When I was in college, many years ago, one of the hobbies sweeping through the youth (and older) was the Society for Creative Anachronism — putting on padding, taking a sword made of rattan wrapped in foam, and pounding on each other in fake medieval battles. I thought it was fun to watch, but was never going to join in. When I imagined medieval warfare, I would always be the peasant with a stick getting trampled into the mud.

Nowadays the big thing is Buhurt. People dress up in real steel armor and use real steel (but blunted) swords to hack at each other until someone falls down. No thank you very much. But my son, the one in the army, has joined a team out there in Washington state. We also have a team in Minneapolis. I am not at all tempted.

He’s the one with the shaved head on the right. He’s using borrowed armor because that stuff is expensive.

I guess military testosterone levels are just fine.

I just did an interview with a journalist who is trying to answer that question. I was not very helpful. I knew Adam Bly as a publisher and promoter of science popularizers — he’s the guy who created Seed Magazine and Scienceblogs, once upon a time, and I met him several times, and he paid me extravagant sums to write Pharyngula and stories for Seed. Good times.

But today I learned that Jeffrey Epstein owned a 26% stake in Seed Media.

I knew that Bly was a kind of wunderkind in cancer research, but I didn’t know much else about him. I didn’t even know what specific research he was known for.

In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.

He began his career at the age of 16 as the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying the biochemistry of cancer, specifically the role of cell adhesion in metastasis. Out of the lab, he founded Seed – tag-lined “Science is Culture™” – and served as its Editor-in-Chief. “

What I did know was that he abruptly erupted out of Canada, moved to New York City, and was somehow shuffling millions of dollars around in various scientific enterprises. None of us sciencebloggers had any idea where all his money was coming from, but we accepted it. We should have known it was too good to be true.

Anyway, Scienceblogs and Seed Media folded in 2010-2011, but we’d seen presentiments in 2009, when the company was showing financial strain, and the ads were becoming increasingly obnoxious, culminating in the notorious PepsiGate disaster, in which Bly sold out to PepsiCo and revealed himself as a corporate shill. The diaspora followed, with bloggers (including myself and Ed Brayton, who generated most of the traffic to Scienceblogs) abandoning it to move to other sites.

Looking back, I can see a suggestive correlation. Seed Media was getting desperate for new financial backing in 2009; Jeffrey Epstein was locked up (under the cushiest of conditions) in 2008-2009. Another person who was suffering Epstein withdrawal at that time was John Brockman:

Although Epstein was evidently no intellectual (physicist Sean Caroll described him as “a standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out big words with no real understanding”), he had a knack for Machiavellian manipulations tied to gifts and favors. In a travesty of potlatch ceremonies, the gifts that the academics brought to the parties were not intended just for Epstein but also for his clan of billionaires and celebrities. The ceremonies were held at opulent intellectual ‘salons’ funded by Epstein. A literary agent by the name of John Brockman was responsible for organizing many of these salons under the guise of a club called the Edge, which facilitated the gathering of billionaires and academics at “glittering events.” Some of these events were apparently secretive safe spaces for participants to praise “race science, rape culture and genetic engineering.” It was through Brockman’s bragging about his association with Epstein to a former client (tech writer Evgeny Morozov) that details of former Prince Andrew’s alleged foot massage emerged.

The so-called Billionaire’s Dinners and various ‘salons’ seem to have faded away as Epstein’s reputation began to poison the events. I was not involved in any of that, I’m relieved to say; I was on Brockman’s mailing list and was invited to contribute to some of his books of essays, but I was not insider enough to be invited to any of his salons with Pinker. Edge is now described as “cult-like”, so fortunately I did not fall into it. I was only on his list for about a year before I was dropped without fanfare.

Would you believe those dinners were almost entirely funded by Epstein”? Or that Brockman attended a party at Epstein’s mansion to celebrate his release from prison?

Now what about Adam Bly? I heard Brockman describe him as his protege, but have no idea how the Bly-Brockman-Epstein axis formed. There’s a big story lurking here.

It’s lunch hour, on my first day back at full-time work, and I’m thinking about food. I’m in transition; all summer I’ve been mostly at home, in part because I’ve been laid up by knee surgeries and some surgeries, but that excuse doesn’t work any more because I’m mostly recovered. My wife has been working a regular 7-3 workday most days, so I’ve gradually evolved into a house-husband. I do most of the cooking, and also laundry and dishwashing…yeah, you could say I’m whipped. And that’s OK. After years of leaving most of the housework to my wife, I’m gaining a new appreciation of household labor.

One of the things I was thinking about was that I’ve got it pretty easy now, since it’s just me and my wife cooperating to run the house. Two people. Simple. Manageable. But still a real amount of work, and while I enjoy cooking, I don’t enjoy cleaning up the aftermath, even though it must be done.

But then it struck me: my parents had six kids, one after another, and I realized that I didn’t see a sink piled high with dirty dishes until I moved out and lived alone and was a lazy sloppy bachelor. My late mother must have had a system: with as many dirty dishes as 8 people would produce at every meal, she must have been diligent about not letting them accumulate — I had never properly appreciated all the labor my mother must have invested in basic maintenance. Thanks, Mom, I’m sorry I never said so while you were alive.

