We’re going away for a week, to Boulder, Colorado. The end result: to observe this exotic creature in her natural habitat. The blog isn’t going to go silent — apparently, the otherworldly organism does take occasional naps — but I’m going to be distracted for a while. Behave yourselves, and trolls, I’ll have my eye on you.

I’m looking forward to this new Aquaman movie with Jason Mamoa. It’s about time someone did that story right.

But then I read this anecdote from Amber Heard, his co-star. She liked to read between takes.

“He adopted this method of ripping out the pages of my book so I would pay attention to him,” she said on Good Morning America. “It would drive me crazy because I’d have 30 pages left and it would be gone.”

I literally gasped in horror. Defacing books is an extreme, radical act, not to be done lightly. He was doing it just to get attention, and he was doing it to someone else’s books.

I hope Heard has a big part in the movie, because I’m going to watch it as if her character is the true protagonist, and Mamoa is the nasty big lunk she’s got to work around.

Gaze on this erotic image.

The current state of computer detection of pornography is a bit primitive: it keeps mistaking desert photos for images of naked people. If I stare hard at it for a while, I guess I can sort of see it — it’s all those reclining curves, I think.

From this we learn that AI is not only unable to distinguish people from bags of sand, but also that it’s more than a little racist.

Almost. He had his 15 minutes, and then he was supposed to just fade away, but apparently his disappearance from public life is going to be preceded by setting himself on fire and taking a swan dive into a giant pool of explosive sewage. His self-indulgent lifestyle is about to implode.

The scale of Milo Yiannopoulos’s financial problems have been laid bare in an extensive tranche of documents seen today by HOPE not hate. The financial documents reveal that the once-darling of the Alt-Lite has racked up personal debts to the tune of $496,000, a figure that has included $47,499.63 owed on his credit card and $20,000 to the jewellers Cartier.

However, Yiannopoulos’ financial problems could be far worse, with one document suggesting he owes $1,600,000 to Milo Inc. alone. On top of this is $400,000 owed to his former partners the Mercer Family and $153,215 to the law firm Meister Seelig & Fein for charges related to his now dropped legal case against the publisher Simon and Schuster.

I’m kind of impressed, actually. He believed his own hype and just went nuts, and now it’s time to pay the piper, which he can’t, because he has no talent or skills.

One can only hope that all the narcissistic alt-righters and Intellectual Dark Web preeners meet a similar fate, although I doubt any of the others were quite so extravagantly profligate.

Our intrepid tech support, Alex, took one look at what I had botched in my attempted upgrade, and fixed it right away. From now on, I stick to spiders — they’re not as fragile.

Abcde Redford should not be ashamed of her name, but Southwest Airlines should be ashamed of their employee’s behavior. Every child should have a name that is unique, or has a strong history, or reflects something about their family. Unfortunately, there is an annoying strain of conformity that says everyone should have a name that is familiar and belongs to a limited repertoire of common names, just because.

Name shaming? This Texas woman claims a @SouthwestAir agent made fun of her 5-year-old daughter's name as they were preparing to board their flight at @JohnWayneAir in Orange County.

Her daughter's name is Abcde (pronounced Ab-city). @ABC7 pic.twitter.com/iHpBPoakYI

— Veronica Miracle (@ABC7Veronica) November 28, 2018

I was interested to learn, though, that Abcde is not totally unique.

Although Abcde is an unusual name, it’s not unheard of. In 2014, Vocativ reported that over the past three decades, 328 baby girls have been given that name, 32 of whom were born in 2009. But when the name is entered into the Social Security Administration’s database of popular baby names, it states that “Abcde is not in the top 1000 names for any year of birth beginning with 2000.”

I think it’s a very nice name. It’ll also be incredibly popular when Abcde grows up and is so pissed off at the mockery that she shatters the status quo.

I loathe going to the gym. I especially loathe it when I forget my earbuds at home, and am forced to consume generic mass media while I’m stretching and sweating and pumping up those feeble strands I call muscles — modern pop music seems to be striving for all the passion of muzak, and broadcast TV…forget it.

So I’m rage-peddling on the exercise bicycle when some insipid collection of TV celebrities are delivering their favorite lines of life-advice to the loved ones in their family, and I’m hating it, and I come up with a line of my own.

If all you needed was the right aphorism, it wouldn’t take a score of years to raise a child.

See? This is why I’m not invited to those kinds of shows. Well, one reason.

Yep, we don’t need to argue, it’s patently true.

After all, these days we are constantly being told that one of the top threats to society is not climate change or fascism but people stifling debate. Some claim that by “no-platforming” controversial speakers, or calling pundits mean names on Twitter after they say something racist on Bill Maher’s show, we are facilitating a dangerous slide into illiberalism. If those pearl-clutchers are to be believed, the key to becoming a society of informed and sophisticated intellectuals is to hook ourselves up to an IV of pure debate, and let the heated repartee course through our veins until it leads us to fact-based solutions.

The article also has some positive suggestions.

Do not be tempted by the promise of easy satisfaction. Watching a debate can make you actively worse at understanding the nuances of a topic. If you want to really know about a subject, here’s my advice: read widely and extensively (and not just the books your favorite YouTuber recommends). Talk to people, patiently and fairly, rejecting your instinctual desire to win. And perhaps most importantly — take this from a veteran — do not reward former debate team kids with your attention. They are the worst type of nerds and they never share their snacks.

I’ve been trying to get people to do this for years. I get a call requesting a debate, and I say, I’d be happy to host a discussion with an audience, why are you making everyone waste half the time allotted with that other blithering fool? And then they hang up, because usually the people asking for a debate aren’t looking for an informed discussion, they’re looking for a foil to make the other guy look magnanimous and open-minded, and they’re bringing in an audience with a bias, anyway.