Good news! Someone’s dead, someone’s alive!

Celebrate! Tom Metzger is dead and rotting.

Tom Metzger, a racist ideologue who became one of the most influential figures in the nation’s White supremacist movement and mentored a violent generation of neo-Nazis from his Fallbrook home, has died.

He’s one of those people you can just feel gleeful at hearing that he’s dead, without feeling the slightest twinge of guilt.

But perhaps that news, while satisfying, is a little grim for your taste. Here’s something lighter: I learned today that Wunda Wunda has turned 100, and is still alive!

Most of you are scratching your heads and saying “Who?”. She was a local children’s TV host who people of a certain age who grew up near Seattle will remember fondly, a kind of Mr Rogers predecessor, who read children’s stories to her puppets. I’m curious how many of my readers will know who I’m talking about.

Anyway, one vicious, nasty racist dies, one kind gentle woman lives on. The balance of the universe has improved.

Now can we get back to doing something about the pandemic?

One distraction, as important as it may have been, is over, so now can we take the pandemic seriously? Please?

New cases are soaring here in Minnesota, and our state government seems reluctant to act.

COVID-19 is sweeping across Minnesota at an unprecedented pace, breaking records for new cases and daily deaths and raising concerns over the ability of hospitals to keep up.

The Star Tribune reports Saturday’s tally of 4,647 new cases — a figure that would have easily set a record during the first eight months of the pandemic — wasn’t even close to the biggest single-day count of the past week. For the seven-day period ending Saturday, Minnesota reported more than 25,000 new COVID-19 cases, or more than 10% of the state’s cases since March.

The Minnesota Department of Health reported another 34 deaths on Saturday, bringing the week’s total to 168, the second highest one-week count since the start of the pandemic. Hospitals, meanwhile, are scrambling to treat more COVID-19 patients even as the virus threatens to sideline more health care workers.

We really need to clamp down: shelter in place, mandatory masking, active test and trace. We are getting free testing today and tomorrow here in Morris, but there doesn’t seem to be much urgency, and people are still fairly casual. I’m on my last week of in-person labs, and then I’m locking myself down and staying home and doing everything over the internet.

I’m not shy about saying this: I’m afraid. The question is, why aren’t you?

Last 3 weeks!

The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.

  • This week: cell signaling.
  • Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
  • Final week: cell origins.

It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.

Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.

Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.

I thought enrollments were supposed to be down?

Yikes. It’s the first day of spring term registration, first thing in the morning, and my genetics class is already full…plus I’m giving a few students permission to take it beyond capacity (I’m splitting all the labs to meet pandemic requirements).

Spring: all the anxiety and overwork of the fall, only with crappier weather. They better cure this pandemic soon, or I may keel over from the stress.

Oh, wait. Pandemics don’t happen anymore.

Well, if a Harvard Professor says so, it must be true.

It’s a wrap!

Our October fundraiser is over, and it was a success: we had fun, we hope we made readers aware of a few more of the many blogs here at the network, and we also raised about $2K, which will shortly be sent off to the people managing our legal debt. Everything was recorded using the magic of the interwebs, so if you missed it, you can still review everything online. Thank you all!

Now we’ll stop pestering you for donations. For a little while.

Our brains are spinning about a bit thinking of fun things to do for a Winter Festival* fundraiser, sometime after American Thanksgiving and perhaps in early December. This would be the perfect time for our readers to make suggestions about what you’d like to see and/or hear us do, and perhaps you have a favorite blog here that you’d like to see represented in the event. Speak up now, especially you donors!

*We have an election tomorrow, so who knows? Maybe we’ll have to do lessons on building barricades, or how to field strip an AK-47, or recipes for squirrel. We’ll be flexible.

A Dark Web: Part Six

This is the conclusion of our story chain, A Dark Web. You can find the previous chapters here:

  1. FTB Presents: A Dark Intellectual Web (Episode 1)
  2. A Dark Web: Part Two
  3. A Dark Web: Part Three
  4. A Dark Web: Part Four
  5. A Dark Web: Part Five

Warning: this chapter is a bit heavy on the exposition, and includes a little bit of gore and violence. Maybe a bit of body horror, too, if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of spider/human chimeras.

A Dark Web: Part Six
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