The lure of the exotic! Adventure awaits!

I was served up an ad that, for once, triggered a deep yearning in me. It was for a Lake Superior circle tour, a collection of 84 museums in various states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ontario — that ring the big lake up North. Many of them looked like somebody’s old house that is used to show off some local artifact, but still, I am so desperate to get out that the whole thing looked like grand fun. It’s a measure of my need to escape that even this place looked appealing.

I wanna see the largest motorized tricycle “possibly in the world,” the world’s largest working chainsaw, the world’s largest working rifle, and I want to use the “free batrooms”.

Not really. Once I get vaccinated and once my teaching obligations are over, what I really want to do is flee Morris, Minnesota for a while.

Nothing against the Da Yoopers Tourist Trap — I appreciate the honest advertising, at least — but if I hadn’t been cooped up for a year I wouldn’t be ogling that place like it was the Louvre. Although, actually, there are probably more spiders in Da Yoopers than there are in the Louvre…

We’re getting better?

Have you been watching the statistics? It looks like we’re finally on the right track.

It might have something to do with this:

I also check the state stats. Minnesota is looking a bit above average for the country.

I still have anxiety nightmares about the pandemic, though. After all, someone has to be the last person to die of COVID-19 this year, and the end of the pandemic doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have to live with this virus forever after.

Also, I figure that once I get my second dose of the vaccine (I haven’t even gotten my first dose yet), I’ll probably get hit by a bus the day after.

Good news from the progeny

#2 Son, Connlann, is going to be promoted — he is now a Captain (Promotable), soon to be a Major. Even better, he’s been assigned to a new base. He’s getting out of Texas, yay! And he’s going to be stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington State.

Now Mary and I have another excuse to visit the Pacific Northwest, once we get vaccinated…which is not imminent. Last date I heard was SEPTEMBER. Yeesh. I guess we’re down near the bottom of some list.

Minnesota disappoints me

The state had a contest to name our fleet of snowplows, and the results demonstrated no creativity at all.

I’m sorry. We should be ashamed and embarrassed. Have you seen the list of Scottish snowplow names?

Amber Snowy
Arctic Angel
BFG Big Friendly Gritter
Blizzard Bear
Chilly Connolly
Darth Spreader
David Plowie
For Your Ice Only
Fred
Gangsta Granny Gritter
Grit A Bit
Grit Expectations
Gritallica
Gritney Spears
Gritter Bug
Grittest Hits
Grittie McVittie
Grittle Mix
Gritty Gonzales
Gritty Gritty Bang Bang
Han Snow-lo
I Want To Break Freeze
Ice Breaker
Ice Destroyer
Ice Queen
Jeremy Brine
Lew-Ice Capaldi
Licence To Chill
Luke Snowalker
Meltin’ John
Mr Plow
Mrs Gritter
My Name’5 Doddie
Nitty McGritty
Penelope Gritstop
Plougher O’Scotland
Polar Bear Explorer
Polar Patroller
Ready Spready Go
Rumble
Salty
Sandy The Solway Salter
Scotland’s Bravest Gritter
Sir Andy Flurry
Sir Grits A Lot
Sir Salter Scott
Slippy McGritty
Snow Bother
Snow Destroyer
Snow Dozer
Snow Trooper
Snowball
Snowbegone Kenobi
Snowkemon Go
Sophie Salt
Spready Mercury
Sprinklebell
Sprinkles
The Golden Great Gritter
The Grittiest Snowman
The Incredible Ice Bear
The Snow Buster
The Snow Solution
The Winter Explorer
True Gritter
Yes Sir Ice Can Boogie

Go back to the drawing board, MNDOT.

Spam filter powers activate!

Got this in my email this morning. Now I’m triggered.

No. I don’t believe a bowl of gummy bears will change my life. I’m going to guess these contain cannabis, but I don’t care enough about my hypothesis to click and check.

The Fox News logo immediately alerted me that this is garbage marketed at old gomers, and I’m not there yet.

Then there’s “AND SO DO THE THE SHARK’S”. Double “the”, inappropriate possessive, and citing Shark Tank, that show about a group of arrogant capitalists? No thank you.

