It may not look like much, but this is a deadly hazard.

We tried clearing our driveway, but this stuff is wet, thick, and slushy, and it totally choked our snow blower. We could push forward maybe 2 meters before the snow blower froze up solid with ice and slush that it didn’t have enough power to push out. We ended up doing it old school, with snow shovels, but even that was impractical — the snow was so dense and sticky that it stuck to the snow shovel blade, and the shovel would just get heavier and heavier. We finally gave up, with the driveway incompletely clear, but it’s all we could do.

My wife was told last night to call the sheriff’s department in the morning, and make arrangements to have our car towed home, but unsurprisingly, we can’t get through. I suspect the town is dealing with real emergencies today, so I’m not going to push. We’ll get it back when we get it back.

Right now I’m sitting back with a hot cup of tea and watching my wife trying to scrape away a little more ice and snow. Get back in here, Mary, this is dangerous slop!

We got about 6 inches of snow last night, creating a winter wonderland out there. It’s not great. Mary was stuck at work last night, not getting home until after midnight…and then her car got stuck in the snow on the road, and the sheriff’s deputy had to shuttle her home. The car is still stuck out there. This morning we’re going to have to clear our driveway, and then call a tow truck to bring the car home. It’s all a big headache.

I also think we’re going to have to go shopping on Black Friday, which I’ve always avoided, but I don’t think Mary’s winter coat is quite adequate, and since all the predictions say this will be a snowy winter. That is, we’ll go shopping if our car is back and functional in the next day or two.

In happier news, today is Knut’s birthday, and he’s away in Korea learning Tae Kwon Do.

If only he were here, he’d have all the snow cleared in a flash.

Quick, here’s a link to Epstein’s email. Are you in it?

I checked, and I’m not. I’m simultaneously relieved and disappointed at my lack of infamy.

Every year, just before Thanksgiving, the city of Morris puts on a Parade of Lights, always in the dark and the bitter cold. The citizens line up along the streets, freezing our butts off, while hyper-excited kids are bouncing off the curb, waiting for the candy to start flying. Then along come the floats, with local beauty queens waving, lights flashing, Pounce (the university mascot) looking terrifying,crews running alongside with bags of candy, and then, most importantly, along comes Santa.

It was all very exciting, especially for the kids. I guess the holiday season has officially started.

I have a long list of places I’d like to visit, but am aware I’ll probably never get the opportunity: Florence, Italy; Lagos, Nigeria; both Antarctica and the far North; Istanbul (but that one scares me, I’d probably get arrested); and many others. I’m fortunate that I have been able to visit the Galapagos Islands, Beijing, China, and a scattering of places in Europe. If I had infinite money, I’d probably be flying off to a new place every week.

But one place I never, ever want to see is Dubai. My infinite money has a limit, and that limit stops cold at hellholes of vast wealth (I know, that’s a contradiction, but I will never have infinite, or even large amounts, of money, but Dubai actually does exist.) One journalist visited the place and now regrets it.

I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.

I am ashamed to have visited. There are some experiences that journalism cannot excuse. I add nothing to the record by having gone. I thought the trip would present a grotesque tapestry that might disclose some new truth about the reordering of the world. It got the better of me. I imagined a gonzo-style reveal about ordering a mojito in Russian from an Indian barman while gazing towards Iran. All of this is possible, but none of it makes my visit worthwhile.

That’s about how I feel about the place. It’s an abomination, the end result of shameful wealth inequity, and I have no empathy to share with the rich tourists who fly there to do…what? I don’t know.

I was sorta disconnected yesterday. My router was down for most of the morning, but mainly, my wife had one of her infrequent days off from work. She has an erratic schedule, and seems to work approximately 6 days out of 7, and her days off are unpredictable. Working in elder care is one of those difficult and under-appreciated jobs that should be paid better but never will be.

So we took advantage of the time to get a lot of mundane things done.

