Spiders @ Home

It’s no fair. I have to work to maintain my spiders in the lab, fussing over their cages, feeding them every day, encouraging them to breed. Then there’s my colleague down the road who just has a compost bin he shovels food waste into, and every year it’s swarming with Steatoda borealis. No work at all. Just leaving it be, letting insects flourish in the waste, which feed the spiders, which also benefit from that year-round warmth of decomposition.

I wonder what the department chair would think if I just started dumping garbage in my lab? It looks like a great strategy for growing a colony.

Below, I’ve included a photo of a few of these spiders in their natural grim, dirty, cobwebby habitat.

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The monkeys must die

I’m teach two courses this term (well, three, actually), Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, a required introductory biology course, and Genetics, an upper level elective. And they’re killing me right now.

But yesterday, I went all ADHD on FunGen and focused from 1pm until well after midnight and got all caught up on grading that course (my inbox is empty), and also prepped today’s lecture and next Tuesday’s, and wrote the exam I’m handing out today, and assembled an outline of the final exam. No, really, I can stop thinking about it for a while. It’s like I had two biting, clawing, screaming monkeys on my back and I took one and bashed its skull with a rock. Very satisfying.

Unfortunately, it meant I had to ignore the other monkey for a day, but I’m going to address that today, focusing on just the backlog in Genetics and clearing that step by step all day and all night, if I have to. It’s a monkey-killing rampage!

There’s a possibility that I might even get a free day this weekend, before the next round of exams show up and demand to be graded. Maybe I can do something exciting, like laundry. Or nap. I’ve only been getting 4 hours of sleep each night, so the latter is tempting.

My commitment to being boring is unflagging

Teaching is done for the day. All student appointments cleared from my calendar. Next up: I have to polish up another exam I’m handing out in intro bio tomorrow, prepare a little learning exercise for the students, and then dive back into grading exams and lab reports.

But first! The sun is shining, it’s 17°C out there, and I’m going for a walk. I’ll probably come back. Probably. That pile of papers will just draw me back, I’m sure.

Of course, if I find a big colony of spiders I might instead turn feral and move in with them.

Time to hug the spiders

It’s happening again. I’m falling behind on the grading, and today I have to give another exam because the syllabus says so. The exam is ready to go, but I’m not.

I’m going to go hang out in the lab for a while and relax.

Must think soothing thoughts, don’t want to break down. Just buckling down, trying to get all the work done, eyes on next week when it all comes to a close.

Also, thinking thoughts of revenge.

See? A positive mindset will get me through this.

Would you take medical advice from a whiny rich frat boy?

Why is Tucker Carlson still on the air? He’s spreading criminal misinformation and encouraging his viewers to sic the cops on people wearing masks.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson thinks people wearing masks are “repulsive” and told his viewers last night that they should even call the cops when they see children wearing masks.

And knowing the yearning, empty vessels that make up the bulk of his viewing audience, you know it will happen. 911 operators will be diverted from actual emergencies so the intellectually lazy prep school boy can revel in the extent of his power.

Mind you, it’s children wearing masks in Walmart that so disgusts him. Not the oppositional defiance bunch that so proudly sports semi-automatic weapons in Walmart.

“Masks have always been incompatible with a free society. We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals, transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us and alienate us to shut us off from one another, they prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you.”

You want America to become another India? Because that’s how you get India.

So what went wrong? Experts cite the spread of the U.K. variant and frequent large events with unmasked crowds. State election rallies have gone ahead, and a Hindu festival drew millions of people to the Ganges River this month—leading to more than 1,000 new cases. But the emergence of a more contagious Indian strain seems to be the biggest factor. In March, a government statement warned of new variants that “confer immune escape and increased infectivity.” In fact, the Indian strain may have been circulating as early as October.

Shamika Ravi, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Foreign Policy that both the new strain and the increasing number of people leaving their homes explain the current surge. She said the high mobility rate may also indicate why more young people are getting infected in the current wave: They are the ones exposing themselves by leaving their homes for work and leisure. Mobility rates for older people have been lower during the pandemic.

This is what I dread. We’re taking a cautious approach at my university — some easing of restrictions, but I’m still going to be doing online teaching primarily next Fall — and I want this over. But it’s not over yet, and too many people are acting as if it is, which will only make it worse. As Margaret Sullivan puts it, Tucker Carlson’s latest idiocy on masks is dangerous and hypocritical even by his usual standards. It’s going to kill people. It’s going to empower more lunatics. And yet Fox News blithely encourages him.

Watch the spectacle of a petulant, gibbering liar straining to fuel the outrage that keeps him on the air, if you can stomach it.

Oh no! A murderbot showed up last night!

