There are still a few spiders hanging around outside. This one was adjacent to the house, where Mary found her hiding under some leaves.
She was cheating, though, because she was living under the dryer vent where it periodically warms up.
Growing up south of Seattle, one of the omnipresent features were the blackberries — everywhere I walked, along the roads, in abandoned fields, along the railroad tracks, there were these impenetrable walls of blackberry brambles. They were a nuisance, but it was great in August because it was like all the paths were lined with candy, you could just pluck huge quantities of fat berries while hardly trying.
But today I read about the history of blackberries in that area, and it starts out disappointing — they’re non-native, introduced by Luther Burbank — but it just keeps getting more OH NO LUTHER YOU DIDN’T.
He started selling a new book that he’d written in his catalogs, The Training of the Human Plant.
Burbank wrote that the crossing, elimination and refining of human strains would result in “an ultimate product that should be the finest race ever known.”
He considered the U.S. the perfect place to practice eugenics, because, at the turn of the century, there were immigrants coming from all over the world. He wrote:
“Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South.
“The union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind.”
It’s long overdue, but we’re in the midst of cleaning up some of the chaos in the management of Freethoughtblogs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean firing the CEO with a hefty golden parachute so he can retire to his mansion, but we are reopening the application process, which has been neglected for a long long time.
One of the reasons for the neglect, besides the CEO’s laziness, is that we changed a significant bit of how we operate: NO ADS, therefore NO FUNDING, therefore our bloggers don’t get paid anymore, unless they work out independent sources of income (Patreon, for instance). We’re also facing a SLAPP suit…but don’t let that scare you, our bloggers aren’t subject to that, just me, personally. We do provide a space to write, and of course, the dubious benefits of associating with a rabid mob of SJWs.
If you applied to blog here in the last two years, you don’t have to resubmit, we’ve still got it on file, and we’re just now in the process of injecting the sluggish beast of our review machinery with potent drugs to stimulate it back into life.
There may be a few other projects that rouse themselves to shamble onto the stage in the near future, since there are also a few other developments, to be announced later.
Oh, this is sad. Gahan Wilson hasn’t produced much new in recent years — he has been suffering from dementia — but I discovered his work in the 70s and loved it. He and Gary Larson plucked my brain out and shaped it before stuffing it back in my cranium.
“I won’t bring any more friends home unless you let me play with them first!”
His work was always distinctive and recognizable, and unlike anyone else’s. That’s a great legacy.
Winter is a tough time to be an arachnophile, especially in the Great White North. It’s even tougher to be a spider. They’re mostly gone from outdoors — I’ve been looking, and everything is frozen and windy, the bugs are all dead, and it’s no place for an arachnid.
They do have some places to thrive, though: in your house. We people at least provide refugia for a few species, like the theridiidids I’ve been following. My wife, who has the eyes of an eagle, found this tiny little guy in our kitchen and scooped him up. He’s a juvenile so it’s hard to tell, but the palps look swollen and he’ll probably be ready to mate after his next molt.
The photo isn’t the best. A) he’s very smol, b) I’m shooting through plastic, c) he’s dangling on a single slender thread spanning the tube, and is practically vibrating, and d) he’s very excited because I fed him a fly, and he’s fangs-deep in that juicy fresh beast.
He’s Parasteatoda, and has a spectacularly stark pattern of angular pigments on his abdomen (not adequately shown). Once he has settled down and is nestled in a comfortable web — it takes a few days for them to build a cozy nest — I’ll have to get some better shots.
At least when people ask where spiders go in the winter, I have an answer. They go to my house.
The first 3 points are nice but not personally relevant, it’s the last two that are most important too me.
Let’s accept all 5!
Well, I, for one, do have tenure, and am free to pursue my goal of building an army of multi-legged venomous monsters and taking over the planet from my secret lair in an exotic location that no one would ever dream could be the center of an empire.
Livin’ the dream! Bwahahahahahahahaha!
Now I just have to solve the minor problem that my experimental subjects are so tiny.
