-loaded every week with lots of work so I can coast through to the weekend…except that my writing class is going to produce lots of stuff I’ll have to grade, and I’m not sure where I’ll wedge that in yet.

I still can’t believe I get no sabbatical next year, and that I probably have 4-7 years go on my sentence, before I can retire. Maybe I’ll drop dead sooner and surprise everyone.