But wait! We weren’t done!

Mary has got the bug. After our hot morning searching for spiders, I just wanted to kick back, take my shoes off, and cool down for a while. But nooooo…she had to drag me off to another local park to search for more. We visited Green River Park here in Morris, which has a lovely restroom that is thick with cobwebs (and also thick with squadrons of mosquitos waiting to lift off).

I charged into the men’s room, where I found this beautiful Steatoda borealis resting in a corner. I left her there, in case anyone wants to stop by and check her out.

[Read more…]

Fruits of our labors

As promised, we got out this morning to collect spiders. Our destination: West Side Park in Hancock, MN. We got a few. The prime hunting ground was a covered picnic area that had a metal frame with corrugated sheet metal walls that was great for the spiders, because they could hide in the spaces between the metal frame and the corrugated metal…unfortunately, it was bad for spider hunters, because they could hide a little too effectively.

Still, we managed to get a few more of our familiar friends, Parasteatoda:

[Read more…]

Why I haven’t been able to watch The Handmaid’s Tale

I read the book. I think I watched one and a half episodes of the Hulu series before I couldn’t take it anymore — I knew that this wasn’t ever going to get to a happy place. Kammy has it perfectly pegged, though, that it’s feminist torture porn.

Yeah, I said it. Feminist torture porn. Basically we have two full seasons of the men getting away with every sort of physical, emotional and psychological torture imaginable, with June either blankly staring in resignation or with a barely concealed look of rage on her face. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Elisabeth Moss’s ability to convey emotion with just her eyes is amazing, but for fuck sake it shouldn’t take nearly two seasons for one of those asshole Gileads to get stabbed. I literally cheered when Emily stabbed Lydia and kicked her down those stairs. When Emily stomped that dead guy’s nuts after he raped her was another stand up and cheer moment. All I’m saying is that the writers have shown way to much of these shitheads getting away with it and not enough of the women fighting back.

I’m going to have to recommend some counterprogramming, a guilty pleasure: Afterwar, by Lilith Saintcrow. It’s a rough, brutal, post-apocalyptic war story, so not to everyone’s taste, but the twist is that it takes place in a future America, after an all-too-plausible take-over of a large chunk of the country by fundamentalist Christian fanatics who run concentration camps and death camps and enslave or kill anyone of a different ethnicity than white Anglo-Saxon. The premise is very Handmaid’s Tale-ish. This story starts up, though, with the wars to crush the evil neo-Nazis, and the aftermath as the bad guys are hunted down and their regime demolished. Everyone suffers, and it’s not a happy story either, but at least the right-wing fanatics suffer more.

It’s all about people fighting back, so it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy for those of us watching the current ascendancy of scumbags.

Friday Fun!

What are you doing for fun this weekend? This morning, the students and I are going out on a collecting trip — we’re going to drive outside of our survey area and just go nuts, prowling around bushes and buildings and parks, looking for novel spider species we hadn’t seen before, and scooping up all the P. tep we encounter to fill up our colony. We’ve got ten healthy egg sacs maturing in the incubator and a swarm of spiderlings to care for, but I’m a little bit paranoid because Winter Is Coming and I know the current bounty of diversity is going to die off fast. I also want to avoid last winter’s problem of a) the male shortage, and b) excessive inbreeding.

Besides, spiders are neat-o, right?

A recommendation: the people who made iNaturalist, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, have come out with a new app for your smartphone, Seek. It’s amazing. Point your phone camera at a tree, a leaf, an insect, anything, and it scans the live image and homes in on a species ID. It’s the most magical thing ever since my grad school days when I’d go for walks with Jim Kezer, an old-school herpetologist, who could give you the Latin binomial for any organism you showed him.

Try it, you’ll like it. It’s not quite as folksy and fun as Jim Kezer was, but it’s handy.

Anyway, we’re going to be out and about in the local small towns and parks, photographing and collecting spiders this morning. I hope your plans are as exciting.

HBO chose wisely

Two white guys, Benioff and Weiss, were the show-runners for Game of Thrones, and they made a total botch of the last season because they were in such a rush to move on to brand new exciting projects, which I can understand…GoT really went on forever, and the author of that series was slowly, interminably expanding the books to a point they’re getting kind of unreadable.

