I wept several times while reading A POEM ABOUT YOUR UNIVERSITY’S ABSOLUTE AND UNWAVERING APPRECIATION OF ITS FACULTY IN SPITE OF SAID FACULTY’S CRAP SALARIES. I might have howled a few times, too, but I blacked out at the end and the last hour has been a blur.

Maybe we need a law against too much raw honesty in our poetry. It’s dangerous.

MPR talked about Morris today! A sign of the future in Morris: Cows + solar panels + fast electric car charger. We crave this kind of fame.

Today, the university community is celebrating the arrival of the only fast electric vehicle charger for more than 100 miles around. And later this spring, a 30-kilowatt solar array will be installed in an adjacent cow pasture, sending clean power to the charger.

It’s a big deal for electric vehicle ownership in western Minnesota: It can take days to charge an electric car at home from a regular electric outlet. Before now, the nearest fast charger was 120 miles away in Monticello.

Also, this:

“It’s sort of a wasteland beyond Monticello, and there’s nothing west of us,” said Eric Buchanan, a renewable energy researcher at the center.

(Monticello is a bit more than a 100 miles east of us; the Dakotas are west.)

So now you know. We are an oasis of electricity in the center of great empty wasteland, devoid of anything. OK, there is a bit of truth to that, except we do have far more corn and soybeans than you’d see in a Mad Max-style wasteland.

Most mornings, I get up a few hours before my wife does, and shortly afterwards I carry out the morning ritual of Making the Coffee, and I dutifully deliver a cup to her bedside, where the sweet strong smell gently awakens her. I’ve been noticing an odd thing, though: we have lots of cups, and a place in the kitchen cupboard where we put them, but on many mornings, the cups are not there. Thus begins another part of the morning ritual, the Quest for Coffee Cups. I tend to find them in the dining room, in the living room, and in our bedroom, strangely always on the table near her side of the bed, and also, they have often collected tea bags in their interiors.

From my observations, I have determined that these ceramic cups undergo a daily migration, and that they wander the house to prey upon teabags. I am pretty sure there’s a complex hidden ecosystem at work here. For instance, I’ve noticed that if I take off my socks in my office and leave them by my slippers, sometime during the day they will mysteriously disappear. My first hypothesis was that the hungry coffee cups were snatching them up, but I’ve never found a cup with a sock in it, suggesting that there may be some other medium-sized predator prowling about the house. I’m eyeing the casserole dish. Or maybe the toaster.

The existence of a hitherto unnoticed food web operating inside my house has me vaguely worried. If I vanish some day, somebody check the guts of the dishwasher, or possibly the cabinet in my office. They’ve been trying too hard to look nonchalant lately, and could be plotting something.

I think the death of Art Bell put me in a time warp. Here’s an interesting story about an army fellow who actually was listening in on Art Bell’s broadcasts while looking for Russkis. He makes the same point I did, that he really was an enabler for the alt-right and wackaloon conservatism.

Once I learned what had happened, I could no longer listen to those favorite talk radio shows anymore. Alex Jones was not simply a funny or stupid clown now. I understood that he was not simply sharing airwaves with disturbed people and utter fanatics, he was borrowing their silly ideas, and listeners who would not otherwise accept anti-Semitic or racist material learned to accept the narrative frameworks of those ideas through him.

As Jones made it okay to believe in this alternate reality, Art Bell made it okay to believe whatever you liked, often on the same station at a later hour. Vampires and werewolves? Ghosts and goblins? Area 51 cover-ups of alien bodies and interstellar spacecraft? Subterranean lizard people controlling the banks? Maybe some of them were real, or maybe all of them were real.

Even greater weirdness: did you know the FBI was investigating those dangerous Dungeons & Dragons players while hunting for the Unabomber?

And then…oh dear.

Aren’t you glad to be living in the second decade of the 20th century when everything is normal again?

This is a list of banned words from 1995.

Two things:

• These lists are just sort of hilarious when the words are just dumped on you out of context.

• Shockingly, there are several words in there I’ve never even heard of before, and that I have no idea what they mean. I feel so naive.

…but you never know. How do you get rid of tons of rotting meat, like a beached whale carcass? The article lists four methods:

1. Blow it up with dynamite. No, don’t do this one. Florence, Oregon tried it in 1970, and will never, ever live it down.

2. Compost it. Drag it to some convenient place and let it decay. Yikes, that’s going to wreck the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in your compost heap, but OK, it’s a natural way.

3. Drag it back out to sea and let it sink. This seems like the best way to me, since whale falls are great boons to marine invertebrates. The catch is that it might take a while to sink, and could drift back to shore.

4. Treat it like garbage, hack it to bits, and bury it in a landfill. Seems wasteful.

So what would Minnesotans do? They can’t drag it out to sea. I guess we could haul it to Iowa or Wisconsin or the Dakotas and let them deal with it. Otherwise, chain saws and wood chippers?

In case you need it, here’s a Jordan Peterson resource page.

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson became famous after he spouted transphobia and refused to use they/them pronouns to address nonbinary students in his classes. He then published a wildly popular self-help book 12 Rules for Life, and has been lauded in the popular press as a leading voice for disaffected men. Center right pundits like Conor Fridersdorf and David Brooks have held him up as an honest and important thinker, unfairly maligned by the left.

Unfortunately, Peterson’s writing and YouTube videos are a bolus of nonsense, resentment, and bigotry. This page provides resources explaining the problems with Peterson’s worldview and arguments.

Also unfortunately, Peterson’s lobster swarm is fanatical and impervious to argument, so if you cross them, you’ll want some backup. I recommend just citing this page at ’em and then ignoring them.