Well, I was so fried yesterday that I went to see this new Sonic Hedgehog movie. Boy, was I disappointed. There was absolutely nothing about cell signaling, or the patched receptor, or midline development. It was all about the adventures of Baby Karl Urban and some electrically charged blue mammal battling a guy with five Ph.D.s, which made no sense at all. Why would you have five degrees? And none of them were in developmental biology or molecular genetics. He seemed to be some kind of robotics expert, although being a perpetual student who can’t land a credible job are not credible qualifications for much of anything.

You’re better off watching this balanced summary of Star Trek history from Mikey Neuman. I learned a few things, although this, too, is seriously lacking in the departments of developmental biology and molecular genetics.

Is my brain still fried? Yes, but it’s OK. I’m about to go lock myself in a coffee shop and grade first-year biology exams. After that, I’ll probably need to go drink.

Yes, I’ve got so much economic anxiety nowadays that I’m imagining voting for Trump. It’s the irrational solution. Good thing I’m not that irrational, so don’t worry, I’m voting for either Sanders or Warren, probably the former.

The rational solutions:

• I’ll plug our Defense vs. Carrier SLAPP suit gofundme again.
• I’ll remind you that we’re having a celebration of our victory on YouTube on Sunday, 23 February, at 6pm. There might be some begging for donations then, as well as ragging on Carrier.
• I’ll mention the Pharyngula Patreon. By popular request, I’ve added a $1/month tier for people who can’t afford more than a small tip. I appreciate every penny! We’ve gotten over 100 patrons, which is great.
• A couple of blogs here, like Affinity and stderr, have run occasional auctions to contribute to our defense fund. Right now, Affinity is giving away this lovely knife in return for the highest donation.
  Strangely, many of these kinds of auctions involve extremely sharp edged weapons.
• If you can’t afford a regular donation but want to make a one-time contribution, there’s always paypal.me/pzmyers to toss me a few bucks.

Don’t worry if you can’t afford anything now — there is no degree of economic anxiety that will convince me to vote for Trump.

Mark your calendars! This Sunday, 23 February, at 6pm Central time, the victorious defendants in that ridiculous SLAPP suit will be gathering on YouTube to serve tea and mock the silly plaintiff and just generally have a good time celebrating getting out from under the legal action (if not the legal debt). We’ll spill the inside dirt on the ugly affair and laugh and maybe get a little bit inebriated and also try to answer people’s questions about the whole mess.

You can join in the chat, too — we’ll post links to the live YouTube event later, here and on The Orbit and maybe on the Skepticon blog, and encourage everyone to chime in with your comments. Even the haters…it’s always nice of you to show up and get giggled over.

It’ll look just like that.

I have a frantically overloaded day ahead of me, so I’ll have to leave you with a picture of a happy granddaughter.

Here’s a less happy photo of our grandson, who was hospitalized for croup.

But the happy news is that he’s all better now!

I do, that’s who. With the first one you feel some sympathy for the candidates, who get a long grueling day of non-stop meetings and conversations and questions, but ’round about the third one, you begin to wonder who is suffering more in this process. It’s going to be another late night for me.

Also, I’ve got to escape to get a haircut. Today will be impossible, tomorrow is a heavy teaching day, maybe Wednesday? It’s rather annoying when work takes over and makes it nearly impossible to take care of basic grooming tasks. Well, the candidate is just going to have to get the impression that “shaggy” is the standard style at UM Morris. Except that I sure hope he learns our style standards from the other committee members, not me.

Yesterday, I discovered that my elbow was causing me excruciating pain. I was mystified; I wasn’t doing any unusual physical activity the day before, and I don’t remember bumping into anything with my elbow. I have no idea what happened.

Except, now that I have a flaming hot lance of incredible fiery pain in my elbow, I’ve discovered that I bang into things all the time. Walk into the bedroom, there’s a door…of course I hit it with my elbow. Go to the bathroom…whoops, there’s a divider by the sink, give it a good whack. Is it possible for me to make coffee in the morning without bumping into anything? No, it is not. Now I go around hissing in agony and cussing up a storm.

At least I have learned the evolutionary function of elbows. They are knobby bony things that act as antennae to detect obstacles in the environment for clumsy people. No other purpose. Also, they have a direct neural connection to the expletive lobule of the brain.

