Another addition to my YouTube schedule: Friday night is play time. I’m going to try streaming No Man’s Sky, assuming I can get my streaming software to cooperate.

There are so many people playing this game now that it’ll be hard to add anything new by being yet another streamer, but I’ll try to give some informed biological commentary on the algorithmically generated planets. I can tell you in advance that they have limited success…but it’ll be fun anyway, right?

Oh, also — I’ll plan on doing some creationist bashing on Sunday mornings at 6am my time, look for that announcement later. I’m trying to accommodate all those people in distant time zones, too!

I did something yesterday to throw my back out — I’m 63, which means I probably did something radical like sneeze. Anyway, I’m sitting here trying not to move a millimeter that way or twist this other way, which would send spasms rippling up my spine, and I think I’ll be immobile most of the day…except that I’m about to get up and walk to the medicine cabinet for some painkillers, trying not to scream or die, and then come back to my chair and just stop for a while.

Fortunately, my self-imposed agenda for the day is to hammer out a couple of syllabi and get them posted to our CMS, Canvas. It’s just fingers that need to work, and so far they seem OK. Classes start up again in 9 days.

Time to gently ease myself out of this chair and gingerly shuffle to the next room. If you hear a shrieking howl out of the upper midwest, I didn’t make it.

This was a new phenomenon to me. Walking into work today, everything was covered with these long whiskers of ice, typically close to 2cm long.

We’ve stayed below freezing for the last few days, and also we’ve had freezing fog every morning, which I presume feeds some peculiar crystallization process. It looks cool, anyway.

This afternoon when I was walking home I saw that they hadn’t melted, but were gradually falling off the trees as a very gentle snow.

Shortly, I have to take off on my regular biweekly foraging trip — it’s a couple hours of traveling that the pandemic adds to my load.

It’s probably a good thing today, though, because doomscrolling through news of the shambles the USA has become is not doing me any good.

Some people are just obsessed. There’s one who goes on sporadic binges of email — I’m calling him Bang, because of his fondness for exclamation points, but I’ll spare you his real name. He apparently had some time off for New Year’s and chose to send me a string of messages. These are all from 3 days around New Year’s Eve.

Ahmad Al-Qloushi, Steven Hinkle, Jonathan Bean and Sukhmani Singh Khalsa
The four individuals above were targeted by the leftist censors and thought police that you claim don’t exist. I suggest you look them up. Maybe you already have! I doubt you’ll acknowledge them though! You ignored the ordeal of Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Hadley when it was brought up to you by his brother on Twitter, falsely accusing them of lying! It just like how Ray Comfort ignores the evidence for evolution when it is presented to him!

Nope, sorry, I don’t know any of those people, and I’m not really interested in looking them up, especially after seeing the names of all the other people he thinks are just ducky.

The Only Bigot is you, asshole!
How dare you call Ben Shapiro and David French bigots PZ! After you called Michael Nugent the Irish Wanker! After you claimed that conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals were all dishonest frauds, said that they didn’t think but clung to prejudices and demanded people accept them! After you said falsely that Regressive left was created by rightwingers who were all terrible! Maajid Nawaz, a liberal Muslim invented the term Skunkwipe! After you slimed Sam Harris as a right wing neocnservative, and said such people should be removed from the atheist movement!
After you banned a man for criticizing commenters that used the words Honkey, Hetero, and Straighty Mcstraighterson!

Wait, what? I had to look that one up, and found a thread where I did ban someone…for consistently defending racists. Someone hasn’t changed.

It’s a thread from 2013. He’s been stewing over this for over 7 years.

