I’m too old for a naked Vampirella now

Way back in 1975, when I was a college freshman, Ian and Betty Ballantine visited my university to give a talk about publishing fantasy and science fiction. In particular, they were there to promote Betty’s latest project, The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. This was catnip to a young nerd who was already playing Dungeons & Dragons, so of course I attended. So did two other people. It was embarrassingly poorly attended.

To my advantage, though — she just gave out pages from the book, and poster-sized prints of the art from the book, so we got all this wall art for our rooms, in addition to stories about Frazetta and the publishing industry. I had a poster of Vampirella!

I lost my nerve and didn’t tack it up in my dorm room — it was just a little too wild and racy.

And now I learn that Frazetta was fond of reworking his paintings, even after he’d sold them for pulp magazine covers, and that he’d updated Vampirella. The repainted version is up for auction now, but I’m not putting in a bid, and I wouldn’t hang this one on my wall, either. The revision involved completely removing her skimpy red costume, and I’ve never considered redecorating my house with sultry naked vampire paintings.

Save us from the glut of ugly statuary

Donald Trump has a new stupid, pointless plan for Washington DC: he wants to put up a statue to Christopher Columbus. He’s not very bright, so he thinks that pandering to an ethnic group is how you convince them to favor Republicans. Only stupid Italian-Americans will fall for it.

President Donald Trump is planning to install a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds, according to three people with knowledge of the pending move, in his latest effort to remake the presidential campus and celebrate the famed and controversial explorer.

The statue is set to be located on the south side of the grounds, by E Street and north of the Ellipse, two of the people said, although they cautioned that plans could change. The three people spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on private discussions. The piece is a reconstruction of a statue unveiled in Baltimore by then-President Ronald Reagan and dumped in the city’s harbor by protesters in 2020 as a racial reckoning swept the country.

Great. Another lump of rock to dump in the Potomac in a few years. It does kind of suit this administration.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

But of course they would consider an imperialist, murderous slaver who maimed and killed the people of a small Caribbean island to be a hero.

But there’s more! A group of cryptocurrency assholes commissioned an 18 foot tall bronze statue of Donald Trump for the launch of another memecoin.

He was put in touch by phone with a group of 16 cryptocurrency entrepreneurs — one in Canada, the others mostly in the United States — who wanted to create a giant bronze Trump commemorating his survival of the assassination attempt at Butler.

“It was a turning point in world history,” Stockton told The Times in 2025. “It would have been a full-blown civil war.” They wanted to capture “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto”, he said.

Their knowledge of history is on par with their aesthetic taste.

Oh, wait. That’s not good enough. It had to be gilded.

It’s possibly the most Trumpian thing ever, but there’s one additional detail. The statue is currently stored in the creator’s workshop, because the people who commissioned it haven’t paid for it.

He is still owed $91,200, Cottrill said. And the giant Trump is staying with him until he gets it. He added: “I can’t trust them to pay me otherwise.”

Now that is definitely the most Trumpian thing ever.

I don’t know where it will end up, but it’s just going to end up in a nearby river or harbor eventually.

Upper Midwest, Unite!

Maybe you aren’t aware of our local biases, but Minnesotans do look down a bit on Wisconsinites (could the reverse also be true? Unthinkable). And then I hear that there have been anti-ICE protests in Green Bay, and that that’s where Alex Pretti was from, and suddenly I feel fellowship coming on.

Never thought I’d fight side by side with a cheesehead
How about with a fellow anti-fascist?
Aye, I could do that

That’s a relief, especially since my daughter has become a Wisconsonite. I can live with that.

A seismic change

Today has been a day full of meetings (with another to come tonight!) and now I’m tired. One of the meetings gave me mixed feelings: a division meeting of all the science faculty to give our final approval of a decision to get rid of our geology discipline.

OK, that’s overly dramatic. We’re not actually getting rid of any of the geology classes, or any of the geology faculty, we just won’t be giving out geology degrees, and the existing structure of the discipline is getting folded into our Environmental Science program. Nothing will be lost, it’s more of an administrative shift, and apparently this is a common kind of change at many universities, but I still feel like it’s a historical break. Before there was a biology, there was geology, and geology was one of the core research fields in natural history. It’s being absorbed into a broader academic discipline, which is OK, I guess, but as an old guy I feel like something is being lost.

I wonder what will happen to biology in a few decades…what grander concept will expand to encompass my little domain?

Don’t tell me physics.

“renovations”

Donald Trump has announced that he is closing the Kennedy Center — pardon me, the Trump Kennedy Center — for two years starting this July. This is for necessary renovations, he says. He also says he’s awaiting approval from the board.

The president said that this would take effect July 4, pending approval of the board, a group that he has appointed and made himself the chairman of.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction that on July 5, he will start “renovating” with backhoes and bulldozers, that he will proceed with no plans for what renovations will be done other than a vague demand for more gold-plated geegaws, and further, that no one in congress will raise a hand in protest, and the laws regulating historical buildings in Washington DC will be ignored.

