Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I go into my local Snap Fitness for a little workout — no, I’m not getting buff, I’m just trying to stave off my inevitable decline into decrepitude. This is supposed to be a good experience, right? It never is, and it’s getting worse.

This morning pretty much all of the flat screens on the wall were tuned to Fucking Fox News, with nothing but Republican attack ads against state democrats (there must be a lot of toxic cash flooding the state right now). OK, I can change the channels, especially when we’re the only people there, but it does make me question whether I want to be associated with the regular clientele of this place.

Even worse, though, they pipe in horrible music from Sirius FM, curated by a trio of the worst, loudest, shrillest, most obnoxious DJs in broadcast history. I deal with this by going in with my earbuds and drowning them out with music I like, sans howling baboons shrieking about contests and trivia. It didn’t work today, because the goddamned music was turned up so loud that even Roger Waters and Joe Cocker Annie Lennox and cranked up to the max couldn’t be heard over them, and I was killing my ears trying to escape. It was intolerable and I finally had to leave.

So when I finally collapse into an even more out of shape, flabby, breathless blob of amuscular goo, I want you all to blame (or thank) Snap Fitness of Morris for driving me away.

And you wonder why I’m cranky all the time.

Iliana’s father is already teaching her how to read.

Saga Vanacek, the young woman who found a Viking sword in a Swedish lake, has written her story. She is commendably practical about her future plans, and has refused the offer to be Queen of Scandinavia.

This month, the archaeologists finally came to search the rest of the lake and they found a brooch that is as old as my sword, and a coin from the 18th century. Then they announced the news and I could finally tell everyone at school. I came back from gym class and the whiteboard said, “Saga’s sword” and there were balloons, and the whole class got to have ice-cream.

I had to give the sword to the local museum – Daddy explained that it’s part of history and important to share it with others. I felt “boo” that it’s gone away, but “yay” that other people will get to see it. I’m going to try to raise some money to make a replica sword that I can keep.

People on the internet are saying I am the queen of Sweden, because in the legend of King Arthur, he was given a sword by a lady in a lake, and that meant he would become king. I am not a lady – I’m only eight – but it’s true I found a sword in the lake. I wouldn’t mind being queen for a day, but when I grow up I want to be a vet. Or an actor in Paris.

Balloons and ice cream are much better than being royalty. I approve.

If you wish you could be a true master of aplomb, you should follow these lessons in how to be more Swedish.

1. Drink a lot of coffee.
Even if you think you drink a lot of coffee, double it right now and still not out-do the average Swede. We drink more coffee than anyone in the world, (except the Finns). Go for strong filter coffee.

2. When you get up in the morning, follow this ritual:
2 slices of crisp bread, 1-2 boiled eggs, a squirt of Kalles creamed cod roe with your eggs. Some sliced cheese, if you are feeling fancy. Drink a large glass of milk. Coffee.

There is a lot more, of course. Much of it seems to be about coffee and food. I speak from experience: this is all true. My wife is 100% Scandinavian (I’m only 50%), and I’ve noticed that she consumes twice as much coffee as I do, and she drinks it twice as fast. Must be genetic.

Or, if you’d prefer, you can aspire to the rigors of being more Norwegian. It’s not easy, but you can look forward to looking down on Swedes. This was also true of my family — even the ones who were half-Swedish liked to tease the Swedes with 20 Swedes ran through the weeds chased by one Norwegian. They overlooked that the song mainly praises the Irish, because as we all know, Knut Rokne is a good Norwegian.

Somehow, the attitude or Norwegian superiority survives the Law of Jante, which Saga Vanacek follows without a moment’s thought.

Warning: I grew up with the Scandinavian customs of a century ago, so traveling to Norway and discovering that they’re now committing the heresy of hot dogs on their lefse was a shock. Cultures change.

By the way, you could also try to be more Finnish, but that would be weird. Only true Finns want to be more Finnish. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

Popular Mechanics has published a defense of Elon Musk, and it’s disturbingly creepy. They’ve got multiple contributors, and the first compares him to Mark Twain.

Not everybody liked Twain. They still don’t. He could be scandalous and self-indulgent. He smoked too much. Judgmental. And Twain, a one-time river­boat pilot, made nothing substantial, produced no commodities or goods, except his tales and observations. He took you somewhere. Mark Twain didn’t think for you, you barrel-hoop baron you. But he was out there. Thinking. He spoke past his newspaper editor, directly to the people, to his readers, whether they agreed with him or not. And while he certainly produced outsize, often painful, observations about what we had become as a people, he also offered glaring, satiric propositions concerning what we might want to try to be henceforth. And why. In person, he could be wily, cold, and unpleasant, but Twain stood out as a man who reliably saw the truth of human purpose beneath the weighty mess of human foibles. He had ambitions for humanity. At the very least, he believed that humanity ought to have ambitions for itself.

And now, Elon Musk walks the earth. The pleasure of his presence on this mantle is similar to Twain’s. You might live in Tacoma and make a living working in a consulting firm that helps affordable hotel chains rebrand themselves using urban graphic-design strategies and overlapping pricing platforms. But admit it, among your everyday pleasures is the possibility that you might pick up an item in the news feed on your smartphone concerning Elon Musk’s next great idea. Electric cars. The colonization of Mars. Tunnels beneath Los Angeles. Brains linked to computers.

