The new Minnesota rules

The crackdown has started at last — late, but better late than never. Just in time for Thanksgiving!

Most prominently, the state is telling Minnesotans not to gather with anyone outside of their immediate household, just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

In addition: Indoor and outdoor dining will be prohibited, limiting restaurants and bars to takeout service only. Public pools, rec centers, gyms, fitness and dance studios and indoor entertainment venues like theaters and bowling alleys will also be closed.

Wedding receptions, celebrations and private parties are also not allowed under the new orders, though wedding ceremonies, funerals and other religious events are allowed if they follow current capacity and social distancing rules.

This is good. Shut down this nonsense now.

Unfortunately, there is some bad news.

The order also puts organized sports — for youth and adults — on pause, but allows professional and college sports to continue, under certain restrictions.

Retail, salons, places of worship, other activities will operate under restrictions already in place.

You know what this means, sports fans and church-goers! The state is just fine with you getting sick and dying. That’s no skin off my nose, since I don’t belong to either group, but I think you ought to be protesting and demanding equal respect. Close the churches and the sports arenas too!

You know what else is over? The election.

This is getting ridiculous.

President Trump has abandoned his plan to win reelection by disqualifying enough ballots to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key battleground states, pivoting instead to a goal that appears equally unattainable: delaying a final count long enough to cast doubt on Biden’s decisive victory.

On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign wired $3 million to election officials in Wisconsin to start a recount in the state’s two largest counties. His personal lawyer, ­Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has taken over the president’s legal team, asked a federal judge to consider ordering the Republican-controlled legislature to select the state’s electors. And Trump egged on a group of GOP lawmakers in Michigan who are pushing for an audit of the vote there before it is certified.

Giuliani has also told Trump and associates that his ambition is to pressure GOP lawmakers and officials across the political map to stall the vote certification in an effort to have Republican lawmakers pick electors and disrupt the electoral college when it convenes next month — and Trump is encouraging of that plan, according to two senior Republicans who have conferred with Giuliani and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.

But that outcome appears impossible. It is against the law in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin law gives no role to the legislature in choosing presidential electors, and there is little public will in other states to pursue such a path.

Behind the thin legal gambit is what several Trump advisers say is his real goal: sowing doubt in Biden’s victory with the president’s most ardent supporters and keeping alive his prospects for another presidential run in 2024.

Trump is openly trying to corrupt a democratic election in the United States, and he’s shameless about it, and his Republican cronies are turning a blind eye to the whole degrading process. Is there nothing that can be done? Do we just sit back and watch this boob commit fumbling, bumbling crimes that embarrass the country in the eyes of the world, and do nothing? It’s like standing outside the plate glass window of a bank, watching an idiot pound on the vault with a sledgehammer, while Rudy Giuliani stands at the door speed-talking nonsense at the crowd.

Oh, and almost half the crowd is cheering the crooks on.

Can we please put an end to our ongoing national humiliation and frog-march the whole mob of blithering grifters out of their positions of authority now? Can we at least strip Rudy of his license to practice law? It looks like we’re not even capable of that.

Huzzah! The last Thursday of the semester!

I have complained about my Thursday schedule before, which makes it the worst day of the week for me. Well, this is the last one! As an added bonus, I also have no committee meetings scheduled for today at all! I can’t get too excited, though, that just means I have a few free hours I can use to tame that savage stack of proliferating grading obligations. Oh, and I have to compose the lab exam that I’ll be flinging at cell bio students tomorrow. And it’s oral presentations day in my communication class. And I need more coffee. It’s not a perfect day, but it’s getting better.

That settles it — I’ll be cowering in my bunker

I do believe I’ll be staying home for Thanksgiving. I definitely wouldn’t be attending any 10-person get-togethers, but if I got together with my daughter, who lives in the center of the dark red infection zone in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I’d be facing a somewhat unacceptable risk. I’m not going anywhere near the death zones of Fargo or Sioux Falls. In fact, the whole Midwest looks like a disaster, but I’m trapped in the middle of it.

You know, if I huddle alone in Morris, Minnesota for the entire holiday season, looking like a dork, and do everything the epidemiologists tell me, I am going to be so pissed off if I get COVID-19 and die anyway. I’m going to haunt all those Republican motherfuckers for eternity if that happens.

I don’t care that there is no such thing as an afterlife. My rage will not be contained.

Bargain accepted, Brenden Dilley

All right, Brenden. I’ll wear the mask and accept that I look like a stupid dork, and you can point and laugh all you want.

You can die.

Could you please get it over with quickly, though, before you infect others? The whole point of the mask is to protect others from your pernicious vapors, so it really doesn’t help contain the pandemic for you to ramble about spewing in public.

One. More. Week.

The last day of the Fall semester is Wednesday, 25 November. I can tell I’m going to barely scrape over the finish line. Yesterday was exhausting, with my face locked into Zoom all day and early evening, and I ended up totally zombified by the time I’d suffered through my last online meeting. Today I have the morning sort of free (there’s always prep work & grading to fill in the gaps), and I’m going to use it to dart into the lab and feed the poor neglected spiders. That seems to be the only joy in my life right now, and even that has to take a backseat to wading through Zoom and clearing my backlog of grading.

Of course, this is the last week of instruction — the final surge of assignments and exams comes sailing over the transom to keep me occupied from Thanksgiving through the first week of December.

Oh, and the holidays…we’re supposed to be sensible and avoid large family gatherings, and I was thinking that maybe we could get away with a small family gathering for Thanksgiving, meeting with my daughter & her husband & the adorable granddaughter. With us, that would only be 5 people, and they all work from home and have been careful about minimizing exposure. But then I realized that I am the dirty, filthy plague rat of the family, since I have been compelled by my job to share a physical space with about 40 people per week. My presence alone would expand their bubbles to a much larger size.

