Ten quatloos to anyone who recognizes the significance of the truck in this photo. Also huge sympathy points for being exposed to it.

Fortunately, the tourism investment in that crap has diminished since the last time I visited Forks, several years ago.

I’d like to know where Marty Essen has been for the last decade or so, because he has written an essay about how Real Time with Bill Maher has become unwatchable. Has become? It’s been ground zero for the worst liberal takes for what seems like ages. At least now he has finally seen the light.

Years ago, my wife, Deb, and I used to arrange our Friday nights around watching Real Time with Bill Maher, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he performed his show from home, he became (to use his term) “a whiny little bitch.” He was so unwatchable that we made other plans for our Friday nights.

Knowing that Maher was back in front of a live audience, we gave him another shot last night. He just made us angry. First, he whined about vaccinations, saying he “took one for the team,” but doubted he’d get a booster. And that led into his nightly diatribe about how if Americans only ate better food we wouldn’t have so many health problems. Sure, many Americans would be better off if they got in-shape and lost some weight, but I can’t remember the last episode where Maher didn’t make the same point—over and over and over.

But what really pissed me off was when he and Andrew Sullivan pontificated about colleges being too woke. I have likely spoken at more colleges in the past 15 years than Bill Maher and Andrew Sullivan put together. The difference is that they speak at select elite colleges and I speak everywhere else. For instance, next week I speak at Hastings College in Nebraska.

I agree with Essen on all that: the vaccination hesitancy, to be as generous as possible, the contempt for American eating habits, and just the fact that he still has Andrew Fucking Sullivan on as a guest all the time should be clues that Maher is a tired old bore. The derision he aims at colleges and college students has also been around for a long time — he’s one of those “comedians” who doesn’t want to do college gigs because the audiences there don’t find him funny, which is obviously their fault, not his.

That brings me to The Chair, that Netflix comedy-drama about a liberal arts college that everyone has been telling me to watch. I unwound from our trip last night by seeing what it was all about.

I hated it. Sincerely, deeply, angrily hated it.

Why were people telling me this piece of shit was any good at all? It wasn’t realistic at all, nothing like any university I’ve worked at, and the writer was just puking up conservative cliches about universities. There are nasty internal politics that go on in university departments, but nothing like what was portrayed on the screen. The English department in that show was portrayed as a nest of doddering deadheads with no interest in education, resistant to any new ideas, determined to subvert any fresh new faculty. Individuals like that exist, but it’s not an accurate representation of how any department works. I can grant that a show like this would exaggerate stereotypes for comic effect, but I didn’t see anything that rang true, and it was clear that the writers knew nothing about the real foibles of a university.

My biggest gripe, though, is with the major conflict at the heart of the story, which was pure anti-wokist garbage. The story is about a bumbling, but presumably charismatic English professor who staggers into an upper level class with pretty much no plan, no idea of what he’s going to talk about, and only a course title, “Modernism and Death”, to guide his structureless ramblings. He sleeps late, he gets drunk, he misses classes, and only seems to occasionally find his way into the classroom — you know, the conservative stereotype of what college professors are like.

One day, he snaps briefly into awareness and tries to deliver some ideas to the students, and starts lecturing on the contrast between absurdism and fascism, and as he mentions fascism, briefly illustrates it with a Hitler salute as he’s talking about how under fascism all meaning is ascribed to the state, to mock the idea of a supreme leader. Nothing in this snippet of a poorly framed lecture suggests any sympathy for fascism, he goes on to talk about the 85 million dead, and segues to discussing Camus and Beckett, who both fought in the resistance. In a fraction of a second, he quotes “Heil Hitler”, students capture it on their phones, it gets edited out of context, and the core conflict of the show is about woke students trying to get a Nazi fired.

This is exactly the myth that conservatives try to promote with that “cancel culture” bullshit — that students are so hypersensitive that they go on full raging alert at even innocent, harmless mentions of their shibboleths. The show works very hard to make the offense trivial and obviously misinterpreted, and the student reaction to be over the top and ridiculous. Boy, those college kids sure are stupid. When the professor tries to explain, all the feminists and brown people listening to him ask leading questions and make extreme accusations and shout him down, because that’s what the writer thinks wokists do.

The fundamental disrespect for students was appalling. The lazy portrayal of college professors was disturbing. The plot was loaded with discursive elements that were never resolved, and the central storyline seemed to be all about those goofy liberals being hoist on their own petard. If you are sympathetic to the idea that liberal arts colleges are bad, you will like this series, because it will confirm every bias you’ve got. I’m not at all sympathetic to that kind of bullshit, so I didn’t enjoy it at all.

Hey, I’m home again, and exhausted after a long day of travel. We accomplished much, however.

Here’s Skatje and Iliana (she’s in the pink raincoat with bunny ears) at La Push, Washington. It was a perfect day: overcast grey skies, a continuous drizzle of rain, and gusty winds blowing off the ocean. This is one of my favorite places on Earth, and it was a delightful day with all conditions exactly as I would have dreamed for.