I mainly pick up on news about Musk because he’s obnoxiously weird. Accusing divers of being pedophiles. Abusing his employees (look up Mary Beth Brown). An ugly divorce. Unable to profit despite receiving millions of dollars from his fellow capitalists. Smoking a joint on a YouTube video.

Electric cars are a great idea — it wasn’t his. He wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity — it won’t. His tunnels are bizarre and impractical. He doesn’t know how to link brains and computers.

He’s no Mark Twain.

Another guy has a different comparison.

Bruce Wayne. Elon Musk. Tony Stark. Three men worth billions of dollars who care more about solving important problems than living comfortably, but only one of them is real.

SpaceX and Tesla cars are great. I don’t know that they make up for the fact that he’s an obnoxious asshole with a cult of personality.

You can listen to an old man rambling here.

Are we expected to mourn?

I saw a few episodes of that godawful HBO reality show, Cathouse, which featured smug thug Dennis Hof as a brothel owner. It is no surprise that he ran for political office as a Republican, and actually won the primary — Republican voters may be moralizers, but they’re also the biggest hypocrites on the planet. He has now died, ending his political aspirations.

I will say he’s one of the reasons I don’t subscribe to HBO. When I’d travel and stay in a hotel somewhere, I’d flip on HBO in the evenings to see what was on, and would routinely see only a few things. One was those dreadful sports documentaries where some lugubrious narrator would drone on about the Cosmic Significance of a boxing match or some sportsball event; the other thing that was always on was that terrible Cathouse show with the women simpering over that bald pompous bouncer guy. Hated ’em both.

I guess his show has been off the air for a while now, and recently every time I’m in a hotel room in the evening it’s nothing but Bill Maher, who always seems like another Dennis Hof, only with hair.

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Jeeezus. The details are trickling out, and he died after a wild birthday party with Grover Norquist, Joe Arpaio, and Ron Jeremy. If only he could have taken them all with him.

Fortunately, there were no women at this party. Have you noticed how these kinds of events always feature great gross corpulent men of greed and villainy, and yet no women ever get mentioned? That sounds like a hellishly bad party to me.

You are allowed to have irrational fears, and it’s fine if you have a personal aversion. What is not fine is when you use that irrational fear as an excuse to disrupt other people’s lives, as has happened lately with ten schools in England closed for three weeks because headteachers were afraid of a spider infestation.

Hundreds more children have been told to stay at home after the presence of false widow spiders has closed a tenth school.

Thousands of families have now been affected by closures across east and north London since last week after infestations of the venomous were discovered on school sites.

Parents have spoken out against the disruption caused by schools deciding to close their doors for up to three weeks on the discovery of the spiders, calling it “over the top” and “ridiculous”.

John F Kennedy Special School became the latest school in Newham to close due to spiders on Friday. Campuses in nearby Stratford and Beckton have also been closed for the foreseeable future.

These spiders are close relatives of the ones I’m working with — apparently, they’re finding Steatoda grossa in the schools (I’ve got Steatoda triangulosa and Parasteatoda tepidariorum). They can bite, and cause an unpleasant blistering and rash, but you have to really torment the little beasties before they can do any harm. OK, I can imagine schoolkids doing exactly that, but the problem isn’t the spiders, it’s the malicious little thugs in your classroom.

But here’s the thing: you can’t get rid of them. They’re everywhere. They tend to hide in out of the way corners, so you probably don’t see them very often, but really, they are ubiquitous. Lately I’ve been searching for them and have become fine-tuned to spotting them, and they’re everywhere: they’re in your homes, your attics, your garages; they are lurking under your bed and other furniture, they’re quietly making cobwebs in the corners of your window frames, they’ve filled up your crawlspaces and the spaces within your walls. If they’re in the schools, they are in the students’ homes. They love those nice shadowy spaces in all human constructions — we’re in a long-term commensal relationship with these spiders. They’re not picking on schools selectively.

I’m sorry, but if you’re going to shut down schools over this routine and mostly harmless occupation by a few small organisms, you’re just going to have to shut down all of England. And Europe. And Asia. And the Americas. The spiders haven’t figured out how to live in Antarctica yet, so I guess we’re all going to have to hide in that continent, quivering in fear of itsy-bitsy spiders.

Until they move in to whatever shelters we build, that is.

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The histrionics are over the top. Check out the photos on this article — they’ve got exterminators in biohazard suits hosing down the schools with pesticides. I’d be more afraid of the goop they’re spraying than of spiders.

A 5000 year old grave in Iran contained the remains of a 25-30 year old, upper class woman. There’s something distinctive about that skull, though.

She’s got a prosthetic eye! Only it’s not your standard glass eye, it’s a ball made of tar and fat, with delicate capillaries made of gold wire, and a diamond shape incised into the ball where the iris would be, and apparently it was held in its socket by a strap around the head, so it must have bulged out quite a bit. Also, it’s black.

This wasn’t an eye made to hide a disfiguring wound, it was made to accentuate it. She must have been terrifying.

(There’s a “reconstruction” at the link, but it doesn’t look like much effort was put into it, like they just drew a black ball on the face of a contemporary Iranian woman.)