Deadly sequels

I was horrified to learn that Ernest Cline had written a sequel to Ready Player One, creatively titled Ready Player Two. The original was one of those books I could not believe got published, it was so badly written and was such a weaponized pile of 80s nostalgia trash, but then Steven Spielberg went and turned into a big budget CGI-rich movie (I have not been able to read the whole novel, or watch more than a few minutes of the movie), and I was shocked yet again. But now Cline has spewed out another. He’s like the Dan Brown of our decade, an inexplicable popular phenomenon that provides a constant stream of bad quotations on the internet.

But there’s an even worse prospect ahead of us: Jordan Peterson is trying to publish Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life..

Jebus. Who knew there was such a large market for shit? And that publishing houses would be so eager to line up and shell out cash for it, in spite of the fact that their employees are up in arms about it?

Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.

Of course executives defended the publication! It’s capitalism, it’s all about the money! And of course the employees, who won’t see a penny over their fixed salaries and hourly wages, have the luxury of principles and can protest the unscrupulous decision.

It’s a self-help book by a guy who published an earlier self-help book, and then went on a self-destructive binge of drugs and weird, destructive dieting and ended up in a coma in a Russian clinic trying to cure his own self-harm with radical, expensive treatments. The only question is, did he end up in such a state because he followed his own stupid “rules for life”, or because he’s such a bad guru that he didn’t follow them? Either way, he shouldn’t be paid to dispense advice, and only a fool would listen to him.

It’s too bad that we have tens of millions of fools in 2020 America eager to lap up the corrupt drippings of bad writers.

What color is your engine check light?

I’ve been ambling along, telling myself that I’m OK, I’ve got a plan to get through all this, I’m fine, go away, leave me alone, I’ve got work to do. Maybe I’ve been wrong, though. Maybe I’m just really good at burying my worries. Then I ran into this simple illustration that brought my situation into focus.

I’m looking at my dashboard, and seeing that my engine status is not a solid green at all. It’s more like a solid yellow that occasionally flutters orange as my engine stutters sporadically. If I were a car, I’d be saying we ought to get this thing into the shop to be checked out (and honestly, if I were a car, I’d more likely be saying that we can coax a few more miles out of it and put off the bother of maintenance a little longer.)

I’m also thinking that there are just two things preventing me from crashing into the red.

  • The election was not totally disastrous. If the orange disaster had been re-elected, I’d be panicking that the starboard engine was on fire and the hydraulics have been cut and there’s no way to lower the landing gear — we’re going in for a belly landing in rugged terrain (yes, I’m aware that my metaphor has become airborne, but that’s to make the catastrophe more clear). Putting Biden in office just means I can sputter along in the yellow, not that everything is fixed.
  • The nature of my job is such that I have semesters of overwork separated by longish breaks. Everything is coming to a head in my classes right now, but by next weekend I’ll have the grading all done and can unwind with a lab full of spiders for a month and a half. It’s not quite enough to push my status into the green, because another semester looms beyond that, but it will help stabilize me in the yellow. I don’t think the surges in stress are the best way to teach or the best way to learn, but it’s the system we’ve got.

It does not escape my notice that yellow is not a good condition to be in.

What about you? Is your engine purring, grinding, or bursting into flames?

We braved the wilderness to forage for food today

It’s a big production. We’re avoiding human contact as much as we can, so we only rarely venture forth for essentials, like groceries. Unfortunately, today was the day. We’re in the last half-week of the semester, so no labs, so we could use my morning lab time to make the long drive to Aldi in Alexandria to pick up a load. We go in the early hours, arriving just as it opens, again to minimize exposure to filthy humans, and we stock up on about 3 weeks worth of food, and then we flee back south to the safety of our home. We’re probably OK until mid-December now.

We’ve made a major shift in our habits, and it still feels strange. It used to be we’d take grocery shopping for granted — the store in town is close enough that I’d plan ahead only a day or two, and walk the few blocks to pick up a few things every few days. But then the local store got all pestilential and refused to enforce the mask mandate (they’ve gotten better now, but they’ve lost our trust), so now we prepare weeks ahead — I also have a store of really basic staples, like dried beans and peas and rice, that could keep us going for a few months, if necessary — and I feel like one of those stupid doomsday preppers, and I despise those people.

Now we’re back, and that means buckling down to grading. It will be great to finish up this semester, and even greater to finish up this pandemic, some day in the distant future.

An unfortunate synchronicity

OBIT Edward J. Conrad died Thursday, November 19, 2020

Here I go and post a video about Ed Conrad on the 22nd of November, and then I learn that he had died 3 days before. I had tried looking him up, but he’d dropped off the internet as near as I could tell in 2015; I guess he was living the quiet life all this time.