The major goal of the trip was to see Connlann promoted to Major. It has been done.

For him, what this means is a whole bunch of new responsibilities. He’s part of the army response team handling the integration of tens of thousands of Afghan people into the United States, and last we left him he was preparing for a mission to airports out east. It turns out that if you need a sudden surge of people needing food and shelter, the Army is the outfit with all the tools to do that.

Now my mission is not accomplished: I have to rewire my brain and buckle down to preparing for classes tomorrow.

I’ve arrived on the Pacific coast to my little struggle. The best internet connection I’ve found is at the Quinault beach resort and casino, so I’m going to try and teach my class at 1:00 Central time from here. I just have to find a quiet (or relatively quiet) spot to talk cell biology for an hour.

Then this afternoon we’re off to the Olympic mountains for a bit.

It’s been dry and miserable all summer here, my lawn is dead, the spiders are panting for a drop to drink, and I arrive at the Minneapolis airport to fly away, and what happens? The skies rip open, thunder and lightning, and everything is drenched. It’s my parting gift to Minnesota, I guess. Don’t worry, I’ll be back on Sunday to resume the desertification.

One thing I should mention on my way out the door is that I’m going to a corner of the US where internet service is spotty. We’re staying at a hotel that assured us they do have wifi, but I’m not sure I believe them, and it’s a little bit of a worry, since I have to teach a class over Zoom every morning. It’s a lesser concern, but if your comment gets hung up in the pending queue, it might be a little while before I can clear it.

Now I have to go get wet, I think. I may step off the plane at Sea-Tac and instantly dessicate the entire Pacific Northwest.

This is my granddaughter, Iliana. She is almost three.

Yesterday, she went on an adventure. She and her mother flew in an airplane from Minneapolis to Sea-Tac, and then she took a bus to the train station, and a train to Seattle, and another bus to her hotel. It was a long day of traveling.

She wore her facemask all the way, all day long. She didn’t fuss, didn’t shed one tear, and was still cheerful and enthusiastic and excited when they stopped for the night. The mask is just something she has to do when indoors with groups of people, and it doesn’t bother her in the least, and certainly doesn’t interfere with any fun.

Be like Iliana.

I’m going to try. I’ll be following in her footsteps today, and we’ll meet up tomorrow. I’ll try hard to be just as thrilled and not cry as Iliana.

I’m asking for myself. I’m a bit dizzy and out of breath for all the laughing at the death of a human being, and I feel a little ashamed of that. Phil Valentine, a conservative talk radio host, has died of COVID-19. His brother has spoken up about his illness.

Valentine’s brother, Mark Valentine, also spoke on the radio after his brother’s condition began to deteriorate, saying that Valentine was, “regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination,” according to AP. “For those listening, I know if he were able to tell you this, he would tell you, ‘Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories.'”

Wait a minute…”regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of the vaccination”? He wasn’t an advocate at all! He used his platform to spread misinformation and actively argued that people shouldn’t be vaccinated.

Prior to his diagnosis, Valentine voiced skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines.

In December of 2020 he tweeted “I have a very low risk of A) Getting COVID and B) dying of it if I do. Why would I risk getting a heart attack or paralysis by getting the vaccine?”

He also recorded a parody song titled “Vaxman,” which mocked the vaccine, according to WTVF.

Prior to his hospitalization, Valentine said on the radio that he was “taking vitamin D like crazy” and that a doctor agreed to prescribe him an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin, according to the Associated Press. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said not to take the medication to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Oh well, there’s the problem. He was a conservative radio talk show host and he was taking a drug that kills worms, botfly larvae, and other parasites. He poisoned himself!

When this pandemic is over, if it ends, I predict that all these rabid anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, the ones who survive anyway, are going to come out and piously belittle their own actions, claiming that they just regret being a weak advocate of all the things they right now strongly oppose.

But seriously, don’t drink horse de-wormer or sheep drench. People who resisted getting the vaccine because their body is a temple and they were not going to taint it with untested, unholy Science are instead rushing out to ingest toxic agricultural chemicals.

I wonder if H. Scott Apley now regrets that he wasn’t a more vocal advocate of vaccination. He’s the Texas Republican who was quite vociferously against anything to do with stopping the pandemic.

Apley is a staunch conservative and devout Christian. But based on his social media activity, Apley didn’t believe COVID was going to affect him or his family.

In May, Apley posted an invitation for a “mask burning” being held at a bar in Cincinnati, commenting, “I wish I lived in the area!” A couple of weeks earlier, he posted a news article about giveaways and incentives meant to encourage people to get vaccinated, writing, “Disgusting.” Apley also railed against so-called vaccine passports, which restrict high-risk activities, such as indoor dining, to the fully vaccinated.

Recently, he suggested that mask mandates in Germany were akin to Nazism. And when former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen celebrated good news this spring about the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy, a seemingly outraged Apley called her “an absolute enemy of a free people.”

Ooops, he regrets nothing, because he is dead now of COVID-19.