Did UATX increase their status, or did Dawkins diminish his?

I think you know the answer.

This is not a joke.

Somebody really needs to take him aside and explain that he’s making a lot of really bad decisions lately.

Gorillas have very small testicles, you know

Why am I not surprised that Elon Musk sleeps with his employees?

Elon Musk Secretly Fathered Twins With Neuralink Executive, Report Says

Elon Musk had twins in November with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, according to court records obtained by Insider on Wednesday, bringing the number of known living children fathered by the world’s richest man to nine.

The twins were born a few weeks before his partner, Grimes, had a child through a surrogate.

Three kids within a month? I’m sure Elon was overwhelmed with his fatherly obligations at that time. Right?

Man, it must be exhausting having to run all these grifting companies AND assert your masculine dominance by fucking your executives, and then having to keep your offspring secret.

Meet me in St Louis — in 3 weeks!

FORTY SEVEN days until classes resume. These aren’t tears, these are drops of pure plasma oozing from my eyeballs.

Happier countdown: TWENTY TWO days until Skepticon. That’s better. I’ll try not to think about how I’ll only have 25 days to get my teaching act together when the meeting starts.

I hope you’ll all be joining me there. The con has put out a call for workshops, so you can participate too! Go ahead, apply, it’s not like I’m looking forward to my talk, I want to hear what everyone else has to say.

Also, you can still (until 15 July) get a discounted room rate at St Louis’ Union Station Hotel using the code SKP22. Do it soon! Like right now!

If you can’t go, but do want to support a progressive conference, especially at this time of regressive politics, you can just DONATE to keep it going.

Speaking of which, I have received email from a couple of people who say they want to go and would be willing to go, except they’re not going to spend money in a horrible Republican state like Missouri. I sympathize, and respect that decision. All I can say is that Skepticon is a beacon of light in a very dark part of the country that needs all the illumination they can get. Unfortunately, the organizers are local to St Louis, so I can understand why they would build the event there, in their home. Maybe we can persuade them to relocate to a more liberal midwestern state (like, say, Minnesota, hint hint) in the future.

One last important and virtuous note: the con requires attendees to have proof of vaccination and to wear masks. Yay! It makes no sense that so many events other than this one are for plague rats.

Did anyone bring a hook? Get him off the stage.

A succinct summary of Boris Johnson’s concession speech:

Johnson says the government has much more to do. He wants to level up, because he believes talent is evenly spread.

He says he has tried to persuade colleagues that changing leader would be “eccentric”.

But he failed to persuade them, he admits – even though the party has a “vast mandate” and is only “a handful of points behind in the polls”.

He says in politics “no one is remotely indispensable”.

The “Darwinian” electoral system will produce a new leader, he says.

He knows there will be people who will be disappointed. And he says he is “sad to be giving up the best job in the world”.

He thanks his wife Carrie and his family, civil servant and staff who have helped him – referring to being “here at Chequers”, before he corrects himself. And he thanks his protection team – the one group who do not leak, he says.

He ends by saying the future is golden.

OK, fuck off now, Boris.

I didn’t like the “Darwinian” reference at all. His views are more crudely Spencerian than Darwinian, I think.

I prefer this summary, too.

Who woulda thought Popeye was so precious to Republicans?

Randy Milholland, creator of the webcomic Something Positive, has busted into the big leagues and is now responsible for the Sunday Popeye strips. He’s doing a fine job!

I hates debate trolls, too! He’s also refreshing a few things about the strip.

After nearly a hundred years in existence, the Popeye comic strip is reportedly getting a woke makeover, with the strip’s latest cartoonist promising more ethnic diversity and “more characters who aren’t heterosexual.”

Cartoonist Randal K. Milholland described the Popeye character as being “gender fluid,” citing old episodes in which the plot required Popeye to dress in drag.

“I [want] to bring in more characters who aren’t heterosexual,” Milholland said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News. “I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either.”

Good news, I would think. Unfortunately, that quote is from Breitbart, where talking about “a woke makeover” is like waving a strip of red meat at a very stupid and confused bull who has forgotten what a normal diet is and thinks an all-meat meal is exactly what real bulls eat. The comments section is bizarre — the idea that a comic strip might include non-straight characters enrages them.

It’s got 600 comments and they’re all as detached from reality as that sample! Did you know that having a gay character in a comic strip represents the Neo-Maoist erasure of history and destruction of culture? They also kind of lose the plot somewhere in there and start ranting about black characters in comic books, all while periodically quoting the Bible. I don’t think any of them are very tightly moored to reality.

