One. More. Week.

The last day of the Fall semester is Wednesday, 25 November. I can tell I’m going to barely scrape over the finish line. Yesterday was exhausting, with my face locked into Zoom all day and early evening, and I ended up totally zombified by the time I’d suffered through my last online meeting. Today I have the morning sort of free (there’s always prep work & grading to fill in the gaps), and I’m going to use it to dart into the lab and feed the poor neglected spiders. That seems to be the only joy in my life right now, and even that has to take a backseat to wading through Zoom and clearing my backlog of grading.

Of course, this is the last week of instruction — the final surge of assignments and exams comes sailing over the transom to keep me occupied from Thanksgiving through the first week of December.

Oh, and the holidays…we’re supposed to be sensible and avoid large family gatherings, and I was thinking that maybe we could get away with a small family gathering for Thanksgiving, meeting with my daughter & her husband & the adorable granddaughter. With us, that would only be 5 people, and they all work from home and have been careful about minimizing exposure. But then I realized that I am the dirty, filthy plague rat of the family, since I have been compelled by my job to share a physical space with about 40 people per week. My presence alone would expand their bubbles to a much larger size.

It makes me very unhappy, and it isn’t fair — I’m also probably the most at-risk person for severe symptoms in the family — but it would be terrible if, in this case, it was Grandpa who was responsible for infecting the younger family members. I guess I’ll be staying home. Maybe if I quarantine myself for a month I’ll be able to meet in a tiny family gathering without worrying that I’m going to kill someone.

Actually, after this killer semester, I might be content to just lie down and take a nap for a month, anyway.

The pool boy speaks!

The pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, who was entangled in a menage a trois with Jerry Falwell Jr. and Becki Falwell gives his side of the story to journalists. It’s sordid and depressing — everyone involved is self-centered and hypocritical and oblivious to their own unpleasantness. So, the Falwells picked up an attractive, well-built pool boy at a hotel for sexual encounters in which Jerry Jr. would watch Giancarlo have sex with Becki, and built it up into a many years long relationship with promises of helping Giancarlo get rich in real estate. Everyone is clueless. Jerry Jr. doesn’t think there’s anything peculiar about the head of an evangelical Christian “university” that strictly polices the sexual behavior of its students getting jinky in a three-way; the pool boy is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Falwells just wanted him for sex.

More and more, Granda would not want to have sex with Becki. By 2013, he would call his sister and tell her that he “physically could not continue” having liaisons with the couple. But whenever he tried to pull away from Becki or tell her that he didn’t want to have sex, he recalls, Jerry would grow furious at her.

The moral majority scion would also threaten Granda, he says, telling him that he would send videos of them having sex to his family and girlfriend.

Becki, in turn, would beg Granda to sleep with her, reminding him of when “we went to bat for you” to buy him the hostel.

“I don’t want this to sound like I’m being forced,” Granda emphasizes to TPM, thinking back to how he felt at the time. “I want to take ownership: I’m gonna bang her.”

“But I always felt like if I stopped, I would be completely cut off,” he adds. “Not financially speaking — losing out on the family experience, which I cared more about than anything.”

It’s around here that Granda began to feel that his place in the Falwell family was conditioned on sex, a cold but persistent feeling that would nag at him throughout the year.

It’s fine with me if Jerry Jr. gets off on voyeurism and infidelity; I am unbothered if Becki enjoys the kind of open relationship that lets her get laid with multiple men; Granda is a willing, consenting participant in their activities. But man, I despise stupidity and dishonesty. Be open about it. Don’t do a wildly hedonistic thing while simultaneously bullying others out of doing likewise.

Also, it’s appalling how much money these people were throwing around. Did Granda seriously believe his penis was worth millions of dollars?

‘Tis the season for terrible Christmas movies

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Sometimes I wonder if I just have bad taste, or if everyone else in the world does. My wife and I were beguiled by the advertising and reviews for this new movie on Netflix, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, “An instant classic!”, one review crowed, so we watched it the other day.

It jingle-jangled my brain.

OH MY GOD IT WAS SO BAD. This is a movie that tries desperately hard to be cheerful holiday fare that it crosses right over the line into creepy, and I was appalled in the first five minutes. All the characters have these intense nonstop grins splitting their faces and are so enthusiastic about everything that I was confident that the entire stage had been doses with smilex gas, and the show was a race to reach a conclusion before everyone collapsed in cackling death. There was no acting. There was only grimacing.