The bad news: in the future, rich people are dreaming of driving around in fugly brutalist armored trucks from Tesla, lording it over the masses in their slabs of cold gray metal.
The good news: they are easily cracked open to reach the soft, pampered sweet-meats inside.
The @Tesla #Cybertruck 'Armor Glass' demo didn't go exactly as plannedpic.twitter.com/gl88Yhs35b
— Engadget (@engadget) November 22, 2019
Bad demo, Elon, bad. That’s not going to light up the eyes of the wealthy people who can afford to buy your dystopian style.
Although, to be fair, the 500 mile range is a very appealing feature. Our standard long drive is about 150 miles to the Twin Cities, and most electric cars would get us there, but not back.
I’ve got to say, Irina Dumitrescu has the most cynical view of the university system I’ve read. I don’t entirely agree, but I can see where she’s coming from.
Universities sing the song of meritocracy but dance to a different tune. In reality, they will do everything to reward and protect their most destructive, abusive and uncooperative faculty. The more thoroughly such scholars poison departments, programmes and individual lives, the more universities double down to please them.
Universities are even willing to ruin their own reputations and alienate their alumni to protect bullies and abusers. They might think that reputation management demands that such behaviour be swept under the carpet, but they ought to know that the scandals will break eventually, and that the cover-up will make them look worse. Some universities even hire people in the full knowledge of abuse allegations against them, thereby becoming invested in keeping secret their decision to put their students in harm’s way.
On the whole, I’ve found universities to be broadly egalitarian and altruistic, but that the management tends to be more out of touch with our ideals. There’s a body of people at the top who see the educational system as a political tool to get power and influence, and we’re at their mercy.
That said, though, it’s also the case that a population dedicated to teaching and science is acutely vulnerable to individuals who can cut through our ranks like a hot needle through butter. I’ve known people who fit her formula for success…even though they are the minority, I imagine her formula for penetrating academia would work too well.
- Cultivate powerful friends. Gain power over as many publication organs and scholarly bodies as possible and use them to promote your clique.
- Do nothing for anyone unimportant.
- Find a less successful scholar who will fear and admire you. Flatter them into becoming your sidekick and count on them to denigrate your colleagues and defend your reputation.
- Crush the confidence of students with the potential to surpass you. Or sleep with them. Or both.
- Manipulate students and employees into feeling they owe you, long after you no longer have power over them. Make outrageous, unethical promises they will feel bad about accepting or refusing.
- Promote a zero-sum model of success. Anyone else’s gain is your loss. Claim your students’ work as your own and reassign their best ideas to your favourites. Collaboration is for losers.
- Systematically badmouth your colleagues so you can improve your own standing. Shut out the students of rival scholars. Mock those rivals for having less successful students.
- Gaslight and spread misinformation about anyone who stands up to you. Complain about the “rumour mill” and “witch-hunts”. Accuse your critics of jealousy.
- Ask loudly why no one is willing to come forward officially to substantiate the rumours of abuse against you. If someone overcomes their terror, call them crazy.
- Lie brazenly. Accuse others of lying.
Dang. I’ve been doing it all wrong. I think my academic mentors have been setting a bad example for this kind of behavior.
It’s strange, too, that we would attract these kinds of individuals at all. It’s not like we’re competing for huge rewards — this is actually not at all how academia works, sadly.
Maybe not “sadly”…while it would have been nice to buy my mama a house with my first academic appointment, I think it would be terrible to have such an over-inflated sense of worth, and it would have also led to attracting even more toxic personalities.
I’m buried in paperwork today and have scarcely had time to do anything with the spider colony today, but I did make my usual scan through the adult cages for new egg sacs (nothing today — they’re still all lurking, full of insect goo), and looked through the juveniles to see who I needed to promote to a larger container. Here’s one with a beautiful complex pattern of mottling on her abdomen, so I grabbed a photo just prior to moving. She’s not appreciative of being shuttled around and disturbed, so she’s in her standard “leave me alone” pose.
That’s Parasteatoda, by the way. Beautiful plumage! Lovely plumage! She’s just restin’, really she is.