It makes me very unhappy, and it isn’t fair — I’m also probably the most at-risk person for severe symptoms in the family — but it would be terrible if, in this case, it was Grandpa who was responsible for infecting the younger family members. I guess I’ll be staying home. Maybe if I quarantine myself for a month I’ll be able to meet in a tiny family gathering without worrying that I’m going to kill someone.

Actually, after this killer semester, I might be content to just lie down and take a nap for a month, anyway.

The pool boy speaks!

The pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, who was entangled in a menage a trois with Jerry Falwell Jr. and Becki Falwell gives his side of the story to journalists. It’s sordid and depressing — everyone involved is self-centered and hypocritical and oblivious to their own unpleasantness. So, the Falwells picked up an attractive, well-built pool boy at a hotel for sexual encounters in which Jerry Jr. would watch Giancarlo have sex with Becki, and built it up into a many years long relationship with promises of helping Giancarlo get rich in real estate. Everyone is clueless. Jerry Jr. doesn’t think there’s anything peculiar about the head of an evangelical Christian “university” that strictly polices the sexual behavior of its students getting jinky in a three-way; the pool boy is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Falwells just wanted him for sex.

More and more, Granda would not want to have sex with Becki. By 2013, he would call his sister and tell her that he “physically could not continue” having liaisons with the couple. But whenever he tried to pull away from Becki or tell her that he didn’t want to have sex, he recalls, Jerry would grow furious at her.

The moral majority scion would also threaten Granda, he says, telling him that he would send videos of them having sex to his family and girlfriend.

Becki, in turn, would beg Granda to sleep with her, reminding him of when “we went to bat for you” to buy him the hostel.

“I don’t want this to sound like I’m being forced,” Granda emphasizes to TPM, thinking back to how he felt at the time. “I want to take ownership: I’m gonna bang her.”

“But I always felt like if I stopped, I would be completely cut off,” he adds. “Not financially speaking — losing out on the family experience, which I cared more about than anything.”

It’s around here that Granda began to feel that his place in the Falwell family was conditioned on sex, a cold but persistent feeling that would nag at him throughout the year.

It’s fine with me if Jerry Jr. gets off on voyeurism and infidelity; I am unbothered if Becki enjoys the kind of open relationship that lets her get laid with multiple men; Granda is a willing, consenting participant in their activities. But man, I despise stupidity and dishonesty. Be open about it. Don’t do a wildly hedonistic thing while simultaneously bullying others out of doing likewise.

Also, it’s appalling how much money these people were throwing around. Did Granda seriously believe his penis was worth millions of dollars?

‘Tis the season for terrible Christmas movies

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Sometimes I wonder if I just have bad taste, or if everyone else in the world does. My wife and I were beguiled by the advertising and reviews for this new movie on Netflix, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, “An instant classic!”, one review crowed, so we watched it the other day.

It jingle-jangled my brain.

OH MY GOD IT WAS SO BAD. This is a movie that tries desperately hard to be cheerful holiday fare that it crosses right over the line into creepy, and I was appalled in the first five minutes. All the characters have these intense nonstop grins splitting their faces and are so enthusiastic about everything that I was confident that the entire stage had been doses with smilex gas, and the show was a race to reach a conclusion before everyone collapsed in cackling death. There was no acting. There was only grimacing.

The plot: it’s about a toymaker who is famous for his inventions, although we’re not really shown any talent, or even any comprehension of what a child would want. In the opening, he builds a tiny and hyperkinetic matador doll that talks…and proves to be so egotistical that he ought to run for president, but has no personality other than an overwhelming narcissism. This creation is supposed to be the great new toy that will make him even more famous, but really, it’s a toy so lacking in charm that you just want to smash it. It might be a fine example of the worst evils of AI you can imagine, but nothing more.

The toymaker’s apprentice steals the matador and the notebooks with all his designs. Then we skip forward in time to learn that the toymaker became a babbling failure, is estranged from his own daughter, and the apprentice has become a success with an empire of toys. Enter the toymaker’s granddaughter, Journey, with a manic smile pasted on and a disturbingly optimistic can-do attitude. The rest of the movie consists of Journey using her ability to visualize mathematics as a kind of magic spell to animate stuff, including an ugly and pointless robot called Buddy 3000 that can fly and somehow enable people around him to fly. He’s activated by — I knew this was coming — belief. You just have to believe, and you can do anything.

Then there are sewer tunnels and explosions. Eventually the apprentice is defeated, and the toymaker vindicated, and he can return to making bad toys like the stupid matador and the big-headed Buddy 3000, all of which will go flying off the shelves, I guess. The only good moment is when the annoying matador is caught, and the toymaker flips off his power switch and announces that he will be reprogramming it, which is also rather disquieting. The matador was stupidly obnoxious and irrelevant to the story, but he did have a personality, icky as it was, and desires and feelings, and the master could just erase and reprogram it all. I guess that’s our Christmas message: if you’re loud and annoying and overly-excited about Christmas, we can shut you down and silence you.

It was apparently intended to be a stage production translated to Netflix, and it shows. Those smiles are designed so that even the kids in the nosebleed seats at Jingle Jangle on Ice would be able to seem them, and everything was so broadly done that there was no need for nuance or subtlety in plot or character or atmosphere. It was just LOUD and JANGLY and RELENTLESS. It also looked EXPENSIVE, with lots of elaborate sets and intense CGI animation. I’m wondering how much money they had to spend to get all those good reviews, too.

Oh, I almost forgot. It’s also a musical. I guess it was understandable that I forgot, because I can’t remember a single tune from the thing.