The plot: it’s about a toymaker who is famous for his inventions, although we’re not really shown any talent, or even any comprehension of what a child would want. In the opening, he builds a tiny and hyperkinetic matador doll that talks…and proves to be so egotistical that he ought to run for president, but has no personality other than an overwhelming narcissism. This creation is supposed to be the great new toy that will make him even more famous, but really, it’s a toy so lacking in charm that you just want to smash it. It might be a fine example of the worst evils of AI you can imagine, but nothing more.

The toymaker’s apprentice steals the matador and the notebooks with all his designs. Then we skip forward in time to learn that the toymaker became a babbling failure, is estranged from his own daughter, and the apprentice has become a success with an empire of toys. Enter the toymaker’s granddaughter, Journey, with a manic smile pasted on and a disturbingly optimistic can-do attitude. The rest of the movie consists of Journey using her ability to visualize mathematics as a kind of magic spell to animate stuff, including an ugly and pointless robot called Buddy 3000 that can fly and somehow enable people around him to fly. He’s activated by — I knew this was coming — belief. You just have to believe, and you can do anything.

Then there are sewer tunnels and explosions. Eventually the apprentice is defeated, and the toymaker vindicated, and he can return to making bad toys like the stupid matador and the big-headed Buddy 3000, all of which will go flying off the shelves, I guess. The only good moment is when the annoying matador is caught, and the toymaker flips off his power switch and announces that he will be reprogramming it, which is also rather disquieting. The matador was stupidly obnoxious and irrelevant to the story, but he did have a personality, icky as it was, and desires and feelings, and the master could just erase and reprogram it all. I guess that’s our Christmas message: if you’re loud and annoying and overly-excited about Christmas, we can shut you down and silence you.

It was apparently intended to be a stage production translated to Netflix, and it shows. Those smiles are designed so that even the kids in the nosebleed seats at Jingle Jangle on Ice would be able to seem them, and everything was so broadly done that there was no need for nuance or subtlety in plot or character or atmosphere. It was just LOUD and JANGLY and RELENTLESS. It also looked EXPENSIVE, with lots of elaborate sets and intense CGI animation. I’m wondering how much money they had to spend to get all those good reviews, too.

Oh, I almost forgot. It’s also a musical. I guess it was understandable that I forgot, because I can’t remember a single tune from the thing.

Resentment in the monkey brain

This monkey monkey got his banana, why should he share it with anyone else? It’s that selfish libertarian impulse, I’ve got mine, bugger the rest of you.

Damon Linker has a monkey brain.

We’ve seen the same phenomenon in our elections for a few hundred years. They’re all about keeping the privileged in their state of privilege. The chief isn’t going to share his banana with us peons, so all we can do is make sure those other monkeys over there are even less likely to get a scrap of banana than we are.

We’ve got to get out of that mindset. I worked off my college debt (which was tiny compared to what students face now), but I consider the deprivation of so many people to be a crime that needs correcting, and I want my students to succeed — I am overjoyed if the next generation surpasses mine. Please do grant them debt relief.

(Mr Linker has been featured on this blog a few times. I’ve never been impressed.)

Then there’s this guy:

Yes, please. Make college free. Why should you be unhappy if your fellow monkeys improve themselves and are able to make greater contributions to your society? Why should you be unhappy at seeing other people allowed to improve their situation?

Why is the cruise ship industry?

Just why. The first cruise ship tour resumed sailing the Caribbean, and guess what happened? Coronavirus, of course. The passengers are concerned and complaining, but I just want to know why you thought cramming yourself into a confined space with 119 other people would be a fun outing.

Sloan, who is a senior reporter for cruise and travel at The Points Guy, reported that the Covid scare started when the captain informed passengers of the preliminary positive test over the ship’s intercom system shortly before lunchtime on Wednesday.
Passengers were instructed to return to their cabins and remain isolated there, he said.

Great. You signed up for a cruise of the beautiful Caribbean, and now you get to sit in a cramped stateroom and maybe, if you’re lucky, stare out a porthole. Even in times without a pandemic, I fail to see the appeal.

At least they aren’t spewing out both ends as the usual outbreak on a cruise ship goes. Instead, they might end up struggling for breath and dying. The industry is constantly trying to upgrade the experience, you know.

Grrrr, Cancel Culture: now men are getting fired for masturbating on Zoom, where will this end?

If you hadn’t heard, Jeffrey Toobin is unemployed.

He tastefully avoids talking about why he was fired. It was for masturbating while on a zoom call with professional associates. Strangely, people are trying to defend him now, suggesting that he deserved a slap on the wrist rather than a firing. I disagree.