I’ve been wondering about something. Here in small town America, when I walk downtown, I see swarms of pickup trucks parked outside the coffee shops and restaurants, especially the ones that cater to the older citizens on a tight budget, like McDonalds (Mickey D is huge with old retirees) and a local homestyle restaurant, DeToys. These are massive vehicles to ferry their owners a few miles to a cheap eatery, where they emerge looking like shriveled pot-bellied cowboy-wanna-bes on stick-like legs, where they hobble in to scrape change out of their pockets to buy a cup of bad coffee off the dollar menu. They make me look young and spry and sensible. Note that I’m not complaining about them being old and poor — if anything, we should take better care of the elderly — but the jarring incongruity of these people driving around in something that’s a small step down from a monster truck.

I don’t quite understand the mindset behind their priorities. All my life I’ve been getting the smallest car I can fit the family into, and my kids will testify to that…perhaps bitterly, as they recall family vacations in cramped vehicles. I aspire to someday have a car that is shrunk down to just big enough to hold me and my wife, gets phenomenal gas mileage (EV, preferably), and has good safety ratings. That’s all I want in a machine that I use to move from point A to more distant point B.

But then, it turns out I’m un-American.

Car companies…knew what people really wanted: to project an image of selfish superiority. And then they sold it to them at a markup.

The picture they painted of prospective SUV buyers was perhaps the most unflattering portrait of the American way of life ever devised. It doubled as a profound and lucid critique of the American ethos, one that has only gained sharper focus in the years since. And that portrait is largely the result of one consultant who worked for Chrysler, Ford, and GM during the SUV boom: Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, a French emigree, believed the SUV appealed—at the time to mostly upper-middle class suburbanites—to a fundamental subconscious animalistic state, our “reptilian desire for survival,” as relayed by Bradsher. (“We don’t believe what people say,” the website for Rapaille’s consulting firm declares. Instead, they use “a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology and psychology to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave towards a product, service or concept”). Americans were afraid, Rapaille found through his exhaustive market research, and they were mostly afraid of crime even though crime was actually falling and at near-record lows. As Bradsher wrote, “People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence.” They, quite literally, bought SUVs to run over “gang members” with, Rapaille found.

Another obvious contrast is that most of the SUVs and trucks I see are clean and shiny, maintained for the prestige. They are not working vehicles. I’ve seen real working vehicles: when I was a kid visiting my uncle’s ranch, they had a beat-up old pickup, rusted and filthy, that we’d load up with hay bales in the morning and drive out over the rocky sagebrush-covered fields to scatter food for the cows. That was not a truck you’d drive into town, not unless you were desperate to get away. Most of the people driving these things are demonstrating some warped status-seeking behavior.

Car companies marketed SUVs towards these people with advertisements featuring SUVs dominating roads, climbing boulders, and other extreme feats even though, by the auto industry’s own research, somewhere between one and 13 percent of SUV owners actually drove their vehicles off-road, and most of those who said they did considered flat dirt roads “off-roading.” In other words, auto companies spent billions of dollars on marketing every year to nudge people to buy over-engineered, inefficient, and expensive vehicles in order to allay irrational fears far out of touch with the lives they actually had.

This cynical marketing worked stunningly well. In 2019, the seven best-selling vehicles in the U.S., and 13 of the top 20, were either pickup trucks or SUVs (pickups, of course, now incorporate many of the same marketing tropes as SUVs from the early 2000s). According to the Detroit Free Press, pickups and SUVs now account for 60 percent of new vehicle sales.

Perhaps no vehicle exemplified this trend more than Hummer. Owned by AM General until GM bought the brand in 1999, Hummer embodied a specific time and place in the American psyche that embellished the SUV persona of overcompensation for insecurity and fear.

Michael DiGiovanni, a GM market researcher who persuaded GM to buy Hummer and ended up running its Hummer operations, told Bradsher the $100,000 vehicle was marketed to “rugged individualists” who were “people who really seek out peer approval,” a delicious irony considering how much other road users loathe Hummers. Like their general SUV-owning brethren, few used the vehicle for actual off-roading.

They aren’t even safer than my tiny little Honda! There’s an 11% greater chance of a fatality in an SUV than in other vehicles, despite their larger size.

Now I’m wondering if the reason I’m not interested in a gargantuan truck is that I watch very little commercial TV, so I don’t see the advertising, and the online targeted advertising I do get doesn’t even try to interest me in buying small tanks. If you watch Fox News, are you more likely to want the biggest metal box you can buy to protect yourself from the Urbans and Immigrant Hordes?