Away in the darkness

There has been a bit of silence here because my mad wife decided she wanted to go camping. In Minnesota. In the middle of January. I know winter camping is a thing, it’s just not my thing, but I went along. So we headed off to Glacier Lakes State Park yesterday, where she’d reserved a snug little cabin for the evening.

Strangely, the DNR link above advertises the place with lots of pictures of beautiful meadows and sparkling lakes and groves of wild flowers. For some reason, they don’t tell you what it’s like in January. It’s like this.

IMG_0295

Skies like spilled milk. The lakes are sheets of ice, covered with snow. The trees are barren and skeletal. Which isn’t unlovely, in its own way, but it’s not how I picture camping (which is more gray, with constant drizzling rain, and bears.)

It wasn’t bad. We settled in, we later went to bed, and we turned off the lights, and discovered something else about the experience.

Total darkness and silence. We were far from anywhere, there were no other campers, the heavy cloud cover meant the moon and stars weren’t shining through at all. I held my hand up to my face, and saw nothing. I waited an hour, for my eyes to adjust…still nothing. There was no wind, and no animals were crazy enough to be out and about, so there was no sound, either. So this is what a sensory deprivation tank might be like.

It turns out I do not cope well with sensory deprivation. I was lying there awake all night, my brain churning away trying to find something outside itself to latch on to, and refusing to go to sleep until it heard a little noise or got a faint glimmering of something. I don’t know whether it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia, but something about being swaddled in dark emptiness was unsettling.

So next time my wife demands that I share her madness, I’m bringing a metronome and a night light. I’m kind of wrecked for the day now, too, and am suddenly noticing more acutely the tick of the clock here at home, the occasional distant swish of a car driving through the snow, and all the clutter in our house.

Our Mad Max future

Oh, the highways of America are going to be so exciting! Here’s a story of two angry dudes responding to driving too closely.

Both drivers pulled into the parking lot of a local car wash and stepped out of their vehicles, according to ABC affiliate WZZM-TV. Witnesses said the tailgating driver fired first, and the other driver returned fire.

When ambulances arrived, the men — Ionia residents James Pullam, 43, and Robert Taylor, 56 — were given medical care and transported to a local hospital, where they were pronounced dead, Detroit News reported.

I demand the right to have a car with flamethrowers and machine guns mounted on it! It’s going to be the only way to navigated the savage wilderness of I94 someday.

Why, yes, I have strong opinions on this matter, but demanding I do something about it will accomplish nothing

I have been told that I must deal with a “misogynistic” statement expressed on Freethoughtblogs by Lux Pickel. They said, “Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.“

I have two points to make here.

[Read more…]

Slow down!

Just a reminder for this time of year: drive carefully.

I live where there’s lots of snow and ice, so when I was watching that video, well before there was any accident, I was trying to choke back yelling at the screen. Why are you driving so fast? Why are you trying to pass? Aren’t you paying any attention to the road conditions, you idiot?

The first rule of bad weather driving is…don’t. The second rule is…if you absolutely must, go slowly.

But wait! Before you blow your budget…

…at the Pharyngula store, something desperately urgent has come up: Sarah Morehead is in trouble. Those of you who know Sarah for her gentle activism in the atheist movement should also know that she’s an exceptionally nice person with a family, so these problems are not to be tolerated. I’ll keep it simple: it’s an ugly spousal abuse situation, which has left her and her kids with no support…and really, when you read her story, you’ll see she had no choice but to get out.

She needs help. She needs donations. If you can, get over there and chip in.

Support Pharyngula! Shop at the store!

Are you scrambling for last minute Xmas gifts? I have a solution for you. Go to the Pharyngula online store, coming to a sidebar near you soon, and buy books and stuff from Skeptical Robot and Amazon. It doesn’t cost you anything more, but I get an itty-bitty cut, which is nice. Think of it as taking a small slice of the Evil Amazonian Empire’s profits and giving them to me, an Evil Blogger.

I just set this thing up, so there isn’t a lot there yet (I haven’t even started on the fiction section yet), but I’ll keep stuffing new entries in, as the whim strikes. Recommendations are welcome, but I’m only including books I’ve actually read myself.

Guess who is all done grading?

ME, that’s who. I still have to upload these last few grades to the official site, but my computer is acting up, as always, so I’m going to have to walk in to my office and do it there. But to celebrate, anyway, I took off to fly my gadget. This is a quick buzz around the Morris Wetlands management district offices. Just because it’s empty and open land, and it’s very quiet (the whole town is quiet right now — students have gone home for the break).

This thing is fun, and the mechanics of flying it are easy, but just a word of warning to anyone who gets one: it takes practice. Lots of practice. Right now I can do all the basics of getting it to go up and forward and backwards and left and right, but I tell you, when it’s a kilometer off in the distance and you’ve lost track of its orientation and your depth perception is off so you think everything is fine but the camera is telling you you’re flying straight towards a tree, it’s a little nerve wracking.

Also, it’s really cold out there, around -15 to -20° C, and you’re actually kind of relieved that the battery is only good for about a 20 minute flight, because you’re fingers are freezing off. Note also it’s not the best day for photography: hazy and gray, flying over a world that’s mostly white. But that’s Minnesota.

Speaking of coddled white guys…

The usual suspects are currently howling and thrashing and having temper tantrums over Steve Shives, another white guy who thinks we ought to welcome diversity, but they’re also taking the opportunity to fling accusations of hypocrisy my way. It’s simply amazing how triumphantly they are spamming my email and twitter account with this irrefutable proof that I lied.

harassment

Gosh. They got me now…oh, wait. Read that last comment. It might help.

No, I have never been accused of sexual harassment. If you were to have access to my employment record, you’d find it was completely clean — I simply do not harass women (or men, for that matter), and never have. It’s also not that I have been exonerated of charges — I’ve never been charged with harassment, because I’ve never done it (note that this does not imply that being accused means you are guilty), and I’ve scrupulously avoided circumstances where there is even an opportunity for such an accusation.

They love to make much of that incident in the 1990s — in which a young woman thought she could get a better grade by extortion. I responded by immediately removing myself from the situation and making the situation open to investigation by authorities. She did not accuse me because she couldn’t.

So I have been threatened with extortion, but no extortion took place. Similarly, I get weekly murder threats, but I have not been murdered. I am conscious of the distinction, but these wackaloons apparently are not.

By the way, these loons have also sent wild accusations of harassment to my university employers…who have treated their baseless bullshit with the respect they deserve. Those also are not credible accusations.

A small request to the Russian people

This is the Transsiberian Railway.

Transsiberianmap

It stretches across the whole of Russia, cutting through places with incredibly cold, barren reputations. It’s the middle of winter.

Our crazy brave daughter Skatje is off to that place today. She’s going to spend three weeks visiting St Petersburg and Moscow, and then boarding that train and crossing Siberia, in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why? She loves Russian culture and the Russian language, and she wants to learn more and see more, and this is her opportunity. So she just decided to go.

Now, while I’m quite proud as a father to have a child who has grown to be so fearless and confident, her parents are going to be a bit anxious for the next few weeks. So, to any Russian readers out there: if by some slender chance, you’ve both read this mention and also encounter an enthusiastic and adventurous American woman on a journey across your country, say hello and remember that she’s there as a friend. And we need more friends around the world.