There’s an American fetish for “businessmen” and “entrepreneurs” that I can’t quite understand. I’ve never been particularly impressed by “businessmen”; they generally seem to have a very narrow perspective on the world, but somehow, they’re supposed to be our ideal. And sometimes, they can be unbelievably stupid in service to their money-making goals.

I don’t expect that man to have taken a biology course, but has he ever actually talked to a woman?

To me, Mike Lindell is the apotheosis of the American businessman.

First Dog on the Moon does adequately capture our current sense of the state of the pandemic, although saying “10,000 dead” is so quaint — but then, it’s an Australian comic. American policy has been so consistently stupid that we have over 1,000,000 dead here. Also, I don’t know what a “bbg*” is, someone will have to explain it to me.

The fourth panel hits home, too.

Do you know someone who has had COVID? Was it you? I was at a rare bbg* on the weekend with a bunch of scientists and only two of them had ever had COVID. WHY? Because they were animal scientists. They are only ever at home or in the bush pointing their fiendish science machines at unsuspecting furry animals or birds and then they go back home again. No COVID.

I’ve never had COVID. WHY? Because am only ever at home or in the field or in the lab pointing fiendish science machines at unsuspecting spiders. I’ve been scrupulous about social distancing and masking everywhere I go, I’ve gotten 4 vaccine shots, and while I had to teach a mob of disease vectors, they all had to wear masks and spread out (former university policy), and I took measures to move as much of my courses online as possible. That’s why.

That was at some cost, too. My big pre-pandemic project was to do community outreach and get a baseline spider population count in homes around here…well, that got monkey-wrenched hard by the disease so I’ve been focused on just the spiders, forget the plague carriers. And oh, man, all the work involved in transforming my classes, without compensation other than not getting sick!

Now all those protective measures have been torn down by my university, and I feel like this is the year they’re going to reward me for 22 years of service with a potentially deadly disease. They’ll be saving on pension expenses, at least.

This is true.

A new Minnesota law lets people 21 and over buy and consume food and beverages with a small amount of hemp-derived THC, but some legislators might not have fully understood the bill before passing it.

The new law says food and beverages cannot contain more than 5 milligrams of hemp-derived THC per serving and no more than 50 milligrams per package.

Although marijuana-derived THC is still illegal in Minnesota, THC derived from hemp is chemically the same. Marijuana and hemp come from the same cannabis plant, though the plants are bred differently, with marijuana plants high in THC and hemp plants very low in THC.

THC, or delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical that causes the high of marijuana.

They didn’t mean to. They didn’t understand the law they were voting on.

Minnesota state Sen. Jim Abeler, a Republican from Anoka, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune he did not realize this law would allow THC-infused edibles of any kind and thought it would only apply to delta-8 THC products.

No takesie-backsies!

I know everyone is acting as if it’s won and done, but it isn’t.

The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

It’s annoying how the people who actually know the science are saying one thing, while politics is pretending the opposite.

“This pandemic is changing, but it’s not over,” Tedros said this week during a press briefing. He said the ability to track COVID-19’s genetic evolution was “under threat” as countries relaxed surveillance and genetic sequencing efforts, warning that would make it more difficult to catch emerging and potentially dangerous new variants.

Here’s a fun one. I want to know what reasonable precautions I can take in my classes, but here’s how my university dodges the issue:

So sure, you can ask your students and colleagues to take reasonable action to protect you and each other, but they are allowed to ignore you, and you will respect their decision to endanger everyone’s health.

Great. This is going to be the year I get COVID. Hope I don’t die!

Awww. Mythicist Milwaukee got their Twitter account suspended, so they’re trying to take legal action to get reinstated. They’ve start a fundraiser that allows…well, I’ll let Thomas Smith explain it.

I like the Pray Now button. If I were to visit that site (I won’t), I’d click the Pray Now button for them.

By the way, as someone who has had to deal with lawyers before, a $2500 goal is paltry.

If I asked you to think of a masked comic book hero, the alter ego of a wealthy multimillionaire, who wore a costume chosen to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, and who had a battery of gadgets he used to foil crime, who would you think of? Batman? WRONG! It’s…the SPIDER, Master of Men!

Yeah, I never heard of him either.

That’s rather interesting, actually, because he was a phenomenally popular character in pulp novels of the 1930s and later. He was in several movie serials, and published in multiple novels over the decades. Apparently he was revived for some comic book series in the 1990s and 2000s, too. Before there were superheroes with magic powers, there was a collection of mysterious detectives in the popular literature — the Shadow, the Green Hornet, Doc Savage, and of course, the Spider — who were all eventually eaten by the Bat who now dominates comic books and movies.

The only thing that seems to distinguish the Spider from the Batman is that the Spider relied on the two pistols he was always running around with, and which he used to straight-out murder his foes. I wonder if the Batman’s evolutionary success, since he was always portrayed as avoiding killing, was a product of Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code Authority, which made publishers leery of excessive violence? The gunslinger heroes seem to have faded away, to be replaced with overpowered superheroes who don’t carry guns, but can raze whole city blocks with a punch. Maybe the Spider needs a Zack Snyder movie? (No, he does not. No one deserves that.)

Here’s a video with some clips from the old Spider serials.

I’m a sucker for that old pulp fiction graphic style, but I have zero interest in watching any of the old serials or reading the pulp novels of the time, and I’m not going to mourn the absence of the Spider from modern movies. What I find interesting is that this one successful, popular franchise could so thoroughly disappear over time, and not even occupy any space in my memory. It gives me hope for the future, it does. I can look at the current glut of comic book movies and tell myself that this too shall pass.

Or that they’ll be replaced with a different glut of franchised fantasies.

It characterized this guy perfectly. He’s even bragging about its accuracy!

Nobody tell him. Not that I think he’d understand your explanation anyway.