Tiredness
I’m tired of you P.Z you asshat! I’m tired of your lies, misrepresentation, defamation, Blancophobia, Ameriphobia, Androphobia, violent statements, anti-police hatred, anti-capitalist claptrap, and especially you thinking you can disqualify someone from the atheist movement because their politics don’t match yours. I’m also sick of you ignoring facts that contradict your leftist worldview. Like that people who challenge leftist orthodoxy in universities are persecuted. Peter Ridd, Brett Weinstein, James Damore, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bruce Giley, and many others have suffered because of communist, socialist, thought policemen like you! I’m sorry I ever liked you PZ! You’re not tired of me, if your were you wouldn’t keep mentioning me on your site! Why haven’t you posted any of my other emails on Pharyngula! That one you listed in September 2020 was posted ages ago, and I’ve sent many more! Including a response to you and the commenters who insulted me when you first posted about me! That by the way wasn’t even the first one I sent you! The first I sent was about Sam Harris and how he wasn’t right wing, or a neoconservative, that Greenwald didn’t dismantle him, that he responded to Greenwald’s screed, and that you had no right to deceive who could and couldn’t be apart of the atheist movement. Are you afraid of my criticism, you Skunkwipe?!

Gosh, he used to like me? I’m blushing.

Yes, I mentioned him and his incessant, over-the-top ranting emails once before. That doesn’t mean I “keep mentioning” him — every thread about conservative racists isn’t actually about Bang. Yes, he does send a lot of angry email, as he admits, it’s just that it gets filed in spam and I only notice every once in a while.

If Bang is tired of me, there’s an easy solution: stop reading my stuff. I’m actually easy to avoid.

Defamation= Lawsuit

If you ever defame me, PZ,nthe way you’ve defamed Harris, Condell, Luciano, Knight, Mehta, Coyne, Ali, Mason, Dawkins, Hitchens, Ngo, Saad, and numerous others, I will sue you so bad that you’re grandchildren are going to need lawyers!

It’s hard to defame an anonymous email stalker, but I’m willing to try.

Your Awfulnes
PZ you defend Antifa’s assault on Andy Ngo, you misrepresent Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, you call Michael Nugent an Irish wanker and accuse him of defending a haven for rapists, you call for a revolution to erase the stain of America, you allow commenters to use the words honkey, hetero, whitey, and mcstraighterson, you brand all police officers as bigots, you brand all conservatives as dishonest frauds who don’t think, but cling to prejudices and demand people accept them, you slander Steven Pinker as alt-right and a right-wing shitweasel, and you have the audacity to call Smalley and Silverman horrible! Fuck you, modern-day Caiaphas!

Bang does have a talent for picking the worst. I mean, really, have you seen what Silverman has been up to for the last few years? Yeesh, after seeing the names of all the people he’s defending, I’m so glad to see I’m definitely on the opposite side of that rift.

Caiaphas, though? I’m not a high priest of anything, I have no power or influence — I’m just a guy who writes words on a blog — and I’d be curious to know who he thinks the modern day Christ I’m scheming to have murdered might be. It can’t be Bang himself, because I already crushed him and ground him into the dirt of ignominy, way back in 2013, and all he can do now is wail impotently, with lots of exclamation points.

So now I’ve got a Bang to go with my Comma. I need to collect all the punctuation! I want lots of angry, upset email from Period, and Semicolon, and Mdash, and Ellipsis…

The Nashville suicide bomber may have had some peculiar motivations.

NBC News reported Wednesday that investigators have obtained evidence that Anthony Quinn Warner, who died in the explosion, may have subscribed to a conspiracy theory that many of the world’s most powerful figures, from Barack Obama to the late Bob Hope, are actually evil, lizard-like extraterrestrials in disguise. Officials told NBC News that investigators, who have been questioning friends and acquaintances and searching for clues of a possible motive for the bombing, have become aware of statements Warner made about the lizard people conspiracy theory — though it wasn’t immediately clear what those statements were. Authorities also reported that Warner made statements to others about hunting possible aliens during previous camping trips he took in his RV.

The so-called lizard people conspiracy theory has taken a back seat to some of the newer and more widely publicized baseless beliefs that have come to dominate the conspiracy landscape in recent years. But in 2013, a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling found that 12 million Americans believed that the country was run by lizard people in suits.

I’m only going to believe in the lizard people if it turns out that there are 12 million of them, and they’re not the “world’s most powerful figures”. That’s a rumor contrived to distract us from who the lizard people really are.