I grew up in Kent, Washington (so did my wife). That was long after this photo, though:

It was named for the region in England where hops were grown because, again before I was born, hops were the primary agricultural product around there. What I find fascinating, though, are the vestiges. The article names some of the early pioneers in that area — Ezra Meeker, Everett Titus — and I lived on Titus street, and the central business district was on Meeker. And that practice left a mark on the economy of the town.

The legacy of hops continues today, even though the Kent Valley is no longer farmland. When produce and dairy farming went away, existing railroad networks and flat farmland helped Kent scale up as a center of manufacturing and warehousing.

“We really built an infrastructure that even after hops left has become fertile ground for industry, for manufacturing, for warehousing,” Garfield said.

Yeah. I detested Kent when I was growing up. Warehouses. I lived through a transition, when the city was taking everything that was lovely and green and pleasant about the place, covering it with asphalt, and putting up warehouses all along the river, with the bonus of tearing down businesses to build more gas stations for the commuter population. Kent was a desert for human beings for a long, long time. I hear it has improved since then, but it couldn’t help bet get better.

But then, I also liked the novel, which is not to everyone’s taste. It was refreshingly pagan, with a plethora of gods, and not much difference between a leprechaun and the king of the gods — they’re all manifestations of human belief, and since they merely reflect humanity, they tend not to be very nice. The show has an element of the surreal to it, too.

If you’ve read the book, you know that one of its featured elements is the Upper Midwest. In an interview with Neil Gaiman, the author makes that explicit.

“I couldn’t have written it without living in Wisconsin, and Minneapolis and St. Paul being the nearest big cities,” said Gaiman, chatting last week from a Los Angeles hotel where he was preparing for the world premiere of Starz’s TV adaptation of the book. “It just wouldn’t have worked.”

Gaiman, so thoughtful in responding to questions that you sometimes worry the phone line has gone dead, wasn’t referring so much to specific landmarks, such as the House on the Rock or the wintry landscape, both of which play pivotal roles in his 2001 book. He’s talking about the region’s general weirdness.

“There’s that tiny off-kilter nature in the Midwest that’s in the details,” said Gaiman, 56, who moved from England to Menomonie, Wis., in 1992. “I would enjoy stopping at a little restaurant somewhere and half the place would be selling peculiar stuff like … warrior princess dolls. That’s weird.”

As someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, the East Coast, and now, Minnesota, I can confidently say that everywhere is a tiny bit off-kilter from everywhere else. The Midwest is not weirder than any other part of the country, but it does have a different flavor, and as someone who grew up in a place with mountains and evergreen trees and the ocean and temperate weather, long-term residence makes it feel like home-but-not-home, if you know what I mean. You live in it, but you’re not of it, and that small element of disconnectedness makes it uncomfortably interesting.

After a harrowing weekend of grading exams and lab reports, I’m kinda sorta done. All that’s left is the potential for revising lab reports, and an optional final exam (it replaces your lowest exam score; it’s more of a hedge for students who had one bad day or an unavoidable absence). Today I’m handing everything back with a summary of their tentative final grade (cue howls and gnashing and wailing), and doing a post-mortem of the last exam, which had the standard bimodal grade distribution — either students sailed through it, laughing at how easy it was, or they missed key concepts and melted down completely (cue more howls, wailing, etc.).

The results do rather mess up my plans for the last lecture on Wednesday. I was hoping to do something more advanced and give them a peek at where they can go with genetics, but instead I think I’m going to have to pick 20% of the class up off the floor and review the basics, so they can possibly pass the course with a successful surge on the final. That’s disappointing, but I have to make sure people who pass my course are at least somewhat capable on the topic.

Anyway, the current statistics: the mean on the last exam was the lowest so far this term, at 66%, or roughly a C-. Overall in the course 4 students so far, out of 31, have earned an A. A few more might join those exalted ranks by doing well on the final.

Also, more fun: today is the day for student evaluations. I try to do this after I’ve broken the news to them about their tentative final grade, which is probably a poor strategy for getting good evals but I like to think it makes for more honest ones.

Because of snow. Sorry, gang, Minnesota has decided to celebrate the first of May by dropping some snow on us, so we’ll have to wait.

Also, this is the last week of classes. I spent the weekend catching up with most of my grading — not quite all, because I need something to elevate my anxiety, to keep my heart beating — so this week is going to be fierce. Happy dance next weekend? Celebrate labor and promote the proletariat then?
Overthrow the government then, too?

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I just realized — it’s not May Day. According to Trump, it’s Loyalty Day. Maybe the snow is to let me know I’m supposed to be disloyal today?

After the last election, a lot of my friends told me that it was more important than ever that we support good journalism — and I agree fully. Then they told me I should subscribe to the New York Times — and I hesitated. I’ve been disappointed far too often by the NY Times. Have we all forgotten Judith Miller, and how the NY Times was the staid, sober, disciplined news source that was beating the drums for the Iraq war? OK, maybe that was too long ago. So have we all forgotten how the NY Times was constantly promoting the “Hillary’s e-mails!” story just last year?

So I didn’t subscribe. And I felt mildly guilty about it.

But now…fuck the NY Times. Once again, they decided to fill a slot on their opinion pages with a conservative ideologue, a dolt formerly of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages (and we all know what a shithole that is), and the first thing Bret Stephens writes is an embarrassingly vapid apologia for climate change denial.