• We reorganized my home office, clearing out a lot of the clutter, moving the futon I never used to a different room. Now I actually have room to move!
• Our clothes dryer wasn’t working. It turns out the vent was clogged, and we pulled it out of its niche to clear it, which was a revelation. This appliance was here when we moved in almost 25 years ago, and we’d never looked under or behind it until now. We finally discovered what happened to Mary’s favorite gardening hat. To put it in perspective, we found old Howard Dean signs that had fallen behind it.



• We went shopping for a new bed. Mary has some minor respiratory issues, which means she often has to sit up in bed, so we’re looking for one of those fancy adjustable beds that will let us both be comfortable. I think it might be a Christmas gift to each other. I think we’re also sinking into degenerate decadence here in the waning years of the American empire.


It’s not supposed to be bent like that

• I’m also looking for a bookshelf with doors — the evil cat destroyed a camera lens (an inexpensive one, fortunately) by flicking it off a shelf, so I need a cat-proof way to store electronics and camera gear. I’ve ordered one that will arrive next week. Until then, I’m hovering over my lens collection like a dragon over its hoard, and snarling if the cat approaches.
• Of course I went into the lab to tend the spiders.
• Mary restocked her bird feeders. My job was to hold the ladder.

Lots of red and green shimmering in the sky tonight.

This was a handheld shot, ISO 6400, f4, 1 sec exposure. Maybe I should drag a tripod out next time I want to shoot the aurora.

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I think maybe my iPhone did a better job.

After a long morning cleaning up after so many spiders, I had to pick up a few things from the grocery store, and fixed a light lunch of rice cakes with strawberry yogurt and berries on top, which is simple and quick and good for me and my wife.

This teeny-tiny package of blackberries cost $4.

I remember standing in front of a big blackberry bush and stripping off more blackberries than that in one handful and stuffing them into my mouth. Wouldn’t even have to move, just pulling them off a single branch.

I went ahead and bought them out of a sense of nostalgia. They were good, but I’m not going to be able to afford to do that very often.

I nearly went blind stepping into that store.

My favorite alien organism in Predator Badlands was the brachiating carnivore with trilateral symmetry. That was neat.

I also like the novel communal (?) branch like thing that would strike like an army of snakes. Cool.

There was a grazer with a weird set of mouthparts that I didn’t get a good look at, unfortunately, but it had to be good because they were adapted to feed on razor-sharp fields of leaves. Show more next time.

I was mildly disappointed with the main big bad monster, which was just kind of ape-like, and had unrealistic powers of regeneration. I want to see the energetic breakdown of the metabolic costs of rebuilding whole body parts in seconds — that’s pure fantasy. Not going to happen.

Also, and this was a problem with the Avatar movies, too, if you’re going to get creative with strange background animals, do think in evolutionary terms. There should be some shared continuity of structure in various clades, not just random odd beasties with no visible relationships between them.

I was deeply disappointed with the main “alien,” the Yautja, who was just a man — a perfectly ordinary, familiar human being — wearing a mask with funny flexible fangs on it. Pathetic. Unbelievable. Cheap and cheesy. Drop that transparently fake alien from future episodes (you know they’re going to keep making these “predator” movies, and the weakest prop in the whole franchise is the predator.)

I’m also a bit tired of the “warrior alien” trope. Advanced alien cultures are going to be more diverse and complex than the “everyone fights for honor” nonsense that’s affected the genre since at least the Klingons, and it’s boring and makes those aliens into one dimensional characters. Stop it.

I guess there was a plot that I didn’t pay much attention to — it was something about big fights with an evil corporation trying to exploit alien monsters, don’t care, been there, done that. Elle Fanning stood out as a good actor who was playing two synthetic humanoids, but I never understood why, if you have mastery of building artificial organisms with intelligence that you’d put them in a limited human form. Get funky with it next time, and let the synth engineers imagination run wild. If I could do that, you know I’d have giant spider-squid hybrids with vaguely human minds running rampant over the cosmos.