I’ll miss the Pacific Ocean

Wait, no, I won’t. I’ll be long gone. I expect the human species will be extinct by then. This is entirely predictable, that thanks to ongoing plate tectonics, eventually the continents will collide into a super-continent, Amasia.

It won’t actually be named that, of course, since the hyper-intelligent spiders that evolve to replace us won’t be using English.

Biology will get interesting, though.

Surrounded by a new superocean, the newly formed supercontinent will also have decreased biodiversity.

“Earth as we know it will be drastically different when Amasia forms. The sea level is expected to be lower, and the vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges,” Li said. “Currently, Earth consists of seven continents with widely different ecosystems and human cultures, so it would be fascinating to think what the world might look like in 200 million to 300 million years’ time.”

It’ll be a harsher world in many ways, but at least it won’t have Homo sapiens screwing it up further. Also, you might want to start getting on the good side of the hyper-intelligent spiders.

The prize for coolness under pressure goes to…

Ariel Elias, a comedian who was doing a comedy set in front of a few MAGA rednecks who didn’t like what she was saying and threw a whole can of beer with great force at her. She scooped it up and drank it while mocking them. I was impressed.

It’s got to be tough to be doing comedy in a bar attended by deplorables. I did notice, though, that when she called for support, the overwhelming majority of the crowd cheered in her favor — the few MAGAts must be feeling isolated and alone, which is good.

Also good: the beer-flinger is being prosecuted for his actions.

Never look at Star Wars in the same way again

George Lucas claimed he’d structured the movie around Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, that there was a universal human story that underpinned all legends. He should have been more skeptical, because as Maggie Mae Fish explains, Joseph Campbell was dishonest and a colossal asshole. A nazi sympathizer? Yuck.

I don’t think white men are intrinsically bad (I better not, since I am one), but one of the only human universals I’ll believe in is that if you grant any subgroup particular privileges and power, they’ll work like mad to consolidate that power, and will enthusiastically support anyone who can persuasively rationalize their status. Campbell was a Gríma Wormtongue for white middle-class Americans in the mid-20th century. As time grants us the distance to see what a cultural nightmare that time was, it shouldn’t be surprising that the sycophants who built the American myth are looking uglier day by day.

Conservatives really hate education

Let’s start calling students names.

“College doesn’t look like it’s fun anymore. I mean, have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are?

“They’re deliberately like ugly-fying themselves. You see them on TikTok. They’re out of shape, they’re asexual. They’re rejecting the truth in beauty.

“They all look like rejects from a loony bin. I’d steer clear of college, too.”

I’ll have you know that all of my students are brilliant, beautiful, and sane. (Near as I can tell — some of them are just black squares on Zoom.)

Keep in mind that the guy talking about students being ugly-fied is Greg Gutfeld.

None of my students look that awful.

I hope this is the start of a Halloween tradition

Our local movie theater is a non-profit coop, which means they occasionally surprise the community with neat little surprises like this.

That is awesome, an opportunity to see some oldies on the big screen for free (and sell popcorn on the side). I would happily spend all afternoon and evening in the theater, except that today I have to dig myself out of the hole I made yesterday when I was flattened by the vaccine. Maybe I can sneak away for one showing.

If they do this again in the future, what I’d like to see is some of the older movies that I never had a chance to see in the theater. Karloff/Lugosi/Chaney stuff, the black & white classics I’ve only seen in late-night television, sprinkled with used car commercials. Or do a whole month of Hammer films. I’d plan my whole October calendar around that.

Another Crimean war

No good comes of war, and now the Ukraine war is expanding to the south. Ukrainians blew up a significant transport route between Russia and Crimea.

A giant explosion ripped across the Crimean Bridge, a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea, in what appeared to be a stunning blow early Saturday morning to a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to control Ukraine.

The damage to the bridge, which provided a road and rail connection from Russia to the Ukrainian peninsula the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, marks another serious setback to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by disrupting a crucial supply route.

I had to look up the Kerch Bridge to see where it was.

No matter how this war ends up, Putin has to regret having picked a fight there. That’s a lesson for every country — no matter how big and tough you are, and how confident you are in attacking a smaller country, you might end up paying a greater cost than you expected. We should have figured that out in Vietnam (I doubt that we did), and Putin’s imperial ambitions are getting a serious reality check.

Stupid brain. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I woke up at 2am. At first, it was because my shoulders were aching from the vaccinations, but then my brain decided it would start composing new essay questions for the exam I’m handing out today…and my stress started rising. Then somehow it started dwelling on my dead siblings — I have two, a sister and now a brother — and at first it was serving up happy memories, but then it segued into contemplating how neglectful I’ve been of the family I was born into, and next thing I know I’m running on the hamster wheel of regret, which is not at all helpful if you’re trying to sleep. I’ve concluded that I’m enough of an asshole to have been less than supportive, but not enough of an asshole to not care.

So now I’m wide awake with a hyperactively depressed brain, tweaking that exam. I am going to be such a fatigued mess when I have to go to my lab.

Vaccination mission accomplished

On top of everything else I’ve got going on today, I got both my yearly flu shot and the COVID booster a few minutes ago. My survivability score just went up a good bit.

Only bad news is that my previous vaccinations have flattened me the day after. This one will be fine, right? Still worth it if it wasn’t, I’d happily trade one day of fatigue for the opportunity to not die wheezing my lungs out.