The virtues of vengeance

We had a little fracas in our front yard yesterday. My wife has several bird feeders out there, and a tree branch is draped with disgusting lumps of suet which have attracted multiple species and individuals of woodpecker — there are a couple of big pileated woodpeckers that hang out around here regularly now. Unsurprisingly, this concentration of happy birds attracted an unwelcome visitor.

There was a lot of squawking and frantic fluttering and panic-stricken birds flying away from our house.

That got me thinking. The woodpeckers are rather helpless, with the choice of eating or being eaten. If I were in that position of a predator blocking my access to food and threatening to kill and eat me, I’d be pissed off and talking to the neighbors about what to do about it. Maybe we’d contact local communities and trade goods and services to recruit samurai — you know, like maybe 7 of them — to hunt down and kill the predator that I’m personally helpless against, so that I can resume gnawing frozen fat off a tree branch.

Woodpeckers don’t have that capability, but humans do. It seems to me that this attribute of revenge and organized overkill might have been a major advantage in our evolution. Other animals certainly make the effort to eliminate competition, but we’re really good at building cooperative specialists to mob anyone who interferes with our living, or annoys us a little bit, or makes a rude comment on Twitter.

We may have overdone it, but our local woodpeckers would probably appreciate being able to find an ally to chase off the bad guy.

Actually, they do have Mary, who’ll go out and wave her arms and yell at the offending bird, but she’s going to go away for a few weeks. I’ll still be here for most of that time, but I’ll probably just watch the drama and muse about the evolutionary pressures imposed by predation.

Do not put Gwyneth Paltrow in your vagina

I am not going to watch a single moment of Paltrow’s new show on Netflix, and you shouldn’t either. Boycott it. Cancel it. It’s a disgrace and it hasn’t even aired yet. It’s called The Goop Lab, and there is no science behind it at all, no lab, no research, just a bunch of rich people jumping on tired old bandwagons like energy healing or psychic mediums and using them as vehicles to sell crap to the gullible.

You can get a sufficient feel for the garbage being peddled from the trailer.

The last line there from Paltrow is We’re going to milk the shit out of it. Finally, some truth.

But another interpretation offers a clear description of Paltrow’s business model, which feeds into the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry. (That’s a lot of milk.) With the ever-elusive possibility of a better life, backed by her celebrity status and good genetics, Paltrow’s Goop hawks uber-expensive aspirational wellness products. That includes a $350 crazy straw, an $84 water bottle with a “positive energy” rock in it, and an $85 “Shaman Medicine Bag” with “magically charged stones.”

The business model is depressingly successful. Goop’s valuations in recent years have soared to $250 million, and the company has expanded into brick-and-mortar stores on multiple continents. The Netflix series is just the latest sign of Goop’s achievements.

I guess I won’t be seeing the next MCU movie if she’s in it, either. Thanks for the excuse!

I’m a military father, where’s my free chardonnay?

Psst, wanna see some gross privilege? How about a military spouse who thinks restaurants should give her free wine for her service?

Once, at my grandmother’s house long long ago, I found an old piece of paper with a couple of blue stars on it. She told me that had been posted on her window in WWII, because she had one son in the Navy in the Pacific, and another serving in the army in Germany. She never asked for free wine.

I guess this military spouse 😀 should have given her some advice.

Clean up the corpses of your victims before they begin to stink

That’s an important lesson I learned from my spiders. I’m going out of town for a week, so over the weekend I made sure that everyone was well fed and watered, stuffing them full of waxworms. Which meant that today I had to go in and extract all the blackened, shriveled corpses of their prey so they wouldn’t just be sitting there rotting for days and days. A pile of dead flies or larvae do acquire a distinctive aroma, so I wanted everyone left with clean cages before I abandoned them.

Also, wow, were these all plump, sleek, shiny spiders. They’ll do fine without me for a few days now.

Teaching cooking, teaching science…lessons to learn

Classes start up again in a few weeks, but I thought I’d take some time to get inspired by a master teacher, watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

That’s sarcasm, by the way. I think Ramsay has real talent as a skilled chef who knows what he’s doing, but he’s a terrible teacher. His show is an excuse to put him in situations with low-talent chefs, where he can explode entertainingly and then reshape the restaurant with his genuine expertise…but really, the entertainment value comes from the raging meltdowns. The effective teaching moments come from the occasional moments of empathy where he explains with real sincerity to the bad cooks what they must do to get back on track. It’s actually a series of demonstrations of how not to teach, interspersed with rare moments when a little light shines through and you see what really works.