Yikes, another blowup in the SF community

Oh boy, the bad boys are at it again. There was an online forum at Baen Books where, as such things happen, there was a wide-ranging and diverse discussion, which is usually a good thing…except that if the management of the forum is slack, it tends to slide into shabbier and shabbier conversation, and soon enough, it’s overwhelmed with shitposters. Honestly, have we learned nothing in the past couple of decades? If you don’t have rules, if you don’t have active management of the discussion, you inevitably end up with 4chan. And no one wants another 4chan.

A writer, Jason Sanford, blew the whistle on the shenanigans going on there. Remember, this is a site run by a professional publishing house; you’d expect some minimal level of decorum. Instead, they got this:

Baen’s Bar has also become well-known in the genre community as a place where racism, sexism, homophobia and general fascism continually pop up. For example, a Baen’s Bar user from India was nicknamed “The Swarthy Menace” on the forum by author Tom Kratman. People on the forum thought that was the height of clever humor.

Racist comments and innuendos frequently appear in many forum discussions. In a thread last year titled “Soft Civil War & Trump’s Army,” user Captrandy wrote that political conflicts in the USA could be solved if “all the angry and non angry white males should stop going to work for a month or so.” In another political thread, user Pugmak wrote “Simple competence has been declared white supremacy. Knowing how to do your job and expecting others to do likewise is now white supremacy and workplace oppression.”

And that’s just the beginning. Baen Books publishes a number of conservative writers, who have conservative fans, who were all fired up about the events on 6 January and started posting calls to political violence. They were the usual idiots, the usual gun-fondling fantasy warriors.

Returning to discussions on the pending second American Civil War, which appears to a favorite topic on the Bar, user Peke wrote on January 8, 2021, that “I can see a smallish force with good skills at explosive handling, bringing a large city to its knees just through a few well-placed booms at some of the points I mentioned.”

Fortunately, that topic caught the attention of moderators. That’s sarcasm on my part because a few posts after Peke’s comment a moderator named James S Cochrane responded to the pending civil war thread by saying “You aren’t seeing a lot of public commentary because all communications are insecure. But most of the former SpecOps people I know have gone quiet. People who trained for twenty years to lead insurgencies or put rounds on target at a mile plus. The Left has also driven off a lot of cops who couldn’t stomach their behavior, most major cities are seriously understaffed at this point.”

That’s right, it’s a moderated discussion board, but the moderators are also playing with their weaponry with one hand, while typing with the other.

The fallout from this unregulated keyboard militia running amok is that Toni Weisskopf, publisher at Baen Books, and nominal grown-up in charge of the circus, has had her Guest of Honor invitation to Worldcon retracted, and the forum has been shut down, at least temporarily. Sanford is getting harassed with death threats. The usual suspects — the various flavors of puppies — are outraged.

It seems to me that a reasonable action has been taken against irresponsible speech, though. It’s entirely fair to refuse to honor someone who is supposed to be in charge who has not been doing her duty, and has allowed a public space to turn into a cesspit. I haven’t seen any sensible defenses of the behavior that was allowed to flourish on Baen’s forum. I tried; here’s an author named Eric Flint who pointed out (probably correctly) that it was only a few bad actors who were saying the stupid stuff.

This is the “great menace of Baen’s Bar” that Sanford yaps about. A handful of people—okay, two handfuls, tops—most of whom you have never heard of, who spout absolute twaddle. Yes, a fair amount of it is violent-sounding twaddle, but the violence is of a masturbatory nature.

Then he goes on to say that Baen Books publishes stuff by some liberal, left wing authors. Again, I believe him. But no one has been claiming anything different. The problem is that you’ve got this double handful of people posting violent masturbatory twaddle, as he admits, and no one was doing anything about it. It’s a moderated board! Why not kick out the violently masturbating twaddlers and make the whole experience more pleasant and productive for everyone else? That’s the objection, that such garbage was allowed to fester, and whoever was supposed to be running the show wasn’t running the show. The argument that it was a tiny minority of troublemakers is irrelevant if the troublemakers were given free rein.

Imagine a bakery that is shut down by a health inspector who finds rats frolicking in the kitchen. Mr Flint is like the dedicated customer who argues that he really liked their croissants, they used the best ingredients, and there weren’t that many rat droppings in his food. Only a handful, OK, maybe two handfuls of rat turds in his flaky, buttery, delicious croissant, so why are you closing his favorite bakery and fining the owner? I’m not only going to question his reasoning, but his taste, when I suggest that maybe they’d be even better without all the rat poop.