Is Primeval worth watching?

I tried watching this old BBC series with an interesting premise: strange, random anomalies keep popping up around Great Britain, providing temporary two-way passages to and from the distant past. It’s a great set up for a monster-of-the-week series, as ancient creatures pop up and terrify the locals and give the scientist protagonists opportunities to travel to the past. I like the idea!

But then, in the very first episode, Cutter, who is searching for his wife lost in the past, finds a human skeleton in the dirt, he quickly runs his fingers over the rib cage, and announces, “It’s not her. It’s a male.” Say what? Do the writers have the bad idea that men and women differ in the number of ribs? That would be embarrassingly bad.

I braved the second episode, which features giant ancient spiders! Way to sidle past my doubts, writers. These spiders have massive chelicerae which seem to be orthognathous, much like those found in tarantulas (the Aranea are labidognathous, and can pinch their pointy little fangs together.) Some people are bitten and envenomed, and some dork suggests that they can’t be spiders, they must be scorpions, which is silly, since scorpions have relative small chelicerae. I had to stop there, because the credibility of the scientific contributions of the writing team is about nil at this point.

For those of you familiar with the show, is it worth it for me to continue? I’m here for relaxing entertainment, not exercising my arm shaking my fist at the TV.

Rich enough to own history

If you thought Vikings were voracious plunderers, you haven’t compared them to 21st century billionaires. Apparently the thing to do when you’ve acquired a few billion dollars is to wall off historic sites for your own personal pleasure.

I know nothing about James Dyson other than that he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman, but I guess that’s a lucrative business, and he’s raked in a whole lot of money, so off he goes to buy an estate that includes an old castle and the ruins of an abbey, which is now his, never mind that it is a site that has been populated since at least the 6th century. It’s his, damn it, and you can stay off of it.

Templemichael Church and Castle

From the state of it, he’s not living there or holding parties in it — he has a grand manor nearby for that. I once made a trip all around Ireland, Dublin to Cork to Galway to Belfast and back again, and I loved stopping off at old ruins and soaking in the history. I don’t specifically remember stopping in Waterford, but I know my route passed through it. I may have left quickly, repelled by all the stinky billionaires moving in (Mark Zuckerberg bought a place near there, which would have made the stench quite thick). By what right does a man, and an English man at that, have the privilege to lock up a chunk of Irish history?

Well, money, I guess. The locals are not happy about this, but it won’t bother Master James, he wasn’t going to invite them to his house for a ball, anyway. He can just dance with Master Mark.

This is one of those weeks

I’m teaching cell biology, but the first thing I have to do is hammer them over the head with…chemistry. They typically haven’t realized yet that biology isn’t all butterflies and cat dissections, it’s also all built on math and chemistry, and we have to get the students thinking quantitative. Today I’m lecturing on small molecules — ions in solution, pH, redox reactions, chemical bonds — and lab is all dilutions and concentrations and basic algebra.

It’s not fun for me, either, but we’ll never get to the fun stuff without it. I’ve been cramming general chemistry all weekend, because I have to know it all better than the students.

Another important matter this week is that I have to get a haircut after a long summer of flowing locks. I’m trying to decide if I should bring back an old style. Here’s what I looked like in the mid-1960s.*

back row: the second wave of cousins, Tim Smith, my brother Jim, Matt Sones.
Front row: first wave cousins, Don Smith, me, Kelly Sones.

That haircut was easy to maintain, and cheap to cut — my mom would just stroke her electric hair clippers over my head, and it would be done. I don’t think I look anything like me now, just a homely, shaggy old man.

I was no prize to begin with, and it’s not fair that I got homelier over time.

I think teaching chemistry over and over aged me. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

*P.S. Only Matt and I are still alive. I should be grateful I’m still here, no matter how ugly I get.

Friday Night at the Movies

Last night, I watched Coyote vs. Acme. Of course it was good! The plot was simple, the nostalgia was elevated, the cartoons were familiar, and violence was absurd and straight out of the 1950s. Take your kids, they’ll have a grand time! Although, to be fair, if you don’t have kids, you might want to stay home, unless you’re a real fan of Warner Bros. animation, or you just love to see anvils falling on characters’ heads.

My curse is that I couldn’t watch it without wondering what the world would be like if we had to share it with colorful, invulnerable characters who could build destructive weapons that could wreak horrendous devastation on humans and our property, but which could do them no lasting harm. The answer was clear: they’d become CEOs of corporations and destroy us all.

Bonus: I volunteered as projectionist for the 7:00 show, but no one volunteered for the 9:00 movie, so I stayed to cover that one, too. It was light work, since only two people showed up for Insidious: Out of the Further. I sold them their tickets and a few concessions, but then I could just sit in the theater and watch the whole thing, undisturbed.

