I’m keeping up with the news from Ireland, where Ophelia is rushing up the west coast. Hurricanes and fierce winds and massive storm surges just aren’t what I picture when I envision Ireland.

I hear our national stockpile of thoughts and prayers were seriously depleted by hurricane Maria. Maybe that means we’ll actually have to give appropriate aid where needed.

Just like we’ve been doing in Puerto Rico.

I made a curry tonight, and was asked to share my recipe. I was a little reluctant, because this is a really easy recipe, and explaining it will erase my mystique as a cook. But I’m a scientist, not a chef, and we believe in exposing all the mysteries, dammit. So here it is. Bonus: it’s vegan!

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Take some extra firm tofu and let it rest under a weight for a while, until it’s extra firmerer.

You’re going to need a small pot. Put a cup of coconut milk in it, and then a couple of healthy dollops of peanut butter, and a variable amount of red curry paste. You get to control the final heat here: add a spoonful or two if you you like it mild, throw in half a tub of the stuff if you want to set the world on fire. Let it simmer until all the chunky stuff melts and you’ve got a nice brownish sauce with rivers of red like blood threading through it.

Now rescue your tofu from the crushing weight and cube it. Slice it into small bits, about the diameter of the tip of your little finger. Use a sharp knife, and maybe you’ll get a finger tip as a standard — you’ll only get to do that twice, so learn fast. Heat up some olive oil in a pan, and fry the tofu cubes up for a while, until they’re getting a toasty brown around the edges. This gives ’em a little more texture. Tofu needs it.

Sad confession. I’d like to add some of those tasty little red dried chilis at this point, and simmer them in the oil with the tofu, but I haven’t yet found any in Morris, so I usually don’t. I should check the Mexican grocery next time.

When the tofu looks good, throw them into the peanut butter/coconut milk/curry paste sauce. Simmer a while. They’ll absorb the flavor and get nutty-spicy.

Get a big white onion and chop it fine. Go ahead and let your tears spatter into it to add a personal touch. Saute in your cooking pot in some olive oil for 5 minutes or so, and then add a healthy dose of grated garlic, like a couple of cloves worth. Add some grated ginger, a bit more than the amount of garlic you added, and swirl it around in the hot oil and onions. Add peanuts. How many peanuts do you like? I throw in a couple of handfuls. Saute some more.

Time to add some spices. If you’re as lazy as I am, just get that yellow curry powder and toss in a couple of big spoonfuls. OK, add another spoonful. Maybe more. To taste. If you don’t have the curry powder, add turmeric and cumin and a bit of ground coriander. Swirl it around until everything is coated and hot, and dump in your coconut milk plus pepper plus peanut butter and tofu. You should get a nice blast of delicious steam in your face.

Really, that might be the best part of cooking this stuff, that moment when you get to breathe in the spices. Sinuses now all clear.

OK, now add a splash of soy sauce, and a couple of splashes of rice vinegar. If you think it’s not robust enough, spritz in some sriracha sauce to invigorate it.

Now we might diverge a bit: I use an instant pot pressure cooker. I just need to zap it at high pressure for 3 minutes or so to turn it into liquid gold. If you’re using a slow cooker, you might need to let it cook for an hour or more. Do the experiment! Do frequent tastings to see how it’s coming along!

Somewhere in here get your rice cooking. I like jasmine rice with this curry.

Final step: add pineapple chunks and simmer for a few minutes. I just use a whole large can of the stuff, but if you want more sweetness, add more (I think Mary wants me to add a couple of pineapples worth). Put it on rice and consume.

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Curries are surprisingly easy to make — it’s all in the spices, and they’re easy to come by. I also have a red curry I make with lentils and potatoes, but I’m not telling because I have to keep some secrets.

We need some of these now and then. I know I was reading about the possibility of the Yellowstone supervolcano destroying us all, and it took me a few minutes to figure out if that was a bad thing or a good thing.^*

Anyway, go read this story about David Bowie and an autistic little boy. It cheered me right up, I say while wearing my nifty new invisible mask.

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^*The article ends by saying the yearly odds of a supervolcano eruption is 1 in 730,000. Still not sure if that’s good or bad.

Apparently, he looks like a drunk balding white man drinking a Bud Lime-A-Rita and yelling racial epithets on a train. You learn something new every day.

…and he decided to enlighten (endarken?) the masses with two great endeavors.

One was to write a comic book about superheroes who fight SJWs. OK, silly, but go ahead, make your story about people with superpowers bopping evil immigrants and antifa.

The other was to…start a university? An online university? A…Voxiversity?

All right, he’s got to be fucking with us. You have got to watch this thing: It’s an animated pop-up book. It opens to “Religion and Philosophy”, which features Vox Day in ridiculous fantasy spiky armor and a spiky throne and a skull. Because of course it does. That’s exactly how we advertise the philosophy department at my university. It’s also precisely how I picture John Wilkins.

Page two is “Male-Female Relations” which features another fantasy warrior-man and a playboy bunny standing atop a pile of nubile women who are dead or something. I guess it’s his alternative to a women’s studies department. I take it he’s going to be teaching gender caricatures.

