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!

The conspiracy theories will bloom spectacularly

Uh-oh. How did this happen?

Jeffrey Epstein, the financier facing charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls, was found unconscious in a Manhattan jail cell with injuries to his neck, US media reported late on Wednesday, citing unidentified sources.

Epstein was found by guards sprawled on the floor of his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Wednesday, it was reported.

The billionaire financier was taken to hospital, according to the New York Post, but it was unclear where he was taken or what his condition was. It was not clear how he suffered his injuries.

That’s a lot of unclear stuff for a guy who has a lot of enemies, who is suspected of possibly blackmailing people, and has a lot of powerful people terrified about what he might say. At least one major bank, Deutsche Bank, is scrambling to cover up their connections to his money.

I want him to live because I want him to talk, some people might want him dead because they don’t want him to talk. Or maybe it’s sunk into Epstein’s mind that his lifestyle has met its end and he’ll never go back to raping schoolgirls.

Space spiders, prepare to land and conquer the planet

You know that batch of spiderlings I caught earlier? I had them in this container in my office, like so:

They’re all the little dots in there. Well, I decided I would set them free out in the garden, and I opened the container as you can see…while still in my office. They immediately became agitated and started scurrying about, and next thing I know, many of them have lifted off and started ballooning. I whipped out my camera and tried to get a photo, but tiny dots wafting through the air aren’t easy to photograph. Here’s a pair of them looking like spiders in space.

This is my favorite, though — it was drifting near the container, so it look like it’s about to land on Earth.

Most of them are outside now, but I’ve still got a few crawling on me, and every once in a while one floats across my field of vision. It’s magical!