We’ve had an animal raiding our compost bin late at night. They’ve been burrowing underneath to get at the rotting vegetables in there, and then scattering them over the yard. This isn’t good. The bin is there to keep the decaying organic material confined rather than just flung about all over the place.

We’ve had this problem before — a couple of times now, we’ve had groundhogs living under our deck. We have a humane trap that we use to catch them and then we transport them a few miles away to somewhere near the Pomme de Terre river, where we release them. This is practically routine now.

So we set up the trap last night, went to bed, and bright and early this morning I go out to check on things. I blithely stroll out to the other side of the garage, and…oh shit.

I backed away quickly. I know that skunks can easily spray 10 or 20 feet, and are shockingly accurate (they aim for the eyes). They can also be mean little guys. This is about the worst thing we could have caught.

My current plan is to wait until 9 to call the local animal control office and make sure they don’t have a policy for dealing with wild animals in city limits. Then if I must I’ll approach the cage with garbage bags as a shield and open it up and let Pepe LePew go.

Lesson learned. Don’t set traps unless you’re prepared to deal with what you catch!

Today is my dull working day.

First up: I gotta go walk a kilometer or two. I’m not in physical therapy now, but I do have to keep up with some exercise.

Secondly, it’s a spider feeding day, and sheesh, but I have a lot of baby spiders who want their living, crawling meat.

Thirdly, I’ve got my Skepticon talk all outlined up in Keynote, with some of the images. Now I have to flesh everything out. The goal is to have it all done this weekend. Gone are the days when I would check into a hotel the night before and hack out the whole talk!

Is this my summer break? Could be worse, I guess.

I got an offer this morning to host a 30 second commercial on my next video — and they’d pay me $1800 for it. Whoa, is a little spot on a video by a little-known YouTuber like myself worth that much? No, it is not, but the money would be nice, and I delude myself into thinking I at least contribute a little knowledge on those things. A niggling temptation wormed its way into my brain.

I was briefly entertaining the idea enough to look up the company making the offer.

It’s one of those crypto/NFT scammer companies.

Well, that made it easy: HELL NO.

At least I was reminded I should get off my butt and implement a couple of the video ideas I have in my head. It’s just that right now I have so many spiders and so many egg sacs that demand my attention and I have to get this developmental timing series done before summer ends and I’m suddenly teaching 3 classes again…

Alan Dershowitz is terribly hurt by his social stigma, and did a long interview in the New Yorker which is basically nothing but Dershowitz having a pity party. What makes it worth reading, though, are italic asides in which he gets fact-checked.

Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]

Or my favorite:

The Abraham Accords. So I played a central role—not a central role, an important role in that. I helped. So they were celebrating that at the White House. I was there anyway because it was the day after I made my speech in the Senate, so I was invited to come. They assigned seats. They sat me right in back of Mike Pompeo, who had been my former student at Harvard Law School. Trump made a very bad joke, and people laughed. I didn’t laugh. [He did.] I thought it was a bad joke. My wife laughed. I didn’t laugh. I patted him on the back, and I said, “Mike, this, too, will pass. You’ll be remembered for what you did in the Middle East.” That was it. That was the entire encounter. I don’t know Mike Pompeo—

I would never have imagined that a serious article about Dershowitz could ever be funny, but this one is hilarious.

If you accept the premise that there are only of two possible answers that are correct, you’ve already lost the debate. Debate? Debates suck.

Although maybe we should consider the Clorgath Factor.

The infinite thread needs more space! Thanks, Lynna!

Previous Thread

Elon Musk is terrible enough, but I can see that he gets it all from his dear old dad.

Elon Musk’s father has revealed that he had a second secret, unplanned, child with his stepdaughter three years ago.

Errol Musk, 76, and his stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, 35, had a baby girl in 2019. Two years before that, he had admitted that Ms Bezuidenhout, 42 years his junior, had given birth to a baby boy named Elliot Rush, who is now five years old.

Jana Bezuidenhout was only four when Mr Musk married her mother Heide. They were married for 18 years and had two children, besides Heide’s three children – including Jana – from a previous marriage.

