Classes are scheduled to start tomorrow. I’m ready, I’ve got a couple of weeks of lectures in the can, swarms of flies at the starting gate, and a grand plan for lab work that’ll take me all the way to May. Students are probably trickling back this weekend, except…

It’s -12°C, snowing, and we’ve got 40kph winds howling outside my window. It’s supposed to drop to -20°C tonight. There are travel advisories up all over the place.

I’m anticipating a half-empty classroom tomorrow. I don’t anticipate the school being closed — this is Minnesota, we take a stubborn pride in plowing ahead through the most frightful weather — but I might have to offer the class over Zoom, for just this one day. I have a strong allergic response to Zoom anymore, but it might be the safest recourse.

Now, live from Wisconsin!

It’s amazing how sharp the boundary is between Minnesota and Wisconsin: you cross the border and suddenly it’s adult novelty stores, billboards for cheese, and roadkill as far as the eye can see.

Previous Thread

This is not an omen. This is just the brain of a 53 year old man-child raised on 4chan, who has somehow acquired more money and power than he knows what to do with.

Elon Musk has changed his X profile.
His avatar is now Pepe the Frog, a mascot adopted by white supremacists.
His name is a Latinisation of “Kek”, a phrase used by neo-Nazis.
Musk has also backed AfD in Germany, the political home for racists.
The man is telling us explicitly what he’s about.

Could someone please let him know his immaturity is exposed?

Also, haven’t all the cool kids moved on well past the “kekistan” nonsense? This is so 2015.

The Aztecs would rip out still-beating human hearts to honor the sun god Huitzilopochtli, so that the sun would continue to rise. I too have performed a ritual every year, in a tradition taught me by my father. On New Year’s Eve, we consume a root beer float to honor the passing year and propitiate the new one. Every year since I was a wee little tyke I have performed the sacrifice.

Until last night. I no longer have children at home, and my wife was at work. I was alone with the cat when I suddenly realized at 11pm that I had none of the sacred ingredients, neither root beer nor ice cream, it was -10°C outside, and even if I felt like taking a walk, no store would be open at this hour. I must confess I also didn’t feel much like saving the world this year.

I apologize if 2025 turns out to be a disastrously bad year — it will all be my fault.

The omens have already begun. The US Capitol building was struck by lightning last night, something that I’m sure almost never happens.

The sale of my mother’s house is imminent — closing is on 3 January. I have spent my afternoons since last week trying to cancel utilities and various services to the house, and it hasn’t been easy. I’ve sat on hold on the phone for an awful lot of time, because, as it turns out, most of these services are reluctant to lose a paying customer, even if she is dead. Much of what I’ve had to do is call, wait for an answer, get told an email address to send a death certificate and letters testamentary, and then wait for a verification phone call. And then discover that the electric company had misspelled her name, which was not an obstacle when billing her, but becomes a problem when telling them to stop billing her.

But finally, it’s all done! The house goes dead on Friday, only to come back to life with new owners.

Next step is to go through a long list of annuities and get them cashed out. Also, a minor thing, I have 21 silver dollars that were in her bank deposit box, I’ll have to get those appraised. I checked out a few of them on the web, and they were selling for somewhere between $10 and $50 each, but I have to wring every penny I can out of everything before I’m done.

I was running some simple errands this morning — I need a short bit of ethernet cat8 cable, something I figured I could pick up locally for $5-$10. I went downtown to what used to be the Radio Shack, that was my usual convenient place to get necessary bits of cheap tech. It was gone! The store had been cleared out and all the merchandise replaced with…Jesus crap. Well, I sure wasn’t going to get my printer connected with a prayer and some slogan praising Jesus silkscreened on it.

This is getting worrisome. A lot of the businesses around town have been gradually replaced with pious garbage that I will not shop at. This one, no, they’ll never get my business. Especially since the hours are 4-8pm on weekdays, longer on Saturdays, and of course never on Sundays. That doesn’t sound like a particularly good business plan to me, but what would I know? I’m not their market.

Anyway, if you’re in need some non-essential fluff and want to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up, the place is called Kings Media & Merch. They sell nothing at all useful, and only at inconvenient hours.

I’ve noticed a trend. My childhood Christmases were raucus events, with my big extended family all cramming into our little houses, and we had two of them, one for each set of grandparents.

My adult Christmases were smaller but just as nice — me, my wife, the kids, and that was it. No grandparents because we’d moved a thousand miles away.

Now in my geezerhood, the parents and grandparents are all dead, my kids are scattered in a broad swathe from Tacoma to Kuwait, and my wife is pulling an early & long shift at work, so I’m home alone, no presents, no Xmas feast, no party of any kind.

I know! I’ll go to the lab and spend Christmas with the spiders!