I stepped away from my computer for just a few minutes, went a few paces outside my door, and got blasted by the actinic rays of the sun, my lungs were scoured by a breath of fresh air, and then I went blind by these glaringly bright trees everywhere.
Don’t worry, I fled back inside and am back in my safe, dim room reading electronic submissions from students with the brightness of the monitor turned down, preciousesss. The lightses are too brightses, they is.
It’s a small thing in the grand mess we’re in, but it’s still good to see that “Doc” Antle, the insufferable exploiter from that Tiger King documentary, has been charged with felonies for his abuse of animals.
Bhagavan Antle, who is known as Doc and is the owner of Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina, was charged with two felony counts related to wildlife trafficking and 13 additional misdemeanors, according to the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia. Tawny Antle and Tilakam Watterson, daughters of Mr. Antle, are also facing several misdemeanor charges in connection with animal cruelty and alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act.
You know, everyone in that documentary was an awful person. Can we just arrest them all and get it over with?
They’ve got fabulous spiders, I’m told. I missed them when I visited, next time I’ll be sure to bring a large collecting vial.
I’m just a simmering mass of anxieties nowadays, so I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep.
What really annoyed me, though, is that was about the time my dad would wake us up to go fishing on a charter boat. We’d get up at this absurd hour, and head out to the docks where we’d stop at a restaurant full of salty dogs and chow down on a big platter of pancakes. So now I’m craving pancakes.
Then we’d get on the boat and cruise out over the Columbia bar, which was always a thrill ride that put stomachs full of pancakes at risk, but never bothered me much. Now I want a boat ride on 20 foot swells.
A full day of fishing, catching our limit of salmon early, then dropping our lines down deep and catching a load of bottom fish, cod and halibut, then heading home for a dinner of fresh salmon, and brining the rest for the smokehouse. Now I want my salmon.
This is Minnesota, though, and I’ve got a day of lecturing and grading ahead of me. Need ocean, as long as I’m getting up before sunrise anyway. Do early mornings flood native Midwesterners with memories of milking the cows or harvesting the corn or whatever? Because I’m lacking that connection.
On a busy day with lots of intermittent distractions, I have to admire Le Guin’s writing schedule.
The thing about the teaching day is that it’s broken up into short blocks sprinkled throughout the day, so blocks of time in which you build up so momentum don’t happen — you get short intervals which you have to spend getting ready for the next one hour chunk of something completely different. It could be better, if we had something like a 4 hour block of teaching, and a 4 hour block of research, but nope, everything is interleaved and we’re trying to mesh with every other faculty member and student needs.
Maybe someday, if I live long enough to retire. Except I notice Le Guin doesn’t include much spidering in her schedule, so there’d have to be a few differences.
Every semester has a worst day of the week, and for me this term it’s the dreaded Thursday: lab, my writing class, committee meetings, sometimes a senior seminar, and as always grading. Lab this time around demands a 2 hour prep ahead of time, as well.
I kind of like Mondays this term. I’ve recovered over the weekend, I’ve just got one big cell bio lecture, and labs don’t start for me until Tuesday. I can plunge into a Monday still fresh and optimistic, but I’m afraid that has totally worn off by Thursday.
Oh hey, I’ve also got to tend to the fly crop and the spider colony today. I hope you all appreciated the fly I sent off to Utah yesterday. I just told it to go west and find the biggest shithead you can smell, land on it, and teabag it for the cameras. The spiders are on the way to lay eggs in his ears, I hope the timing is good so they hatch out on election day.
Hey! Attention, consumers! I need to give you Important Informations!
I used to be like you, tired, worn out, full of aches and pains. It used to be a regular feature of my life that one joint or the other would flare up and start misbehaving. I’d injure myself rolling over in bed. I’d plan my summers around my annual knee eruption, which I could do nothing about but suffer. I’d think, well, this is just life, this is what getting old feels like, it’s just going to get worse and worse until one day I shatter my spine by breathing, and then it’ll be over.
Last spring, though, I had a routine check up with my doctor, and he mentioned casually that, you know, a lot of Minnesotans, we of the Northern climes, have vitamin D deficiencies — the vitamin you can synthesize with sunlight — because while we do have plenty of sunshine, we tend to huddle indoors all winter long to avoid freezing to death, and some of us have jobs that are performed under fluorescent lights even in the summer. I think he may have noticed my pasty-pale complexion and had reason to suspect I was one of those subterranean creatures who shun the light and live like mushrooms.
So I’ve been taking vitamin D supplements every day, and I just want to say…I think it worked. This has been my most pain-free summer in years, and I haven’t had a single knee or ankle or other random joint explode on me even once! It’s a miracle!
Anyway, just drop my name or use promo code…oh, wait, I don’t have a promotional deal with Big Vitamin, so never mind. These things are fairly cheap and seem to have made a big difference for me*.
It’s also given me exuberant hair growth and a minor derangement of some sort, but that’s a small price to pay.
*Possible confounding variable: I did a lot of summer research outdoors, so a fair bit of walking and far more sun than usual. That might have helped.
OK, also, major dietary change. My wife and I have thoroughly embraced the Mediterranean diet, so a bit of keto (but not over the top), lots of fish and olive oil and green vegetables and eggs. Possible slight contribution there.
Yeah, and I’ve lost 25 pounds or so since March. No way that could have done anything, right?
Oh, and I’ve been avoiding filthy, disease-ridden humans for half a year. Nah, that couldn’t possibly have any health effects.
It’s the little bottle of vitamins, yeah, that’s the ticket! But seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d been running a vitamin D deficiency for several years, so it’s probably a good idea to have corrected that.
…every one of the people in this charming video from 124 years ago is now dead? Even their children are dead?
Some things never change. Snowball fight 124 years ago. Lyon, France, 1896. Colorized and speed adjusted. Original in black and white by Louis Lumiere.pic.twitter.com/UOu5voQufH
— ArtNouveauDeco (@NouveauDeco) October 4, 2020
Yes, I must be feeling morbid. But I also want to know what happened in the rest of their lives.
I am no longer quarantined, so I have big plans for today.
That’s it! That’s my day! Spiders and grandchildren, always a good plan.
We were written up by the Sierra Club.
The Morris Industrial School for Indians closed in 1909, and the federal government transferred the lands and buildings to the state of Minnesota. In doing so, the federal government included a stipulation that the next educational institution built there would provide Native students free tuition.
The exact reason for the tuition waiver is lost to history, but Kevin Whalen, a Morris professor who specializes in Indigenous education, theorizes that it has its origins in treaty law. Many treaties between the US government and Native tribes contained provisions that the government would provide education in return for land. He said, too, that there were some who assumed the treaty waiver probably wouldn’t matter in the long run: Many in the US government at that time expected Native populations to disappear or die out.
When the US government transferred the lands to Minnesota, the University of Minnesota began operating an agricultural boarding school on the site. In 1960, the UMN Morris campus replaced the boarding school, and the tuition waiver requirement carried on.
Now, UMN Morris is a Native American–serving Nontribal Institution, a designation given to colleges that have more than 10 percent Native students. With the tuition waiver program still in place, nearly one-quarter of Morris students are Native American, far above the national average.
Since it’s the Sierra Club, they also play up our environmental focus.
To Olson-Loy, it is no surprise that so many alumni end up working in sustainability or serving tribal communities, or both. Native culture and environmentalism are “embedded” in everything that they do at the school.
“You get this stuff because you graduated from Morris,” Olson-Loy said. “It’s in the water here.”
If I were 18 again, I’d want to come here.