It also made me appreciate the reason that my parents almost divorced when I was 7 or 8 years old. Mom wanted to get a job outside the home, and Dad reacted with great hostility. He, and the rest of us, were dependent on all that hard work Mom was doing. (They must have figured out how to manage the situation, because they reconciled, and Mom got a part time job at Boeing.)

Remember, though, I was thinking about food, and I was trying to remember what Mom did for dinner. Eight places were set at the table, and she had to provide bowls of food we’d have to pass around and serve ourselves…something. That’s where I drew a blank. What the heck was I eating while growing up?

Maybe you have a better recollection than I do. I was getting mostly forgettable, bland food.

There was a very anthropological distinction between my parents’ roles. Dad did the glamorous, high protein stuff: a big slab of smoked salmon, a beach trip where we’d come back with buckets of clams, barbecue in the summer. But that was an occasional treat, not even every week. Mom would do the basic low-budget, economical stuff every day, which now I’ve mostly forgotten. Lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, cereal for breakfast, and potatoes, corn, broccoli, etc. for bulk at dinner, and I recall tuna casserole a few times a week (which was OK, I liked tuna casserole), but probably the most memorable favorite was putti klub, a potato dumpling wrapped around a bit of meat, and then sliced and fried and soaked in maple syrup. We also had a filling stew with root vegetables and mystery meat (I knew exactly what it was, heart or tongue, cheap organ meats, cubed and cooked to be unrecognizable), and sometimes a platter of breaded pork chops, or better still, liver and onions. I used to terrify my kids with threats of serving liver and onions for dinner, because I actually liked it, while they were grossed out at the very idea.

But man, the work involved in making meals for 8 people every day, and doing it on a very tight budget–I couldn’t do that.

Now you might be thinking that I had 3 kids and had to have known the struggle of feeding 5 people every day, but I don’t. I remember cans and boxes from the grocery store, and that’s about it. Maybe I could ask them what they remember, but I think they all died of malnutrition, kwashiorkor, beriberi, rickets, and scurvy, and even if they had survived, wouldn’t have good memories of family meals.

How about you? Do you have fond memories of good food on the table?

Time to go to…work. I have to go into my lab/office and get my class in order for the start of Fall term in two weeks.

Oh well. Next year at this time I’ll be retired, and nobody can tell me to go to work ever again. (Also, my “work” is enjoyable stuff anyway.)

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As I was walking into work, I spotted a bouquet that reflects my feelings perfectly.

A little more time, and those flowers will be buried in snow, and I won’t have to look at them anymore.

We got up early and drove to the other side of the state, through all the heat and humidity, to attend a baby shower for Kat and my son Alaric.

They also announced their engagement at the party. Yay Kat & Alaric!

Right now I need to drink a lot of water and lay down in an air-conditioned room. Later.

My Wednesdays all this month have been consumed with running errands to Alexandria, which have been worsened by the fact that the AC in our car is dead. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in a car with windows rolled down and a roaring hot wind blowing past me. I’m slumped in a puddle of sweat right now.

OK, a distraction: anyone else remember the Hot Stuff comics? How about Wendy, the good little witch, and Casper, the friendly ghost? That’s the trinity that provided me with all of my theological training. It wasn’t any less contradictory and silly than the nonsense the Lutheran church tried to stuff me with, and it was more amusing and more ethical than anything in the Bible.

I get up early every morning, and practically the first thing I do is check the news to see if our ghastly president is dead yet. I have high hopes that sometime in the near future he’s going to suffer a miserable painful death (or a quick painless one, I don’t care), and instead every morning I discover that he has instead done something incredibly stupid and destructive, and our representatives in government have done nothing significant to stop him. And then I feel deep disappointment.

It’s a poor way to start my day, but it’s every day right now. Yeah, I’m a terrible person, but that guy is worse.

Now I have to go for a walk to temporarily clear my head of all this despair.

I’m probably the only person to feel this way.

Serves him right. This sculptor thought he could cash in on the Charlie Kirk frenzy, but it backfired on him — now he’s left holding the bag.

A New York sculptor has been left furious after spending $100,000 of his own money to build a lifesize statue of Charlie Kirk, only to find that no one wants to buy it.

Sergio Furnari, originally from Italy, had hoped the statue of the deceased far-right activist, which he intends to display in Times Square, would raise “millions” of dollars. Instead, he said he has been inundated by messages from people saying they intend to urinate on the sculpture.

Not only do they want to piss on it because Kirk’s reputation is in the toilet, but man, that is one ugly-ass statue.

“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he said. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine. [Kirk would say]: ‘Oh no, Palestine doesn’t exist.’ I thought: ‘Well, this guy must be out of his mind.’”

Instead, Furnari said he made the statue in an effort to “glorify and to exercise the first amendment, this freedom of speech” – although at points during the conversation, Furnari also said he made it to support Charlie Kirk’s wife; to “glorify democracy”; and to “commemorate a person”.

Sergio Furnari with his statue of Charlie Kirk. Photograph: Sergio Furnari
He later added: “Why am I making the statue? The same reason why Michelangelo did the Pietà, or Michelangelo did the David, or Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why? Just to commemorate a moment, you know, a person.”

Right, it’s all the same reason: to make money. He thought it would be lots of money, but it turns out to be negative numbers of money.

Until then, Furnari is left with a 6ft 4in statue of a renowned racist, which he has spent $100,000 making, and which no one wants to buy. Maybe it is cursed after all.

Nice summary. That should be how we remember Kirk — as a big ol’ racist.