I hadn’t mentioned that one of his other obsessions was life after death, and he wrote a fair bit about the Sheppton Mine disaster, and was confident that the experiences survivors and families had in that traumatic evident were proof positive of an afterlife. I did not find his stories persuasive. And no, the ghost of Ed Conrad did not visit me and tell me that I had to memorialize him with a YouTube video.

OOOoooooOOOOwoooooooooo.

Have you no sense of decency, ma’am, at long last?

A German COVID-denier (hard to believe such things exist anymore) decided to present herself as bravely defying the government by standing on a stage and claiming to be just like Sophie Scholl, which kind of takes one’s breath away as an appalling act of hubris. A security guard at the event is so disgusted at the way she’s trivializing the Holocaust that he publicly quits on the spot.

Watch to the end. The best part is when the young woman is so embarrassed that she throws her microphone down and storms off the stage.

Be like that security guard. Don’t be like Jana from Kasse.

Stay home. Please.

Have you read the news from Minnesota?

The daily scene at Regions is playing out in ICUs across Minnesota as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 sweeps across the state. Open ICU beds were down to single digits in some parts of Minnesota last week, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered a four-week shutdown of bars, restaurants and entertainment and fitness establishments in hopes of slowing the virus’ spread to alleviate pressure on hospitals.

From Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids to Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar to Regions, ICU beds are filling as quickly as they are opening up. Statewide, 79% of available ICU beds are filled, and 26% filled with COVID-19 patients.

The state’s capacity of open ICU beds has declined about one percentage point per day the past two weeks — raising the probability that some of the 408 ICU surge beds might need to be activated in unused hospital and nursing home wings.

“There’s no beds anywhere,” said Dr. Matthew Klee, whose ICU at Mercy is full and under pressure to take patients throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. “It’s become like a game of chess over the entire state.”

More worrisome are the growing infections among health care workers who then can’t care for patients.

HealthPartners on Friday reported 308 workers absent due to COVID-19 infections and 414 who were quarantined due to viral exposures. Collectively, the Allina Health, CentraCare and Mayo Clinic systems reported more than 3,000 such absences last week.

Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.

You don’t need to go gallivanting off to visit family this weekend. Really, you don’t.

I get mail…from Autism Speaks

Yesterday, I got a letter from a charity in the mail — it was from Autism Speaks. It had me mystified me — why are they asking me for money, and most of all how did they think I’d be interested in their organization? I didn’t bother to open up, but just threw it in the trash.

So today I ran across this useful guide to autism organizations, and thought I’d share it, just in case they’re doing a large scale fundraising drive.

The new Minnesota rules

The crackdown has started at last — late, but better late than never. Just in time for Thanksgiving!

Most prominently, the state is telling Minnesotans not to gather with anyone outside of their immediate household, just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

In addition: Indoor and outdoor dining will be prohibited, limiting restaurants and bars to takeout service only. Public pools, rec centers, gyms, fitness and dance studios and indoor entertainment venues like theaters and bowling alleys will also be closed.

Wedding receptions, celebrations and private parties are also not allowed under the new orders, though wedding ceremonies, funerals and other religious events are allowed if they follow current capacity and social distancing rules.

This is good. Shut down this nonsense now.

Unfortunately, there is some bad news.

The order also puts organized sports — for youth and adults — on pause, but allows professional and college sports to continue, under certain restrictions.

Retail, salons, places of worship, other activities will operate under restrictions already in place.

You know what this means, sports fans and church-goers! The state is just fine with you getting sick and dying. That’s no skin off my nose, since I don’t belong to either group, but I think you ought to be protesting and demanding equal respect. Close the churches and the sports arenas too!

Huzzah! The last Thursday of the semester!

I have complained about my Thursday schedule before, which makes it the worst day of the week for me. Well, this is the last one! As an added bonus, I also have no committee meetings scheduled for today at all! I can’t get too excited, though, that just means I have a few free hours I can use to tame that savage stack of proliferating grading obligations. Oh, and I have to compose the lab exam that I’ll be flinging at cell bio students tomorrow. And it’s oral presentations day in my communication class. And I need more coffee. It’s not a perfect day, but it’s getting better.

That settles it — I’ll be cowering in my bunker

I do believe I’ll be staying home for Thanksgiving. I definitely wouldn’t be attending any 10-person get-togethers, but if I got together with my daughter, who lives in the center of the dark red infection zone in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I’d be facing a somewhat unacceptable risk. I’m not going anywhere near the death zones of Fargo or Sioux Falls. In fact, the whole Midwest looks like a disaster, but I’m trapped in the middle of it.

You know, if I huddle alone in Morris, Minnesota for the entire holiday season, looking like a dork, and do everything the epidemiologists tell me, I am going to be so pissed off if I get COVID-19 and die anyway. I’m going to haunt all those Republican motherfuckers for eternity if that happens.

I don’t care that there is no such thing as an afterlife. My rage will not be contained.