This is terrible. I pre-ordered Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries Book 6) ages ago, and it crawled into my Kindle app overnight and is sitting there, tempting me.

There’s no way I can read it now. I don’t have the time.

But…on the day I turn in my final grades in mid-May, the sun will be shining, the weather will be balmy, and I will be relaxing on the deck, reading this book, free of all stress, every muscle unkinking, brow unfurrowed.

And the day after that I’ll be scouring the countryside for spiders.

I am becoming sympathetic to squirrel murder

I’m coming around to Iris‘s point of view. I have a bird feeder just outside my office window. It’s supposed to be squirrel-proof (nothing is squirrel-proof).

Birds are constantly coming by. Our cat sits there twitching, watching them.

Unfortunately, these big meaty monster squirrels keep climbing up on it, terrifying the birds. There’s a bar for the birds to perch on, to the right, but it’s hinged so that when a heavy rodent climbs on it, it folds down, closing access to the seeds inside. So far, so good.

Only now what the squirrels have figured out is that they can climb onto that silver roof and twist that red handle until it unlatches, and then get on the bar and pop the roof off, allowing them to climb right in and wallow in bird seed. It’s very annoying to find the roof removed and a brushy-tailed rat inside, indulging in gluttony.

I’m trying something different now. I’ve put a line of sriracha sauce all around the roof, and also dabbed it on the latch. We’ll see how well that dissuades the thieves. Otherwise, I wonder if a line of squirrel skulls would work.

Anyone else have other suggestions?

That reminds me…

I’m home alone, and in addition to taking care of the evil cat, I have a mealworm colony in the dining room. Mary set it up and usually feeds them — it’s not a big deal, just throw a slice of apple in there every once in a while — and I just scoop up a handful every few weeks to feed the spiders.

We do not have 10,000 mealworms. I’d have to be raising a thousand spiders for that to make sense. But I can dream!

(We do not have guests over for dining now…pandemic, you know. If we did, we might move the colony to another room, even though they are quite quiet and well-behaved.)

Why does CNN pay Rick Santorum to appear in the news?

The “liberal” news media <snort>. Watch this and try not to throw anything heavy across the room.

There it is. There’s the great American myth. We are a nation that coalesced out of nothingness around two ideas: FREEDOM (for white landowners) and CHRISTIANITY (oh, judeo-Christianity) and the Ten Commandments and Jesus, despite none of those appearing in our constitution. Meanwhile, the people who were already living here were just sitting around slack-jawed and drooling, not a single thought in their heads, no art, no culture, no religion, no technology, no music, no traditions, so it was OK to slaughter them. It’s one grand smug lie, repeated over and over, and the rich white people sit there and lap it up.

The fact that that slimy fraud hasn’t been canceled and has in fact been prospering is all the evidence you need that cancel culture does not exist.

It gives me some slight satisfaction that I lived at a time in Pennsylvania when I could vainly vote against that horrible human being.

The first responsibility of a university should be to provide a safe space for learning

Should I be envious? Look at these scores that Bruce Conforth of the University of Michigan got on RateMyProfessor. This may be the first time in years that I’ve so much as glanced at that hellsite (no, don’t tell me what my score is, I don’t want to know), but I heard all the news about what an inspiring, award-winning instructor he was, so I had to check.

Yeah, “all the news”. You know something awful has happened, because you don’t get national attention for being really good at your job. So let’s get the whole story.

Several sexual assault allegations surfaced Friday against former University of Michigan American Culture lecturer Bruce Conforth, who won the 2012 Golden Apple Award for most outstanding U-M instructor, according to the New York Times.

Conforth, a musician and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, retired in early 2017. His retirement came after three women reported to the University in 2008 and 2016 that Conforth had attempted to engage in sexual relationships with them as students, according to the Times.

Now, six former students have filed legal papers with the intent of suing both Conforth for sexual misconduct and the University of Michigan for failing to provide Conforth with consequences or protect the victims with further investigation and action.

Conforth’s allegations of sexual harassment include unsolicited messages and rape.

Warning: the article gives more detailed accounts of his behavior. It was hard to read through to the end, where you discover that six other professors and administrators at the University of Michigan have been committing unrelated sex crimes in recent years, and the university has only reluctantly acted on them. I guess it’s easier to hand out awards.

We get an idea of the university’s policies from the timeline.

The University claimed to have taken action against Conforth by setting restrictions on him after the first report of sexual assault in 2008, and planned to conduct an investigation after the second two reports in 2016, if Conforth did not agree to retire in 2017.

So…you rape one student, and the U wags a finger at you and gives you a major teaching award a few years later; you have to rape three students before you’re asked to quietly retire and collect your pension. No wonder they’ve accumulated an impressive collection of sex offenders on their faculty.

But he was so popular and enthusiastic in his lectures, you know…