Congratulations to the UK

Buh-bye, Boris!

I hear you’re finally getting rid of that wretched boob, Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson is to resign as Conservative leader but will push to stay on as prime minister until the autumn, prompting a backlash from some Tory MPs who say he has to go now.

Johnson’s decision came after an extraordinary standoff with his cabinet, which ended after Nadhim Zahawi, his new chancellor, told him to quit. By that point, more than 50 ministers had walked out, citing his mishandling of a string of scandals and failure of ethics.

So that’s what a collapsing government looks like.

There are things I don’t understand here. So he’s going to resign from leadership of his political party, but he wants to stay on as prime minister of his country for a few more months? How does that work? His scandals and ethical failures are just too much for the oh-so-ethical Conservative party, but are entirely satisfactory for the leadership of the United Kingdom? He’s like the lingering stink of a pungent fart, he’s going to cling to whatever wisps of power he can grip, in spite of near-universal dislike. We’ve experienced that over here, with a criminal ex-president pretending to be in important figure of influence, but hey, at least the UK didn’t have a mob of yahoos storming Downing Street.

Oh, and he’s going to be replaced by Dominic Raab? Isn’t that just more of the same? All of your Tories seem to be as repugnant as our Republicans.

Logistics are so important

I can’t really compete with Marcus and Charly in the big time construction and crafting projects, but I did make something that worked really well today. I made a fly-shaker. You know, like a salt shaker, only you shake flies out of it.

I’ve got a lot of spiders right now, all housed in individual vials, and I’ve got many more on the way. In particular, I’ve got 40+ baby spiderlings, with maybe a 100 more waiting to emerge any day now. I really want to keep them well fed so they’ll grow rapidly (and to Great Size, I hope), which means I’m feeding them every other day. This has been a clumsy process in which I put a few hundred wingless flies in a wide mouth cup, then cover it with a lid, and go down a line of spider vials using a paint brush to flick a few individuals into the loving arms of my babies. This is messy and awkward, because as soon as I open the lid to flick out a couple of flies, they all swarm to escape.

It takes 45 minutes to an hour to feed everyone, and it’s sloppy and a fair number of flies escape…to die, because there’s nothing for them to eat in the lab, and there are also escaped spiders that are thriving on their futile attempts to get away.

My fly shaker is simple: a plastic water bottle with a very small, fly-sized hole drilled in the top. I tape over the hole, use a funnel to dump a lot of flies into the bottle, and then open up all the spider containers. The spiders are well-behaved and will quietly rest in their web. Then I remove the tape from the fly shaker, invert it, and tap it once on each vial. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-etc. I did the whole bunch in less than 5 minutes! Then I was free to sit back and watch the gladiatorial spectacle as my spiderlings went into a frenzy.

I’ve been inefficient and working too hard. Now I can grow this spider army far more easily.

Maybe I should write a parenting book

I’m learning things from raising Steatoda triangulosa. Feeding time is a marvel: I recorded a very short video of the little spiderlings’ reaction to having a fruit fly thrown at them. It’s like instant implacable carnivory! They’re eager to leap onto their prey, exhibiting the same behaviors as the adults.

So, this is my idea of a good parenting book. Take your little human baby, and toss a small calf or a large puppy into the crib with him or her. Leave them to their business for a few days. Come back later and remove the bones and scraps, and toss them another one. Repeat until they’re old enough to hunt on their own.

I guess since they’re weak humans, you could give the baby a Bowie knife or something to compensate.

Unfortunately, my own children are all growed up, and it’s too late to try on them. My kids probably won’t let me try this with the grandkids. That means…

Having trouble reading Pharyngula?

You aren’t alone — it seems to have developed an annoying allergy to Safari, which is the browser my wife uses, so I better get it fixed. It’s only Safari, and it seems to hang at some random point while loading the articles, which makes it hard to track down. I’ve suspected it might be something funky in the sidebar, so I’ve purged a lot of that stuff (some of it was ten years old, so about time), and I’ll continue to pick away at it.

One observation that led me to think it’s something about the main Pharyngula page is that there’s a workaround: if you go to the FtB main page, and go from there directly to individual articles, they load fine. Still very annoying.

Thanks to some advice from @[email protected], I may have sort of fixed the problem. It was a mundane link to Twitter that was making Safari puke. Link now hidden, blog now seems to load on Safari. Why it didn’t like that link is a mystery.