It reminded me of science in a lot of ways. We have the same problems. Ramsay sometimes fondly recollects his training, when he had to work 7 days a week for long hours and got yelled at by demanding masters; I knew labs like that, but was fortunate to have had mentors who were much more understanding and treated their students like human beings. After seeing him in action a few times, I just want to tell Ramsay that he was abused by people seeking to build their reputations and their income, and that he is now perpetuating that abuse, while pretending that it is necessary to be abused to become a great chef. It shouldn’t be. It’s obvious that being a line cook is intense, hard work that requires discipline and focus, but screaming and throwing food at the wall and calling the cook making the mistake a donut doesn’t help. It’s counterproductive, even if it does make for flashy reality TV.

Both science and cooking excel when the people doing it love their work, have a passion for their subject, and are creative. They both also require discipline and focus. Glorifying grueling expectations and taskmasters who torment their lackeys is a poor way to instill discipline, and is antithetical to that passionate embrace of the work.

Yet after watching him work for a while, I still kind of like Gordon Ramsay, but only for those moments where he lets the mask slip and reveals that he likes at least some of the people he’s yelling at, and has these brief moments of heart-to-heart communication. That’s where the real teaching gets done.

T.S. Eliot trembled in fear

Here’s a good opening to a story that makes me want to read more.

So my dear friend and podcast soulmate, Whiskey Jenny, recently made casual reference to “the TS Eliot batshittery,” and when we asked for more details, she sent a link that I will share with you shortly. First, some context: TS Eliot once had an… affair? with a woman named Emily Hale, over the course of which he exchanged many, many letters with her. He destroyed all her letters to him. She saved all his letters to her, and she donated them to Princeton with the stipulation that they should not be opened until 2020. I learned about this many years ago, and my imagination was captured by what it must be like to be a scholar of TS Eliot. Imagine knowing that over a thousand personal letters existed, written by the object of your study-slash-ardor, and that you could not have access to them until 2020. Wow.

Imagine being TS Eliot, learning in 1956 that a thousand of his old love letters were archived and scheduled to be released to scholars in 2020. Imagine…wait a minute. Isn’t it odd that he wrote a thousand letters to Emily Hale, and then abruptly turned around and married a different woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, about whom he later writes of their time together as “nightmare agony of my seventeen years”, and that the only thing worse would have been marrying Emily Hale? And then when Vivienne died, he turned around and married a third woman, Esmé Valerie Fletcher? Eliot was concerned that the passion expressed in those letters was, I suspect, stuff so embarrassing that Eliot wrote a preemptive letter explaining himself that had to be released at the same time as Hale’s letters. He sounds desperate to protect a legacy that he thought would be compromised by the contents, so he has to disparage the woman.

The letters seem to be about what you’d expect: passionate declarations of eternal love from a poet.

“You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.”

He continued: “I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead; at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age.”

Describing himself to be in a “kind of emotional fever”, by December he confessed that “the pain is more acute, but it is a pain which in the circumstances I would not be without”.

The only thing terrible in it all seems to be Eliot’s later letter, which is embarrassing in how pompous he is about shooting down the contents of the adoring letters he wrote to that ghastly-after-the-fact woman. He would have been better off adding nothing.

By the way, the volume of letters isn’t so surprising. There was a year before our marriage when my wife-to-be and I lived apart, in Seattle and Eugene respectively, and I wrote lots of letters, maybe once or twice a week. This was before email, you know, and when long distance phone calls cost a fortune, so yes, we actually wrote physical letters on paper and put a stamp on them and sent them off. Also, no word processing, no printers, they were all hand-written. That was only about 40 or so years ago, kids.

Alas, I hope you aren’t waiting to see them appear in the Princeton library in 2040, because she burned them all.

No good deed goes unpunished

She’s pretty, white, and blonde, but at least she used her privileges for good. Kaylen Ward, an Instagram model (not a very noteworthy accomplishment, it means she looks good and takes pictures of herself) made an offer: send her proof that you’d donated at least $10 to fight the Australian wildfires, and she’d send you a nude photo of herself. It took off! She has apparently motivated donations somewhere around $500,000. That’s a worthy use of her body, did harm to no one, and she wasn’t even handling any of the money, so there was no opportunity for it to be a scam.