Unfortunately, the HBO show they were eager to do was Confederate, an alternate-history series in which they postulate a victorious Confederacy and the aftermath. The alt-right good ol’ boys were salivating over that, the rest of us were cringing, and everyone was wondering if the two guys who recklessly crashed HBO’s biggest cash cow had adequate sensitivity and nuance to handle that kind of story.

The answer is “no”. HBO has killed the project. Good.

I like these alternative alternative history suggestions, though.

This kind of story, even when well-meaning, is always just very meh, because in the end, we may live in a society in which slavery is illegal, but the ramifications of slavery are still ever present in modern life. Why not create an alternative universe where the Reformation was allowed to be tough on the South and allowed Black citizens to have more legal protections so they could govern themselves fully? Why not a story where chattel slavery never happened? Why do we need to bring up the Confederacy and open up a bag of worms that this country has never been comfortable enough to pick through?

Why hire a couple of hacks to do it no matter how good the idea is?

Our own little basket of atheist deplorables

Peter Boghossian has a new book out. I can guarantee I won’t be reading it if the cover contains blurbs from these people:

“If these people like this book, you should run screaming from its presence. Or chant ‘Klaatu Barada Necktie’ at it.”

Except maybe Sapolsky. What is he doing in that list? Don’t tell me he’s been sucked into the Intellectual Dork Vortex, too!

Speaking of Boghossian, the Portland State IRB has found him guilty, guilty, guilty of violating their guidelines. He’s now prohibited from doing any research with human subjects, or even applying for research grants, until he undergoes remedial ethics training.

That’s some letter he’s proudly waving around. It’s a gigantic black mark on his record that he’s advertising — if some person I didn’t know applied for a job at my university that included a university condemnation of their propriety and ethics, and prohibited them from applying for grant funding, that application would be round-filed so fast it would leave scorch marks as it exited the filing cabinet. That’s a kiss of death.

Wingnut welfare to the rescue! I’m sure a conservative think tank will consider that a beauty mark rather than a blemish. Maybe Prager U will want him?

Ian Murphy has died

I didn’t know him personally (which may have been for the best), but I followed his work. He did what a satirist is supposed to do, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and he was especially expert at the latter. Now Murphy has died.

Friends and colleagues of journalist and satirist Ian Murphy, former editor of the recently revived Buffalo Beast, an alternative online news site in Buffalo, NY, report that Murphy has died. Murphy passed away on July 17, 2019, Buffalo Beast staff said. He was 40 years old. The cause of death has not been confirmed.

In life, he was a professional weirdo.

Ian Murphy is the editor of The BEAST (buffalobeast.com), a half-satirical news and opinion website dedicated to militant rationalism and quasi-journalistic hijinks, which was founded in 2002 as a Buffalo, NY biweekly rag by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Murphy is best known for prank calling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wherein he posed as arch-libertarian moneybags David Koch. He’s also infiltrated the grand opening of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” by posing as a Christian reporter afflicted with “Asperger’s Syndrome by proxy,” gone undercover in the Church of Scientology while on hallucinogens, canoed to Canada to expose ineffective and profit-driven post-9/11 border security, and proudly received hundreds of death threats. In the spring of 2011, Murphy ran as the Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to fill the seat vacated by disgraced “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee. While reaping a pathetic one percent of the vote, Murphy nonetheless scored a comedic victory, and national press, for creating a scathing parody of his Republican opponent’s website. Murphy has also been published by Alternet, Crooks & Liars, The Daily Beast, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive. And as of this writing, Murphy is standing trial for “disruption of a religious service” with a dildo. In reality, he was arrested for filming a police officer while covering a National Organization for Marriage anti-gay marriage rally. So if he doesn’t show up, he’s probably in jail.

He was the gonzo commentator for our era, and now he’s gone. He was a better reporter than the sad fumbledums working for the 24 hour news networks, that’s for sure — we’d be living in a better world if he’d been hired to replace Chris Cilliza. Actually, we’d be better off if the corpse of Ian Murphy replaced Cilliza — it’s not too late!