I can thank Stephens for one thing, at least. I no longer feel guilty. I’m even feeling a bit lucky to have avoided one waste of money. I guess a lot of people are feeling this way now.

One of the dudebro organizers of the Fyre Festival, on being told there was no way they were going to pull it off short of spending $50 million:

Let’s just do it and be legends, man.

If that isn’t enough absurdity for you, you can read a personal account from an attendee.

I’m beginning to wonder if this was a trial run for the revolution. No tumbrels, no guillotines this time — we just advertise on Instagram for a party with supermodels in some exotic location, charge the rich for their own transportation, and drop ’em off in a tarpit somewhere. Fyre Festival was the ‘B’ Ark.

Wow. The Fyre Festival didn’t look at all interesting to me, but it seems to have suckered a lot of people. It was a music festival with only one band I’d ever heard of, and all the advertising seems to have revolved around photos of young women in bikinis. “The unparalleled best in music, cuisine, design & hospitality on a private island in the Exumas”, they said. And then…

Fyre Festival set out to provide a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience on the Islands of the Exumas.

Due to circumstances out of our control, the physical infrastructure was not in place on time and we are unable to fulfill on that vision safely and enjoyably for our guests. At this time, we are working tirelessly to get flights scheduled and get everyone off of Great Exuma and home safely as quickly as we can. We ask that guests currently on-island do not make their own arrangements to get to the airport as we are coordinating those plans. We are working to place everyone on complimentary charters back to Miami today; this process has commenced and the safety and comfort of our guests is our top priority.

The festival is being postponed until we can further assess if and when we are able to create the high- quality experience we envisioned.

We ask for everyone’s patience and cooperation during this difficult time as we work as quickly and safely as we can to remedy this unforeseeable situation. We will continue to provide regular updates via email to our guests and via our official social media channels as they become available.

The Fyre Festival team did become accomplished masters of understatement, though.

Blink 182 cancelled, because they’d never been paid. Which is strange, because tickets were exorbitantly priced.

Festival-goers paid anywhere from $450 for a no-frills day pass to up to $250,000 for the full VIP experience. One widely-advertised festival package cost $12,000. There were even packages that included a private yacht.

That’s a whole different world, there. People paid thousands of dollars to fly to a desert island in the Bahamas for a weekend of luxury. I’m straining to pay a few hundred dollars to visit Cincinnati for a science conference. Really, don’t go into teaching or science if you want to get rich.

But at least I didn’t get robbed. The Festival turned out to be soggy disaster tents, squares of cheese on plain bread, no music, and evacuation flights. It does provide a rich mine of schadenfreude, though.

Stuck at #fyrefestival trying to leave for the last 8 hours. barley any food or water or security or electricity pic.twitter.com/jHPMnJw5gx

— Lamaan (@LamaanGallal) April 28, 2017

Luxury! Music! Cuisine! Hospitality!

Heidi Czerwiec dared to complain about ROTC carrying out unannounced military exercises on the University of North Dakota campus — I sympathize completely. There were a few times when I was at Temple University that I’d sleepily arrive on campus early in the morning and suddenly be surrounded by men in buzzcuts and fatigues waving rifles around, and no, it wasn’t a pleasant shock. We don’t seem to have a ROTC program here at UMM, fortunately.

But Czerwiec was reasonably concerned and later quite angry when she looked out her office window to see men in camouflage gear with guns, and she complained loudly to the ROTC officer in charge — you do not spring these kinds of activities on people without warning in this era of “active shooters” and mass murder at schools. It was irresponsible and unethical. Maybe the ROTC ought to carry out their exercises elsewhere?

And then right-wing radio and news sites got the story.

They play her up as one of those liberals, unpatriotic and hatin’ on the military, wanting to take away your guns. It turned into a frenzy of ignorant hatred.

Out of the 500 or so emails I receive (not counting voicemail and Facebook messages), most are hatemail, most calling for my job.

Nearly all the hatemail (98%) is from men.

Most of the hatemail accuses me of one or more of the following: being anti-military, anti-gun, and liberal:

And then she quotes a series of emails. They are so, so familiar. I’ve seen similar responses, in similar floods of right-wing hate. She’s a woman, so she also gets lots of dismissive insults about her appearance, her genitals, her “fuckability”. I wish I could say I’m safe from those, but nope — I get similar comments, and a common insult is to suggest that I’m a woman, so they can recycle their misogynist cliches against me, too. They can’t even criticize a man without letting their contempt for women ooze through.

What always strikes me is how unoriginal the haters are, how much their language is one of primal grunts and unthinking rote recitals of the same old stupidity and prejudice. Even when they can string together a proper and grammatical English sentence, the sentiments are the same crude bigoted knee-jerk execrations — it’s the difference between a turd and a lovingly sculpted turd.

It was a disconcerting article to read, bringing back unpleasant memories of past deluges of yahoos hating on me that I’ve received. But then I open my inbox and see that this morning I’ve only received two hate mails that got past my filters today, and only one of them wanted me to die horribly, and even he was willing to wait for me to passively die of cancer without actively causing my demise, so I’m feeling like maybe this will be a good day, relatively.

It’s got thrills, surprising upsets, and dramatic footage. I speak of…TIRE SKI JUMPING.