Return to the homeland

After completing our top-secret mission yesterday, we’ve allocated our day today to exploring the ancestral homeland. My mother was born in Gary, Minnesota in 1939, although she quickly escaped to the fjords of Washington state. My grandparents, Paul (1917-1989) and Nora (1915-1998) spent their youth in Fertile and Gary. My great-grandfather, Peter(1880-1970), and great-grandmother, Christina (1885-1974) lived here until the whole family made a great exodus West after WWII.

But it goes back further still! My great-great-grandparents, Jens (1850-1939) and Marit (1849-1933) all lived here, too! And before them, Marit’s father, Ole Solem (1821-1902) and Jens’ father, Dyre…but there the records start getting murky. All I know is that Dyre was born in Storen, Norway at some unknown date, and died in 1874.

Our plan is to visit a cemetery or two, and drop by the towns of Fertile and Gary, and there’s the Prairie Smoke Dunes Scientific and Natural Area to check out (of course we’re looking for spiders as we go). Those plans were complicated by the discovery that the Polk County Fair is going on in Fertile today…so we might have to stop in there for a bit, too.

Man, this place is flat. We’re on the old lake bed of Lake Agassiz, and I guess I’m not surprised that a bunch of old Norwegians fled this place for one with evergreen forests, mountains, and an ocean. They were probably put here to crush their intrinsic desire to build fleets of longboats and go raiding.

shhhh…secret mission

It was a plain white insulated box, tightly sealed, no hint of its contents. We drove north a hundred miles to our clandestine destination, there to make the exchange.

We met the North Dakotan operatives at a nondescript Dairy Queen in downtown Crookston. I quietly slid the box across the table. I accepted a bowl of ice cream. Mission accomplished.

We told no one the contents of the box. It was whisked away to undergo detailed analysis by scientists at the University of North Dakota. I won’t reveal what it is, even under torture. There’s no way you can make me tell. Try your worst!

Social media confusion!

There are too many options for social media so far. Twitter is dying of a surfeit of Nazis and an incompetent overlord; Bluesky I haven’t tried, but I don’t trust it, since it’s run by the old overlord, and will probably follow the same trajectory; I’ve been on Mastodon for a while, and am comfortable with it; the new kid on the block is Threads, which is owned by the repulsive Zuckerberg. Let’s see what the First Dog on the Moon has to say about it!

I think the final category, “Owner seeks dominion over the Earth,” is definitive, which means I’ll stick with the distributed community of federated websites that lacks an owner.

The people who have all the money have no art

I have fond memories of taking my newly wed wife on a date to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the theater in downtown Eugene, back in the day. I also have fond memories of putting my toddler son Alaric in a little red wagon and trundling him over the Willamette River pedestrian bridge to the Valley River Center mall to see the next Indiana Jones movie…and also the Star War with all the Ewoks in it. These were movies made for entertaining fun, and were the background of my young adulthood. I think they also made my kids happy.

This past week, the latest Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is playing here in Morris, and it’ll probably be playing next week as well. I haven’t felt even the most subtle stirrings of sentimentality to motivate me to go. The movie studios have milked me dry.

Also playing: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I hope the theater is cleaning up — it’s a co-op, and I’m a member, but here I am, a guy who loves going to the movies, and I’m not at all interested. I’ve even got a free ticket tacked to the refrigerator, and the impulse just isn’t there any more.

One reason is that I’m aware that Indiana Jones is a terrible role model and a very bad scientist built on colonialist preconceptions, part of trope that has been thriving since H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like “Temple of Doom,” leave the Nazis out.

That contributes to my lack of interest, for sure. I feel a little bit guilty for enjoying a tale of a swashbuckling college professor fighting Nazis and also, unfortunately, looting non-white people’s history. Unfortunately, the pleasure part of “guilty pleasure” started to fizzle out as I also realized that every single movie is centered on garbage pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology — the Ark of the Covenant with its vengeful ghosts, an evil Hindu priest who can magic hearts out of his victims, a goblet that grants eternal life, the crystal skulls of telepathic space aliens, and now in the latest, an ancient widget that allows one to travel in time. When you lay it bare like that, stripped of its gallant romanticized hero, they just look stupid. Maybe I can suspend disbelief once or twice, but not for 42 years. The well has gone dry.

