There’s a reason Minnesotans don’t wear sandals in Winter

I’m still required to wear backless shoes as I recover from Achilles tendinitis, and the only such shoes I have are a pair of sandals. I also still have to take a very short walk to the lab to take care of spiders and flies. Today, while wearing my heaviest, warmest socks and making only a short shuffle from parking lot to science building, I discovered that this combo, despite being awesomely stylish, provides no protection for one’s toes on even a mild Minnesota winter day.

Said toes are now snorgled down in a hot heating pack. You could get frostbite really quickly out there if you aren’t properly prepared!

We weathered that weather just fine

We had a night of howling window-rattling, but that was the worst of it. We dropped from 4°C to -12°C overnight and acquired a thin layer of snow — hard to tell how much because the wind scoured it off of exposed surfaces. We are on the northern edge of the big storm that ripped through the midwest, so we still have power and all that good stuff — Iowa, SE Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan suffered far worse.

So, I selfishly wonder, will my flies arrive safely at the lab today? That’s the real test.

Oh, no…this might be all my fault

I’m sitting here all innocent-like when suddenly all these alerts come streaming across my desktop.

Uh-oh, that’s not good. We’ve got students planning to go home today and tomorrow.

Volatile weather? Never seen here before?

Plummeting temperatures and slippery roads…what could be causing this?

POTENTIALLY HISTORIC HIGH WIND EVENT! Wait, I might be responsible. You see, I ordered a whole bunch of mutant flies earlier, thinking the weather was going to be mild during the middle of the week — I check the weather before ordering these things, because it’s a bit dicey in December, and I’ve received shipments of biological specimens frozen rock solid before. I honestly thought this would be good timing to sidle past the Weather Gods and the Fly Gods. They are expected to arrive…

TOMORROW. <duh-duh-DUUUHHH>

I taunted fate, and this is what I get.

I guess we better batten down the hatches and make sure everything movable is secure — I remember a year when our garbage cans took flight. Everyone be safe. I hope my flies make it.

Anne Rice is dead

Or she better be — I thought her series usually started off provocatively and interestingly, but then dribbled off into confusing and weird Catholic mysticism, and also got increasingly self-involved, so any Anne Rice revenant is likely to get tedious fast. She did manage to define a whole horror sub-genre, so I’ve got to give her credit for that.

She was…unique. What else can we hope for?

Oh no, I was just reminded of her response to criticism. Authors who chew out readers for not liking their books is always cringe.

The things you learn on the internet

Hey, Ladies — according to this trash website, I’m available.

The most frequently asked questions are, is PZ Myers single or dating, and who is PZ Myers’s girlfriend? We are here to clear up and debunk dating rumors surrounding PZ’s love life and girlfriends.
…
According to our records, the American 64-year-old biologist is most likely single now. PZ Myers remains relatively quiet when it comes to sharing his personal life and makes it a point to stay out of the public eye. He may not be dating anyone publicly, but PZ may be seeing someone in private, and details were not made public yet. So it’s probably not safe to jump to conclusions.

Don’t tell my wife.

I think this site autogenerates gossipy nonsense for anyone who has any public information available on the internet.

Entertaining misery

Well, I have no appetite now. I just read this review of Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy, and even at a distance of thousands of miles and with no prospects (or desires) to visit this pretentious little place, it quite killed my interest in food for a while. It was 27 “courses” dribbled out over four and a half hours.

This, for instance, is one full course: it’s a cast of the chef’s mouth filled with some kind of foam. There were no utensils, you were expected to lick the ‘food’ out of there.

I think, if ever I get to Italy (which I would love to do sometime), I’ll just order the pizza.

It may be cold out there, but this is fake

So stop sending it to me!

I have no idea how that could have formed naturally, but the first big clue that it’s fake is the lack of provenance. The second clue is the shape of the capture lines — this was made by someone who never really looked at an orb web. A third clue is that when you look for where it came from, you discover that it’s cropped to remove the ice sculpture of a giant spider at the bottom. Or you find that an entomologist had already debunked it.