Update on Professor Piss

You may recall that last Spring, a chemistry professor at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota was accused of urinating on student belongings, and was dismissed from his position. His troubles have greatly increased: he has been formally charged with a felony.

There has been a confession.

Urination had been found in trash cans, individuals’ water bottles and inside professors’ decorations, the state criminal court document said.

Investigators determined Fischer was responsible for the series of urine-related cases, and he resigned from Macalester College, where he had spent 25 years working.

Authorities confronted Fischer before charging him, the court document said. He allegedly shared that “during the last one and a half to two years he developed a habit of urinating in a cup and disposing the contents in either trash cans or lab sinks around campus”, according to the document.

Calling it a “habit” doesn’t make it better.

Hot tip for any young people hoping for a career in the sciences: having a criminal record of peeing all over your workplace is the kiss of death for your employment prospects. Dr Fischer has flushed away his 25-year teaching career with his “habit”.

This is why I’m not a romantic

I was trying to think of romantic dates to go on with my wife, and I came up with a brilliant idea: I should take her out to Shakey’s Pizza. That was our standard destination back in the 1970s, go out to Shakey’s, sit in a booth with a pineapple pizza and a diet coke, and talk for hours. Yeah, that’s the ticket, an evening of nostalgia and sentiment and good memories.

One problem, though. When we weren’t looking, the entire chain shriveled up and died. There’s a cluster of them still alive in Southern California, and apparently they’re thriving in the Philippines, but none in Minnesota, and only one left in Washington state, in Pasco. Near as I can tell even the old location in Kent, WA has been replaced with a Chuck E. Cheese. I guess I’ll just sit at home, looking dour. See, this is why old people have a reputation for crankiness.

What do the teenagers do nowadays on a Saturday night? What did you do, once upon a time?

Second thoughts on Verity

Last night, I did another shift as theater projectionist, and sat through the movie Verity a second time. We had another evening of light duty, as only 4 people showed up, and two of them had free passes, so I sat through the whole thing.

It was so much worse than I thought. This was an incompetent piece of film making.

I was criticized in my original review for saying that Dakota Johnson can’t act, and that she spent “the entire movie looking vaguely stunned,” but that was a plot point that was mentioned multiple times! The opening (and entirely superfluous and irrelevant to the plot) scene was Johnson getting splashed with blood from an auto accident in front of her, to which she responded with complete equanimity. She later tells Josh Hartnett that she’s been told she has “resting bored face”. She responds to every horrific thing in the movie with utter passivity.

But the worst is the plot, and I’ll have to give away spoilers here, so it’s below the fold.

[Read more…]

Should fraternities be shut down?

The Guardian asks, “Fraternities are the most likely place for US campus rapes. Should they be shut down?“

What a stupid question. YES.

It’s a lengthy article that goes through all the problems with the fraternity system — the alcoholism, the hazing deaths (two annually!), the rapes. I kept reading for the positive reasons, and they give a few. One is the threats.

“All the Greek alumni would have pitchforks, and it would be a whole debacle rather than kind of letting this play out in the press and then just going back to business,” said Lucy Taylor, a University of Maryland graduate and the creator of the podcast Snapped about the sordid history of fraternities and sororities.

Another is a variant of that threat.

“When you get rid of Greek life, you get rid of some of the most passionate people that cared about the school, right? And so why would someone like that donate to the school if the school is eliminating something that was a key part of their time at Cornell?” he said.

This is similar to the argument in favor of college sports, and ultimately it’s all about money. Fraternities and sports are orthogonal to the function of universities and education, and they should only be tolerated as long as they don’t interfere with the education students are supposed to be there for.

No good reasons for frats are given other than platitudes from North American Interfraternity Conference, a trade association of fraternities.

Hillary Brewer, the organization’s chief communications officer, did not respond to a question about whether sexual misconduct is pervasive at fraternities but stated in an email that they “are an accelerator for success in college and beyond. They create lifelong connections to the campus, community and friends.”

You don’t need frats to make connections and friends, especially not since the connections are with the kind of people who favor elitism, abuse, and misbehavior.

Shut them all down.

A dismal season for movies

As usual, I’ve been running the projector for the local theater

Last night was the dull horror of Verity, a movie based on a potboiler by Colleen Hoover. It’s had a low level of attendance for the past week, but it does tap into an unusual audience: women’s book clubs. It’s fair that that audience should be served, and Hoover is apparently an extremely successful author, but it’s unfortunate that they are so poorly represented. The movie has a dark and twisty plot that bored me far too quickly, but it’s greatest flaw that its star is…Dakota Johnson. The woman cannot act. She spends the entire movie looking vaguely stunned, just as she does in every movie I’ve ever seen featuring her. Anne Hathaway is also in it, but she spends the first half imitating Johnson by playing a brain-damaged paralyzed accident victim.

We had two ticket-paying attendees last night.

The other movie playing last night was Heart of the Beast. It’s a dog movie. It also features Brad Pitt and an unbelievable plot. Brad is flying a private plane over the Alaskan wilderness with his loyal and brave military dog, when he has a massive heart attack and crashes his plane into a lake, 60 miles from civilization.

He has to dive deep into the frigid lake to salvage his camping supplies. He and the dog then have to hike through rugged terrain, fighting of the occasional grizzly bear and wolf pack, falling into a whitewater stream, breaking his arm, getting gnawed on by wolves, and, like Dakota Johnson, never changing his expression. Did I mention that the inciting incident was a massive heart attack? Rather than going into intensive care, he instead must stoically battle against a savage wilderness with his dog pal. It was a long slog for both Brad Pitt and the audience.

Attendance: 0.

I blame the movie studios. These are dull, formulaic movies that are also poorly marketed. I knew nothing about either before pushing the button to put them on the screen: Verity was dependent on the popularity of a book in a niche market, and Heart of the Beast was a movie about a dog, and that’s all you need to know (not that there was much deeper in it than that).

I think the one bright spot this time of year is the free Saturday matinees, when we show old, familiar spooky movies and make all our profit on popcorn and candy sales — and we also get an audience of appreciative families. Digging up old hits is a more productive use of the theater than showing the poor fare the studios are dumping on us.

And look! Today you can get firetruck rides!

The scariest thing I’ve seen this Hallowe’en season

Yikes. An anhydrous ammonia leak. Look at all the people fleeing!

That stuff will kill you, burning out your eyes and lungs. And it’s everywhere where agriculture is practiced. We’ve got tanks of it stored just outside of town, and whenever I’m stuck at a railroad crossing, I see the tank cars full of that stuff rolling by, and I wonder what I’d do if the train derailed right in front of me. Die, probably, painfully. I doubt that I could outrun the cloud of ammonia.

Who needs ghosts and witches and monsters when we’ve got modern industrial farming? Go ahead, read some accident reports to give yourself nightmares.

Infinite Thread XXXXI

Behold, the Ugly Palace (il Palazzaccio, aka The Palace of Justice in Rome).

It’s nice to know we aren’t the only country that throws away money on hideous, grandiose buildings with terrible cost overruns and rumors of corruption. Of course, if it were built here, it would be excessively gilded, and would be a deathtrap.

Talk among yourselves about construction projects. Or whatever.

Previous thread

Plumbing is for human benefit, the spiders can take advantage, too

Yesterday, we had a plumber come in and adjust our shower. The water pressure had been declining, it took many minutes for the water to heat up, and even when it reached peak temperature it was tepid. The plumber traced the problem down into the basement, and now we can get a scalding high pressure blast out of it, which is great for us. I’ll have to ask the shower spiders what they think of it.

Sorry, spiders, you might see more of us as we revel in a good hot scouring.