What should I wear for a Halloween costume? Here’s an idea: I could go as a sexy Ph.D.

Hey, I’ve got the qualifications! It would be perfectly appropriate for me. I shudder to think of all those peons who might have only a bachelor’s degree sashaying about, masquerading far above their station.

The reviews are enlightening, though. It seems that selling the image of hardworking scientists as sex objects is rather awful and demeaning.

So don’t get that costume. Actually, this whole business of sexy costumes is gross and discriminatory. So I tried looking for something more appropriate for me…search for “spider costume for adult man“.

Oooh, it still popped up with a sexy halloween costume. This has gone too far.

I hope there hasn’t been much depreciation in an older body, because I’m thinking just selling off one kidney would get a whole lot of us out from under some legal debt.

All the other defendants are younger and their body parts are probably worth more, but if I sold off an organ, I’d also have some left over to get a fancy new microscope for the lab. They’d probably use the excess for something youthfully frivolous.

By the way, while we wait for a decision on the Minnesota case, the next step is a hearing in the Arizona case, in which Carrier, acting as his own lawyer, gets to depose the woman he harassed, which is all kinds of fucked up. Isn’t it nice how the legal system enables his ongoing harassment?

I went off to see Joker last night, feeling conflicted. The director, Todd Phillips, has been kind of a dumbass complaining about how he’s a victim of “cancel culture”, so I felt like skipping it just because the guy has a ridiculously thin skin. He’s also been whining about how you can’t do comedy anymore, because his audience has a thin skin.

Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture. There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’

This was confusing because Joker is not a comedy. Definitely not. Not a single laugh in the whole show, except for the strained, fake laughter of the central character. It’s a bitter, sad story of a man’s descent into hell.

Another thing it’s not is a comic book movie. It’s got token signifiers — it’s set in Gotham City, with an Arkham Asylum, and a rich guy running for mayor named Thomas Wayne who has a young son, Bruce — and that’s about it. A few callbacks to characters in comic book movies does not make it a comic book movie, although maybe it makes it more marketable. I left thinking it would have been better with no attempt to connect it to the world of comic books, as a character study of a man named Arthur Fleck struggling with mental illness and an uncaring, brutal society divided into the really rich and the really poor. It’s also an interesting exercise in the use of the unreliable narrator.

You never know what’s really happening in the story! It’s told from the point of view of Arthur Fleck, and constantly slips into his fantasies. The woman in the apartment down the hall is his girlfriend…no, she’s not, she’s terrified by him. He’s in the audience of his favorite late night talk show host, and is singled out for praise and brought on stage…no, he’s not, that’s clearly a daydream he’s having. He gets invited to appear on the talk show after his terrible stand up act goes viral…wait, is this a real part of the storyline? Is any of it? The final scene is in Arkham Asylum…is the whole dang movie from start to finish a fantasy playing out in Arthur’s mind?

I like this kind of complicated ambiguity. It keeps me thinking non-stop throughout, and makes me consider seeing it again just to figure out what I missed, and assemble a complete picture of the puzzle. If you’re one of those people who thinks it’s a celebration of incels committing mass murder, you’ve made a very superficial reading of the story. It’s not that, either.

It’s also not about revolution and an underclass rising up to throw off the shackles of the rich, an interpretation one could also make. Arthur is a “hero” in the movie not to a criminal underworld, but to an oppressed majority of working class and poor people living in this grungy hell-hole of a city. They don’t know who he is, he isn’t a leader, he just represents somebody embodying the spirit of one of their signs, “Kill the Rich”. We don’t even know if this is an actual event in the world of the story, or just another wishful thought oozing through Arthur’s head.

I walked out feeling like this is the kind of movie I ought to like, and I sort of did, but the one terrible flaw is that the whole thing is unremittingly discouraging and hopeless. The message is that the world is shit, and it’s even shittier if you’re poor and have a mental illness, and even the wealthy who ought to have it easier are just grim, soulless people who take pleasure in punching down. I guess you could argue that that is all true, and the movie has built an excellent mirror to society. I’d like to be able to imagine one tiny sliver of hope somewhere, though. I guess I’m a bit like Arthur that way.

Way, way back when we first moved to Minnesota, almost 20 years ago, one of the promises I made to my daughter Skatje to help reconcile her to the move was that we’d let her get a cat. We did! In the spring of that year she adopted Midnight.

She loved that cat. Midnight has been her constant companion through high school, through college, through grad school, through her marriage, and now through the first year of her child’s life. Iliana and Midnight have gotten along pretty well.

While Midnight has been lively and alert every time we’ve seen him, he’s been steadily accumulating geriatric cat health problems, with years of urinary tract infections and kidney problems, and was recently diagnosed with a large tumor in his digestive tract that was just going to get worse. After twenty years of mutual loyalty, it would have been unkind to let him suffer more.

So yesterday, Midnight was put to sleep.