Another prediction: the building doesn’t actually need major renovations, but that this demolition will occur solely because artists around the world are cancelling engagements at anything with the Trump name on it, and he finds this embarrassing.

He really is determined to leave his mark on the country, even if it is only a mark of shame.

Why is conservative music so awful?

The Super Bowl is coming up! This weekend, I think, but I haven’t been paying much attention.

I don’t like football, and I don’t think I’ve ever watched it for the sports. I’ve tuned in to the half-time show a few times, and it’s always disappointing — there’s a musical act drowning in a sea of ridiculous commercials, and from what little I’ve seen of broadcast television, a lot of those ads will be for gambling services. No thank you, I’m well informed on how probability works. The musical act this time around is Bad Bunny, and I’ve liked what I’ve heard of his music, but not enough to wade through all the Super Crap.

But Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, so some people are furious that he’s featured on an all-American event — these are the same people so ignorant that they don’t realize that Puerto Rico is American. Apparently, we’ll have some counterprogramming available, from TPUSA, an anti-American white Christian nationalist organization.

Conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA has announced Kid Rock will headline its counterprogrammed halftime show, dubbed “The All-American Halftime Show,” when Bad Bunny takes the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show stage on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Along with Kid Rock, The “one-of-a-kind streaming event,” which will celebrate “American faith, family, and freedom,” will feature performances from “Bottoms Up” singer Brantley Gilbert, “I Drive Your Truck” singer Lee Brice, and “I Hope” singer Gabby Barret, according to a press release.

Oh god. That sounds awful. Couldn’t they sign up Lee Greenwood, even? They’re all country-western singers, my least favorite music genre, I’ve never even heard of the songs they mentioned, and Kid Rock is a washed-up hack. Television is going to be more of a dead wasteland to me on Sunday than it usually is.

Hey, I’m a washed-up hack, too — maybe I should schedule a livestream for that hour. I promise I won’t try to sing.

I’m in the Epstein files??!?

I decided to search for my name in the Epstein files, expecting nothing, and I’m mentioned in a couple of email messages. The two mentions are kind of pathetic. I was briefly included in one of John Brockman’s email list along with a swarm of other people, so when he wrote to Epstein, my name got incidentally dragged in. Nothing specific. No flights to sex islands. No sexcapades. I was just briefly one of the “cool kids”.

Very briefly. For a short time, I was regularly getting missives from various members of the new atheists and the scientific publishing industry, which was nice to be part of a community (although it also left me uneasy). Then, suddenly, they stopped. I was suddenly removed from the list with no fanfare, no announcement, not even a courtesy warning…I think it’s because I criticized Richard Dawkins.

It turns out the “cool kids club” is fragile and doesn’t allow much introspection.

Wheee, more Epstein revelations

A couple more letters emerge out of the files, these all involve John Brockman. Brockman was the king of scientific publishing; I believe he was the agent for all of Richard Dawkins’ books, and he was the agent for my one book, he was Lawrence Krauss’s agent, etc.\. If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal. He had a lot of clout, clout that was invisible to most people.

So when a “rather nasty young woman” criticized Richard Dawkins, he went crying to John Brockman.

> From: Richard Dawkins < [ A
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman < [
> Subject: Lawrence
>
> John
–
> 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
>
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists- everywhere/
>
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
>
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard

Apparently, Brockman had been making up excuses for Epstein to his clients, and then those clients were echoing those excuses to justify their own ugly behavior. I have no idea what Dawkins thought Brockman could do to help. It was just an incestuous little clique.

This next one is very much inside baseball. I was on Scienceblogs, along with a lot of other very good people, which was founded by Adam Bly, who was also connected to Brockman. Bly got a lot of money from somewhere, I don’t know where, enough to launch a blog networks and a print magazine, but this email suggests to me that one of his sources was Jeffrey Epstein. Now I feel tainted.

The “PR crisis” he’s talking about was PepsiGate. We were all scientists and journalists at ScienceBlogs, except that Bly had suddenly brought a new blog into the network, a great big corporate advertisement for Pepsi disguised as a science blog. It’s true, it was a crisis: several people people yeeted right out of the network, citing ethical issues, and even more of us were yelling at Bly that this was wrong, you can’t do that, it’s blurring the boundary between objective science and shilling for a corporation. It was really, really ugly, and Bly just seemed oblivious to our concerns. (Note also: those of you who remember this event know that it’s also where another blog, ERV, went histrionically pro-Pepsi and lurched into the manosphere. It was a weird time.)

Bly was consulting a convicted pedophile during the whole episode. I suspect said pedophile had provided some degree of seed money for the science magazine, Seed.

To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail com]
From: Adam Bly
Sent: Thur 7/812010 3:18:24 AM
Subject: Thurs.
I’m dealing with a PR crisis at ScienceBlogs (relating to a customer, PepsiCo) and haven’t left my office all day. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like Yet so wanted to give you a heads up in case I’m unable to leave the office again tomorrow.

I have copies of every issue of Seed stored in my house. I guess I won’t feel bad about throwing out the clutter at last.