I need to vent. I’m grading lab reports, and one of my banes is this: students who assemble a series of tables and plunk them into the results section with no text narrative. Nothing to glue them together. Just Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, I’m done. I tell them in Cell Biology that I hate this, that it’s completely unacceptable, and these students have gone through cell bio. I tell them again in Genetics; I tell them I want them to imagine that all of their tables and figures fell out of the manuscript, but I can get the gist of what the results are from the text. I tell them that a table or figure does not exist if it is not referenced in the text. They’ve done one lab report earlier in the semester, in which this rule was reiterated, and I gave them big fat zeroes on their results section if they committed this sin. Then have to know by now. I’ve emphasized it so many times this term. I tell them in lab. I tell them in lecture. I warn them that this is a huge peeve of mine, and students keep doing it despite my tirades, and this year, finally, I hope the whole class will get it.

First 6 student lab reports: they just have a string of tables for a results section.

Jesus fucking christ. This isn’t hard. Can I just give them all failing grades, quit my job, and apply to be a Walmart greeter? They’re doing worse than they did on the first lab report.

I am not encouraged to continue, but I must. If the next lab report fucks this up, I’m going to explode and my poor wife is going to come home to an office painted in blood and body parts.

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I had to think back to the instructions I gave the students with the first lab report.

Introduction. You should explain what a complementation cross is, and you should explain what each of the mutants, scarlet and brown, do. I will not be expecting an extensive literature search; citing your textbook and flybase.org will be adequate.

Methods. Think back: you did a cross of st x st and bw x bw just to make lots of flies. You isolated virgin females to cross st x bw (and maybe did a reciprocal cross) and generate F1 flies. You then crossed the F1 flies to make an F2 generation. Explain all those steps! Imagine that your methods will be used by next year’s students to replicate this experiment.

Results. The core of the results section will be the data that is currently in a spreadsheet on Google. Reformat that into two pretty tables. You don’t have to include the entirety of the raw data; you might want to sum up particular categories. It’s all up to you how you present it. NOTE: Just the tables will not be an adequate results section. You must have a text narrative that explains the tables.

Discussion. Now interpret the results. Tell me what you expected, summarize what you observed, and do some statistics. Did what we saw fit the expectations? Remember that you looked at multiple phenomena. Are the sex ratios what you expected? Was one mutant more viable than the other? Are there anomalies in the data set, like maybe some groups got completely wacky results? Explain what must have happened. Another NOTE: there’s always a tendency to agonize over what went wrong. Try to emphasize the positive conclusions from the experiment.

I pretty much told them exactly what I expected. I also went over this in lecture and lab. I don’t know what went wrong, so I’m just going to blame COVID-19.

Lab reports are all graded now, and I didn’t die, yet. I’ve got to escape, though, so I’m going out for Mexican (I’m vaccinated! I can!): fish tacos and a margarita should help. Then I come back to do the next big assignment.

This morning, I followed the Sacrament of the Cat, which is that first I must use the bathroom and allow our cat to watch, and then I go to the kitchen and give her a nice big spoonful of Fancy Feast. This is a ritual that has been followed for time immemorial. She gets very cranky if I don’t follow it, and if I do, she gives constant yowling commentary.

I was alone in the bathroom. It was very strange.

I walked to the kitchen alone. She heard me open the tin of cat food and walked in quietly. When I served it on her plate, she sniffed at it, and then sadly walked into the living room and hopped up onto her easy chair. Here she is:

I opened the door to the sun room, where she has a blanket laid out for bird watching. The birds were making their usual racket. The cat didn’t budge.

I scratched her behind the ears, which usually triggers a paw swipe and a twist around to try and bite me. Not this time. She closed her eyes and didn’t move.

Uh-oh.

I let her be. She hasn’t left that chair all day. Tonight, I opened a can of tuna, which usually has her coiling around my ankles and demanding a taste. Nope. She didn’t leave her chair. She hasn’t eaten all day.