It’s a funny thing, but he was a bit of a pain in the neck — we still have a big urine burn on the floor in my office, where he’d sneak into a corner to pee — but you don’t get to love someone because they’re convenient. He’s going to be missed, and remembered, in our family.

A few years ago, we bought a vest and leash for our cat, with the idea that she’d be able to play outside, supervised. She tries to escape at every opportunity, so we thought she’d like that. It was a nightmare. She was shape-shifting and twisting and clawing and yowling to escape, and ended up pulling a Houdini, getting out of it, and leaping in a single bound onto the roof of our house. We immediately gave up on trying ever again. You can imagine what I think of this idea for a Halloween Spider Costume for Dogs, Cats.

No way. Nope. That would not be cute. It would be more like a scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing, and for more versimilitude, it would be my guts spilled over the scene.

Although…I wonder if the large size would fit me?

---

P.S. If anyone has a similar spider costume for their pet, send me a photo and I’ll post them for Halloween.

Hello, everyone. How was your day? I got to drive all across the state to sit in court and quietly listen to a little man call me a liar twice, and then drive back again.

Briefly, today’s hearing was strictly procedural. Richard Carrier filed a defamation lawsuit in the state of Minnesota against me, after the statute of limitations on such suits had passed. He had to argue that tolling the statute was a reasonable thing to do do.

He had sued a bunch of us in Ohio, and failed because the venue was inappropriate — none of us lived in Ohio, and he had only just moved there himself¹. Ohio basically told him they weren’t going to let him move to their state for the purpose of suing a lot of random people in other states. He argued that because, while he was out of the statute of limitations for Minnesota, but was still within the statute of limitations for Ohio, where he was ineligible to sue me, we ought to pretend the part of Ohio law that defines when you can sue someone in Ohio ought to apply here in Minnesota, and that because he was busy suing us in his failed effort in Ohio, that ought to have stopped the clock for purposes of his Minnesota lawsuit. It was very twisty. It must be fun to pick and choose pieces of different state laws to cobble together a legal justification for doing whatever you want.

Our lawyer, Marc Randazza, argued that that rather defeated the purpose of Minnesota’s statute, and that there were good reasons to limit how far back you can go to fish up mean things someone said about you and sue them for it, and it opened the door to endless suits. How can you apply an Ohio law to Minnesota when Ohio has already been determined to not have jurisdiction?

Another excuse Carrier had was that I had displayed the post he was suing me for in a YouTube video, and that should count as resetting the clock on the defamation. That’s interesting, because it means he gets to silence me no matter what — any mention of my accusation means he gets to sue me again. He even said that: if this hearing rejects his tolling of the limitations, he’ll just refile another lawsuit based on the last time I mentioned his banning. Infinite harassment! Yay!

I also learned what he specifically objected to in that post. It was this paragraph, and specifically the mention of “persistent, obnoxious sexual behavior in defiance of specific requests that he cease”².

Whoops! Guess I just reset his imaginary clock again!

Anyway, Randazza pointed out that everything I said was a statement of what I’d been told, that it was even backed up by documents that Carrier himself put in evidence (the emails between Carrier and Dadhaboy are clearcut examples of persistent obnoxiousness, for one thing). The whole suit is going to get thrown out eventually, so why not cut it short? The judge said that his role there was just to make a judgment on merits of his procedural argument, unfortunately. Which is fair, even if these procedural technicalities allow him to carry on his legal harassment indefinitely.

That’s where it all stands, unsatisfactorily. Randazza made his arguments that Minnesota limitations apply, Carrier made his that he gets to bring in Ohio law, there was some discussion of the contents of the suit that Carrier brought in in his own filing, and the judge said he’ll make a ruling when his workload permits, which may be months and months away. So we wait. If the judge agrees with my lawyer, we’re done, the lawsuit is thrown out. If the judge decides to let Carrier have his way, the process will linger on, we’ll have a trial and discovery and all those fun things which will drag the sleaze in Carrier’s history into the light. Both have their advantages — Randazza would love to bring this to trial on first amendment grounds — but I’d rather just have it over and done with.

It’s not over and done with yet.

---

¹He accused me of lying when I said I thought he lived in Northern California, where he had been living up to something like a week or so of filing suit. I guess he thinks I should know where all the bloggers here are living all the time^*, especially him, because he’s so special.

²He accused me of lying and making that up, that it was just my opinion. Nope. It’s what I was told when I asked his accusers. We’ve got the receipts. They’re in his own legal filings, actually.

^*I don’t have a clue, mostly. I put the tracking devices in their heads, like I was supposed to, but I told them they had to change the battery every year, at the same time they changed them in their smoke alarms. Just stick the AAA battery in their right ear, positive end first. They keep screwing it up! Wrong ear, wrong way around, I suspect some are stuffing the battery in a different hole altogether.

---

Don’t forget our legal defense fund!