It was awful. I have never liked the genre of supernatural horror; even in the long ago times, I detested The Exorcist and didn’t find it at all scary, just silly. The problem with these movies is that the screenwriters have no constraints, they can just invent random abilities and constraints, and the whole point is to generate “spooky” situations for the human protagonists. This whole movie was a couple of wide-eyed frightened people scuttling through a dark haunted house with flashlights — so bad lighting, an occasional ghost popping up for a jump scare, and an arbitrary series of hoops the good guys had to jump through to banish the ghosts. It was stupid. And this was the sixth movie in the franchise! I walked out.

I found the previews far more entertaining, which isn’t saying much. Crawlers is coming out later this fall!

OK, normal, real spiders become threat because of abnormal, unreal behavior. I’ll probably watch it. It’s fun to watch stupid people freak out over a situation I’d probably find charming.

Another movie coming out is Spider Island. It’s the same premise as Crawlers, or Arachnophobia, for that matter. I kind of suspect that Arachnophobia would be far superior.

The main feature of this movie is that it is set on a tropical island resort, so we’re going to get lots of spiders with pretty girls in bikinis. It’s not a combination that appeals to me, so I’ll probably skip it unless it’s shown right in front of my face.

If only we could get rid of all the anti-immigrationists so easily

Milo, looking glum

I’m torn. I think the government has gone way overboard on deportations — let the people pursue happiness! — but yeesh, it’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

Far-right political commentator and deportation advocate Milo Yiannopoulos is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody facing a final order of removal, according to U.S. officials and agency records.

Yiannopoulos, who is British, was apprehended in the New Orleans area and is being held in a Louisiana ICE holding facility, the U.S. officials said. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Yiannopoulos came to the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

I was feeling a twinge of sympathy, both because I hate ICE and because he sure looks down in the dumps in his mugshot, but then, I was served with some quotes…

California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally, he posted on social media in June 2025.

Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty, he wrote in September 2025.

There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering, he wrote in June 2025. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.

Yeah, throw his ass out of the country.

Quality entertainment with TNT and exploding cigars

I am working the Morris Theater tonight, and we are showing…

I’ve been looking forward to this, but at the same time I am being reminded that my childhood was filled with horrific cartoon violence — and we laughed and laughed. Was my mind poisoned by Warner Brothers?

I also remember the great Saturday morning tragedy, as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and the whole gang were gradually phased out, replaced by the insipid ersatz sit-com bullshit of Hanna-Barbera. If there is a sequel to Coyote vs. Acme, I’d like it to be a war movie where Acme-fueled Warner Bros. protagonists demolish the Flintstones and the other cheaply animated dreck dribbling out of Hanna-Barbera.

It’s another Incitatus moment

The Roman emperor Caligula threatened to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul. Historians agree he didn’t actually accomplish that, it was more of a demeaning joke against the aristocracy and a way to brag about his power, but still…that’s one of the many stupid, hateful things we remember him for. Caligula has not fared well in history. Historians can argue down to this day that Caligula was the worst Roman emperor of all time, for his capriciousness, his venality, his narcissism, his greed, his ineffectiveness as a leader.

Does that sound familiar?

At least Trump has actually done the thing he claimed he was going to do: he has signed an Executive Order declaring that Lake Ontario is to be renamed Lake America.

resident Donald Trump on Thursday signed an ‌Executive Order instructing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” ​

The change is set to take effect immediately, he said. Trump earlier in the week had floated the idea of a new moniker for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

It is absurd. Not only is it not going to happen, but it also highlights the fact that Executive Orders as a tool for governing have been corrupted and are totally useless. No one except brain-dead MAGA clowns are going to call it “Lake America”.

“The name is more than 400 years old, pre-dating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” said Carney on Thursday. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

Insisting that Canadians are aware of the “naming reality,” Carney rejected Trump’s directive for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has also rejected the whole idea.

History and the world are going to be laughing at our idiot president for a long time to come. You might say that at least he hasn’t put a horse in the Senate, but I think a lot of the candidates he has endorsed, and all of the nitwits in his cabinet, would serve us better if they were horses. Put Burgum in harness and run him in the Kentucky Derby, he’d be more useful there than as Secretary of the Interior.

It’s over, Mike

The Mike Lindell saga in Minnesota is over. He had been throwing his familiar temper tantrum over losing the primary election, which is his right, and it was also his right to demand a recount, if he was willing to pay for it.

He was not willing to pay for it.

Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile.

Therefore, it is settled: Lindell lost. The election for governor in November will be between Demuth and Klobuchar. Lindell can go cry into his pillows.