I can’t help but feel that Hollywood has lost the script. It’s no longer about creativity and leaps of imagination — it’s about franchises, and repeating the same thing over and over again to wring out every last drop of profit. Indiana Jones should have been retired after the third one, going out on a high note — you could even argue that the first one was enough, time to move on. Star Wars, the same story: wasn’t the first trilogy more than enough, take a break and develop some new “intellectual properties”. Don’t get me started on superhero movies. I am so over the endless permutations of Batman. And now they’ve got this “multiverse” nonsense as an excuse to slap new costumes on tired old musclebound heroes.

It’s not just me, either. I was shocked to discover that the ever-optimistic Mikey Neumann, of Movies with Mikey, failed to find a single moment of joy in his review of Space Jam 2 (a movie that was completely off my radar, admittedly, and would actively avert any interest I might have in going to the movies). This was entirely out of character for him, but I think I share his despair at the ongoing corporatization of art. Neumann can usually find something worthy in even the most dreadful dreck, but Space Jam 2 is the product of a soulless corporate beancounter who saw the entire legacy of Warner Bros. as a fantastic collection of assets, a pile of stuff he couldn’t appreciate but could sell at an ungodly profit.

There are still a few movies I look forward to seeing, but none of them are attached to a “franchise.” That word is killing movies, just as “franchise” has killed so many small, unique, interesting diners around the country. It’s a word that makes profit-seeking landlords and accountants drool, though — too bad it has the opposite effect on consumers.

It is a good day to get some work done

It’s some kind of national holiday celebrating our independence, but I don’t feel like celebrating in a country where justice has been deposed and our supreme court is nothing but a corrupt arm of the far right Federalist Society. So instead I’m going to murder spiders.

I’ve got a set of wild-caught Steatoda triangulosa, and another set of wild-caught Parasteatoda, and yet more long-term lab-fed S. triangulosa, and they’re all going to feel the kiss of cold 95% ethanol before being stashed in a freezer. Then this weekend they get delivered to a collaborator up north who will disembowel them and sequence their microbiome.

That’s how we celebrate America’s birthday around here.

Also this weekend, we’re going to visit a few cemeteries around Gary, Minnesota and check out the graves of some long-dead relatives, and do some sight-seeing of great-great-great grandparents’ old haunts, while also chasing down a few spiders. It seems appropriate.

No cheese, no tomato sauce? That’s not a pizza

But it still looks delicious. This is a fresco found in the ruins of Pompeii.

I stared at that image trying to figure out what’s in it: focaccio bread, was easy enough, seasoned with pesto, but what’s on it? Is it all dried fruit, which would make it rather sweeter than I’d like, or are there onions and mushrooms in there? There’s not enough information in the picture, I’d have to free wheel it.

The more I stared, the hungrier I got. I could probably make the focaccio, since I won’t find it in the markets around here, and I make pesto all the time. But what to top it with? I’d want something more savory, with dried fruit on the side, and of course I’d need a cup of red wine. This could be an all day project.

Twitter: The End

This morning, I discovered that my Twitter account is “rate-limited”. Actually, everyone’s account is rate-limited.

So I’m only allowed to read 600 tweets per day. What that means in practical terms, since I follow about 800 people, when I first log in Twitter will access all the tweets made by those people overnight, and then…I’ve reached my limit within minutes, and I’m done. That’s all it takes, Twitter is over for me before I take my first sip of coffee.

I pity all those people who are paying $8 a month to get privileged access — now nobody is going to read their prioritized tweets, except other blue check users, and even then, only until they finish their breakfast, and then they’ll be done, too.

Brilliant move, Elon. Just shut it down.

Meanwhile, I’m on @[email protected].

I don’t follow Elon Musk, but does he even realize that he’s just effectively blocked people who do? Probably not.