Page three is “History, Immigration, and War”, with a gigantic suit of golden armor wielding a huge flaming sword. Popping up out of the top of the suit of armor is a tiny Trump-head wearing a baseball cap, like a tiny pimple atop an engorged, inflamed, veiny testicle. In the background, a horde of Pepe the Frog cartoons are driving tanks.

Cut to a dead-eyed, middle-aged man who introduces himself as Vox Day, and assures us that tens of millions of people will want to watch the series of videos he’s calling “Voxiversity”, which the social media giants are trying to silence, so you should send him money.

You are reading my description and refusing to believe this could possibly be true — it’s got to be some kind of over-the-top joke. But no. Watch the video. I was underplaying the cheesiness.

Nobody takes this bozo seriously, do they?

Probably, darn it. I had uncles who were in it, and sailed the same routes in the video below, and they had a few stories. There are positives: like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. There are negatives, like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. But man, the peacefulness and beauty of the sea sure are tempting.

The adjunct run-around. We ought to be ashamed. The Guardian explains how bad the adjunct game has become: professors living in poverty, homelessness, and even turning to sex work to make ends meet. This is simply not right, and yet universities are openly exploiting the people who should be the most important workers in their institutions. Why do they allow it to continue? Money.

Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

This is why adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world”: among labor experts adjuncting is defined as “precarious employment”, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that “faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career”.

This behavior is blatant capitalistic criminality, and it has to end. I have a few suggestions.

The accreditation agencies are playing a role in allowing the exploitation to continue. They are supposed to be assessing the quality of the educational experience at a university; when half the faculty are part-time, paid on a shoestring, and are receiving no benefits for their work, that says that the teachers at that university are disrespected and are not provided the resources to do their work, and they should not be accredited. When a big name ivy league university is told their degrees will count for nothing unless they increase the percentage of full-time faculty, they will change.

Make it illegal to hire faculty for less than some high percentage of full time (with exceptions; some part-time medical leave, for instance). It is absurd that anyone has to take on 3 or 4 piddling little teaching appointments to make ends meet; that says right there that there is enough work for a full time person, but they’re artificially breaking it up to avoid paying benefits. Sometimes you do have to hire faculty purely for teaching, with no research option, and that’s OK — but do it with an integral number of teaching lines, instead of breaking it up into dribs and drabs that are not fair to the people you hire. When my wife was working as an adjunct, it meant driving all over eastern Pennsylvania to piece together enough work. She would have been thrilled with a job at one place, with an office and some acknowledgment of her existence, even if it involved just as much teaching.

My tenured and tenure track colleagues have a part to play, too. Are the contingent faculty in your department treated in the same way as everyone else? Are they asked to attend faculty meetings? Do they have a say in the curriculum and course offerings? Or are they told to come in, teach their one course, and then get out of the way and disappear? Are you telling your administration to create teaching lines, or are you simply lobbying for individual courses to be staffed? Are there part-timers in your department that you are used to seeing show up briefly and disappear? Do you talk to them?

Parents of prospective students: do you ask about how classes are staffed? How likely is it your first-year student is going to meet or be taught by tenured faculty? If their classes are all taught by a temporary faculty who is also teaching part time at a local community college, you might as well start your kid in that community college. They’re getting the same education, from the same person.

We treat too many people in this manner of prolonged cruelty. It really needs to stop.

Why don’t we have elevenses anymore?

You’ve had an excruciating work day. Your boss moved your deadline up, an irate customer yelled at you over an expired coupon, or maybe your desk mate smacked through an egg salad sandwich with his mouth open. Happy hour couldn’t come soon enough.

In the 19th century, you wouldn’t have had to wait. Start drinking before lunch, why don’t you? The tradition of “elevenses” meant it was customary for workers to take a break at, you guessed it, 11 a.m. In most cases, the respite was synonymous with a tug from the ol’ bottle.

This semester, most of my lecture classes are scheduled for mid-day, and I’ve got labs in the morning from 9-11. Eleven o’clock is the perfect time for a break, I’m realizing. I know how a hobbit would celebrate elevenses, but the American tradition is different.

Boozing wasn’t very taboo at first. In our new “alcoholic republic,” people (mostly men) passed the bottle at all waking hours. Employers were actually expected to provide hooch throughout the workday. It made sense that the mid-morning break now common in modern work environments naturally paired with whiskey. Thus, the American definition of elevenses was born.

Hmm. I should float this suggestion by the division chair, or even the chancellor. Except…this is a very bad idea in a commuter culture. Daily alcohol consumption before the drive home sounds like a catastrophe in the making, and it’s a good thing this custom faded away.

But wait! I don’t have a commute! I live across the street from my workplace. Surely nothing could interfere with a daily tipple for me, so maybe we can make an exception for people who live within walking distance of work.

Except then I’d become that “fun” professor who is oddly discursive and talks funny and occasionally falls down in class. So maybe that’s a bad idea.

I guess I’ll stick to 11:00 tea.