Ick ick ick ick ick ick ick ick. This is a betrayal of the trust that ought to exist between a father and daughter, and I don’t care if there isn’t a genetic relationship. Something is just not right in that family.

Although, to be fair, the other members of the family know this is totally fucked up.

In 2018, Errol admitted that Ms Bezuidenhout had given birth to a baby the two conceived “in the heat of the moment” when his stepdaughter stayed at his home after her boyfriend threw her out. “You have to understand – I’ve been single for 20 years and I’m just a man who makes mistakes,” he told Rapport at the time.

“I told my daughter Ali about him because I thought she would be supportive and understanding,” he said. “She said I was insane, mentally ill. She told the others and they went berserk. They think I’m getting senile and should go into an old age home, not have a life full of fun and a tiny baby.”

Elon Musk, on his part, has branded his father “evil”. He is estranged from his father and described him as a “terrible human being” in an interview with Rolling Stones in 2017.

“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he had said. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”

The creepy old man does have an excuse, sort of.

While revealing the latest birth to The Sun, Errol Musk seemed to reason that making children was his only purpose. “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he said. “If I could have another child I would. I can’t see any reason not to. If I had thought about it then Elon or Kimbal [Elon Musk’s younger brother] wouldn’t exist.”

Ah! The philosophy of cockroaches! So that’s where Elon learned the meaning of life.

William Brinkman has been documenting the strange goings-on in Bolingbrook, IL for years on his blog, and now he has gone and given us a book giving us a perspective on that weird place, called The Rift.

What if everything you believed was a lie?

Tom Larsen grew up believing in stories from the Bolingbrook Babbler newspaper: of UFOs, half-human weredeer, and of vampire gangs that roamed the streets at night. Then one day his parents told him the truth—the stories were all a lie.

Fresh out of college, Tom built a reputation as a blogger of the scientific skepticism movement, debunking the reports of paranormal events in his hometown. However, after famous podcast host, Jamie Kyle, posted a video about how Tom’s attempts to “hook up” with her at a skeptic’s conference made her feel uncomfortable, the blogger was furious.

Now, in his mid-twenties and still angry about his humiliation, Tom has made a career from defending the skeptical movement against “modern feminists”, including Humanist Heart, a group of social justice skeptics. And, when he hears that his hometown of Bolingbrook will host Humanist Heart’s congress, and Jamie will be their guest, Tom hatches a plan to confront the podcaster.

The only problem is that he must work for the Bolingbrook Babbler to gain access to the congress, and risk ruining his skeptic reputation. But an attack by a weredeer while working on his first assignment for the Babbler leaves Tom’s beliefs in pieces. The monsters, the UFOs, everything he tried to debunk—are all real!

Now, there are angry Men’s Rights Activists trying to disrupt the congress, weredeer have surrounded the area, and mysterious time rifts appearing throughout the village. Only Jamie and the Babbler can help Tom fix this, but will he be able to get past his anger and distrust before reaching the point of no return?

That sounds uncomfortably familiar, echoing the last decade of the skeptic/atheist movement. Except for the weredeer and the UFOs.

Wait. MRAs exist, and skeptics who resent not being allowed to use women as their toys exist…if a herd of pointy-hoofed mammals come after me at the full moon, I’m not going to close my eyes and say they aren’t there.

There was a call for campus bodies today — they were recording a recruiting video, I think, so they just wanted a swarm of college-like people to mill around on the mall. I dutifully showed up to do my part to serve the UMM community, like a good boy, and they started splitting up the mob. You walk here, you walk there, you two throw a football around, etc. Reasonably enough, they started organizing the young photogenic types first, setting them in motion. I was predictably the last one…and the organizers walked away, leaving me aimless, so I just moved out of the frame and hid behind a tree.

At least now I know my job. I’m the creepy old guy lurking in the shrubbery while the co-eds and jocks frolic in a bucolic collegiate scene. You can still sign up for the university, because you all know I’m mostly harmless, just kind of unsightly. The worst I might do is show you a spider.