But all is not well. What she was doing was classified as “sex work”, and that must be punished.

Donations poured in – but the internet fame had implications for Ward’s career as an Instagram model. Instagram disabled her account for violating its community guidelines, and copycat accounts are popping up to try and capitalise on the model’s viral success.

“My IG [Instagram] got deleted, my family disowned me, and the guy I like won’t talk to me all because of that tweet,” she posted on Sunday.

“But f**k it, save the koalas.”

The stigma around sex work has to end.

Drag him out of office in handcuffs NOW.

He’s not even aware that he’s tweeting out promises of war crimes.

The UN passed a resolution in 2017 prohibiting this sort of thing, you know. As explained by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova:

“The deliberate destruction of heritage is a war crime, it has become a tactic of war to tear societies over the long term, in a strategy of cultural cleansing. This is why defending cultural heritage is more than a cultural issue, it is a security imperative, inseparable from that of defending human lives,” Director-General Bokova told the Security Council, as she spoke in support of the resolution, with Executive Director of UNODC Youri Fedotov and Commander Fabrizio Parrulli of the Carabinieri Italiani.

“Weapons are not enough to defeat violent extremism. Building peace requires culture also; it requires education, prevention, and the transmission of heritage. This is the message of this historic resolution,” she added.

The resolution was prompted by a number of tragic acts of cultural vandalism, many of them by Islamic state fanatics. Now we’re planning to be just like them.

The resolution urges nations to increase efforts to preserve historic monuments and sites in conflict zones. The onset of the 21st century witnessed attacks against global heritage sites increase significantly, including the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and Timbuktu’s ancient shrines in Mali.

Previous efforts by the Council to safeguard cultural heritage focused on the illicit trafficking of looted cultural relics to fund terrorist activities in Iraq and Syria, where the “Islamic State” militant group destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites, including Roman ruins at Palmyra.

However, Friday’s resolution called for further international cooperation in investigations and prosecutions of individuals and groups committing attacks against cultural heritage sites, monuments and relics.

The resolution affirmed that “directing unlawful attacks against sites and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or historic monuments may constitute, under certain circumstances and pursuant to international law, a war crime and that perpetrators of such attacks must be brought to justice.”

You may recall that religious fanatics in the US, particularly the likes of the Hobby Lobby fundamentalists, were actively looting cultural artifacts from Iraq…also a crime. Now Trump is threatening to bomb major cultural sites in Iran, confirming our status as a rogue state run by barbarians.

Do I need to point out the dishonor of using the Iranian hostages from forty years ago as a justification for destroying art and history, or the hypocrisy of telling Iran to not threaten us by threatening Iran? Very well, I do. Trump is a dishonorable hypocrite and a lying barbarian. He has to go. Soon.

Bathroom buddy

Look who was keeping warm in a corner of our bathroom:

I’d really like to know where they hide most of the time. All winter long we see these isolated individuals suddenly popping up out of nowhere.

Found another one hanging out in the dining room with a mess of fibers. It’s very tiny, half the size of the one above.

Spiders had their breakfast

This morning, I cruised down to the local bait shop and bought a bunch of waxworms. “Good luck fishing,” said the proprietor, as I was going out the door. I didn’t feel like explaining that there would be no fish involved today.

I got to the lab and delicately tweezered one pale white waxworm into the center of each cobweb, where it would squirm unhappily. It had been lifted out of its comfortable environment and was hanging suspended from a couple of cables, which it did not like at all. Picture a whale trussed up and dangling from the ceiling of a meatlocker, straining to escape the trap, while little fanged predators look on.

The spiders usually paused for a few minutes. I imagine they were briefly stunned at the immensity of the bounty that has fallen from the skies, but they didn’t wait long — they swiftly scuttled out, their hindlimbs flickering as they quickly reinforced the webbing, occasionally moving in close for a long kiss.

When I left, I looked in the incubator…rank after rank of transparent cages, like little glass abbatoirs, each with a madly writhing worm struggling desperately to escape, each with a small long-legged creature clinging to their back, biting.

Warmed my heart, it did. They looked so happy and eager (the spiders, not the worms). It reminded me of my kids on Christmas morning.