If she hasn’t bounced back tomorrow I guess I’ll be walking to the vet with a cat in her carrier, which she hates, and would normally have her snarling and hissing and spitting. I’m not even sure I’ll get that reaction out of her. She failed the tuna test! This is very ominous.

This past month has been something else — overworked, trapped in my office all day long, stressed out to the point where I’m severely lacking in sleep. I’m a physical and mental wreck. But that all changes shortly. I’ve been meeting with students all day, trying to coach them through their last few assignments, and my last appointment of the semester is at about 1:00…and then I’m done. They’re all on their own at that point. They’ve got their final exams in hand, they do them and turn them in on Tuesday, and it’s one last surge of grading, but I’m free until then. Days of freedom. I won’t know what to do with myself.

Well, actually, I kind of do.

By 1:30 I’ll have finished my last meeting. Then I’m bolting outta here. It’s a warm sunny day, I’m going for a nice refreshing walk. I might stop at the coffee shop — I can do that, I’m vaccinated — which I haven’t visited in over a year. I might just breathe fresh air for a while. I’ll try to avoid getting hit by a bus, which would be a terribly ironic end to a long painful year.

Then I’m coming home to sit out in the sun room and work on our Mother’s Day Fundraiser. See the link over there on the left? It’s empty at this point, but only because I’ve been too swamped to fill it in. The other good people here at FtB have been making plans, I’ll be consolidating those and putting them on the page, and then we just have to do it all, while begging you for donations to cover our legal expenses. I’m making a video about an intersex mother — it turns out you don’t have to have XX chromosomes to be a good mom, surprise, surprise — and we’ve got stories about mothers on various blogs to be unveiled. But all that isn’t work, it’s a change of pace, and fun.

But first, leg-stretching and lung-filling and pretending I’m human again for a while. Maybe I’ll sleep through the night tonight, too.

I think my theme for the day will be, “Look, mom! I’m still alive!”

Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing, news that does not interest me at all. A pair of meddling incompetent billionaires are splitting their fortune? Whoop-te-doo, as we say down here in the holler, does that mean they’ll stop trying to interfere in healthcare and education? Probably not.

But what does make me sit up and listen is that Melinda is letting all her resentments hang out. Oh boy! I am not at all surprised that Bill was suckered by Jeffrey Epstein.

Melinda Gates met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside her husband Bill in New York City and soon after said she was furious at the relationship between the two men, according to people familiar with the situation.

The previously unreported meeting occurred at Epstein’s Upper East Side Mansion in September 2013, on the same day the couple accepted the Lasker Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel and were photographed alongside then-mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The meeting would prove a turning point for Gates’ relationship with Epstein, the people familiar with the matter say, as Melinda told friends after the encounter how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender and how she wanted nothing to do with him.

This is what I don’t get about these people who willingly associated with Epstein. As the article says, Epstein was rude and arrogant and was constantly name-dropping, so why would anyone with billions of dollars want to hang out with him?

The ties between Gates and Epstein ran much deeper than the tech mogul first admitted. As The New York Times reported, starting in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions. This was three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida; by then, accusations that Epstein exploited girls and young women were widely reported in the press.

Oh, and this is fun: catch Gates lying about his relationship.

Indeed, the Times reported Gates visited Epstein multiple times from 2011 to 2013, and that Epstein had tried pitching a new charitable fund to JPMorgan honchos and to the Gates foundation. In 2013, Gates also took a ride on Epstein’s private jet (christened by tabloids as the Lolita Express), from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight records reviewed by the Times. CNBC also reported that Gates rendezvoused with Epstein in New York in 2013.

When Gates first met Epstein, he was still Microsoft’s chairman and the second richest person in the world with a net worth of $56 billion.

“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” Gates said in September 2019, as media coverage into his connections with Epstein were heating up. “I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that. There were people around him who were saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.’

Oh, yeah? What were you doing in Palm Beach, Florida in 2013 that you now want to hide, Bill?

That’s my daughter Skatje, who has successfully passed her exams for advancement to candidacy for a Ph.D. today. It’s hard to believe.

OK, the photo is about 20 years old.