I am an authority on these matters, you know. As a cishet male, with white privilege and the credibility of someone with a respectable position (mostly) in society, and with a healthy interest in sex and a strong sex life, I can confidently say that I am entirely capable of participating in Zoom meetings while maintaining my full focus on the topic of the discussion. This goes for other events in my life, too: I can go for a walk, eat a meal, see a movie, all of these common mundane things, without masturbating.

Restraint is not a super-power.

Toobin engaged in unprofessional conduct that made the people he must work with extremely uncomfortable, and that compromised his credibility and status as a serious journalist. Of course he should have been fired!

Now the HR contingent and the moral outrage brigade are probably shouting in chorus: “Even if the camera was off, that level of, ummm, self-aggrandizement has no place at work.” I agree wholeheartedly. Except Toobin wasn’t at work. He was working, but he was at home. And if one if going to engage in such activity, I can’t think of a more appropriate place than in the privacy of one’s home. I might even go so far as to say it’s the only appropriate place for such individualistic indulgences, but then teenagers might never visit their local libraries.
This is where 2020 has blurred some vital lines. With so many of us now working out of our homes, should office norms apply to our private domiciles during work hours?

The lines aren’t that blurred. I’m also now working mainly out of my office at home, but I am quite capable of recognizing that when I’m teaching a class, advising a student, or attending a committee meeting, I am engaged in the professional activity for which I am paid, and which carries expectations of a certain level of appropriate conduct. I’m not so stupid that I think being in my house means I can turn into a wild and crazy guy and dance around naked during office hours.

Wait until office hours are over to open up the whisky and put a lampshade on your head. It’s really not that difficult. Draw the lines yourself and recognize the boundaries that will allow you to do what is needed.

If you can’t, well, maybe Jeffrey Toobin needs to get himself an OnlyFans account.

Hit the brakes hard right now!

Yesterday, Minnesota had 4900 new COVID-19 cases and 56 deaths. Our governor has announced a tepid response.

Starting Friday, there will be a 10-person limit on indoor and outdoor private social gatherings that include a maximum of three households, Walz said. Receptions for events like funerals and weddings will be limited to 50 people as of November 27 and 25 as of December 11 and will be prohibited from occurring between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.

Bars and restaurants will now be limited to 50% capacity both indoors and outdoors, with a maximum of 150 people. Dine-in service will end at 10 p.m., although delivery after that time can continue.

Oooh. No more than 50 people congregating all at once in a confined space. Yeah, that’ll stop an infectious disease right in its tracks. Then 150 people in a bar? Drunk people are well known for their restraint and consideration of others.

The chancellor of my university has told all of us to stay home as much as possible through at least 30 June.

Consistent with many other large employers and the State of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota is now asking staff and faculty who can work from home to continue to do so through at least June 30, 2021. The University wants to empower you all to make plans that support your families while maintaining a smaller number of people on campus.

Can I work from home? Ha ha, no. I’m teaching a genetics course with a lab this spring, as I was last year. Last year we basically had to shut down the lab mid-semester as the infection numbers were climbing. This year we’re seeing an even greater surge, but this time we’re just going ahead with the lab. Jaded, we are. The quarantine facilities on campus are at 33% capacity now, are we to expect that number will go down after the students go off traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and come back after milling about in a viral stewpot for two months?

I’m planning for the spring as best I can. To maintain social distancing and reduce contact, my plan is to cut the length of the labs and triple the number of sections, informally, which means merely increasing my lab workload three-fold. No problem! I’ve been “empowered”!

I’ve also got a contingency plan for shutting the labs down cold, and having students use data from previous years to do the analysis part of the work, at least. I guess that plan only kicks in when we’ve got a dead faculty member or student. What we ought to do is freeze everything in the country right now to bring it under control, but I guess we’re going with a half-assed dribble along scheme, crossing our fingers and hoping it’s all over at the end of June, coupled to an increasingly cavalier attitude about sickness and death.

The worst case scenario so far: more than doubling the number of deaths by February.

The United States on Friday was approaching a record for the number of new daily coronavirus cases, as a new study warned that the pandemic is set to cause half a million American deaths by February.

Covid-19 is on course to ravage states across the nation throughout the coming winter and more than 511,000 lives could be lost by 28 February next year, modeling led by scientists from the University of Washington found.

Don’t you worry, though. I’ll still be pushing fruit flies while 300,000 people die in the next four months. Unless I’m one of them, that is.