The spam is rising. I’m going to have to go through and block a lot of unwanted email sources.

This one isn’t too bad, but it set me back for a moment: Phone numbers used to start with letters. Oh yeah? That’s news? The first phone number I learned was UL2-6652, my home phone. And yeah, we also memorized phone numbers, something we also don’t do anymore.

My girlfriend’s phone number was 852-1177 (learned after the letter convention was abandoned). Another curse I have is that stuff I memorized as a kid still floats around in my head — I’d try calling her up again, but she lives in the house with me now, and I haven’t memorized her current number.

I also get lots of email from Donald Trump, which I don’t mind — please do waste a few pennies on me, I’ll never ever vote for you. The annoying one is PragerU, which sends me spam every fucking day, and now they’re sending me postal mail.

It’s a fundraising letter, of course, but also, annoyingly, it doesn’t actually give the reason why Charlie Kirk dedicated his upcoming book to Dennis Prager. The book is some pious claptrap about keeping the Sabbath, which smarmy ol’ Prager agrees with, but that’s about it…so send him $35, $50, or $70 for some reason or other.

Mainly, though, it’s clear that PragerU has an absurd amount of money that they’re spending on outreach, and they’re busy capitalizing on Kirk’s bloody death. Ghouls, all of them.

That’s a good long life, so there’s that at least. But otherwise, let this be an object lesson to everyone: you can make marvelous discoveries and launch science in bold new directions, but if you treat people badly, that’s what you’re going to be remembered for. The Washington Post even brought it up.

Dr. Watson also was known for his unsparing, even mean-spirited candor when commenting on the personalities and rivalries at the cutting edge of science. A longtime colleague at Harvard, eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met” and compared him to Roman emperor Caligula, the mad degenerate who fancied himself a god.

I have to paraphrase an old and familiar joke:

So a man walks into a bar, and sits down. He starts a conversation with an old guy next to him. The old guy has obviously had a few. He says to the man:

“You see that lab out there? Built it myself, recruited the staff, and it’s the best lab in town! But do they call me “Watson, the lab builder”? No!”
“And you see that book over there, I wrote that, number one bestseller in the country! But do they call me “Watson the author”? No!”
“And you see that double helix over there? I figured that out, took me years, against the resistance of the establishment, but do they call me “Watson the co-discoverer of DNA? No!”

The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:

“but you peddle a lot of racist and sexist ideas…”

I do have to say, though, that I met his wife, Elizabeth, who seemed very nice and struggled to get Jim to shut up, and I feel sorry for her. She seemed to care very much for him, and I hope she’s coping well.

Computer security is not an issue Clouseau has thought about much, I guess.

At the time of the brazen heist of $102 million in jewels from the Louvre last month, the password to the world-famous museum’s video surveillance system was simply “Louvre,” according to a museum employee with knowledge of the system.

Awesome. I wonder if the password to the vault at Fort Knox is “FORTKNOX”. Someone should try it.

They are trying so hard to come up with excuses for how this could have happened.

The Louvre director told French lawmakers, “The security system, as installed in the Apollo Gallery, worked perfectly. The question that arises is how to adapt this system to a new type of attack and modus operandi that we could not have foreseen.”

They could not have foreseen that a taxi driver, a delivery man, and garbage collector could have been so sophisticated to back a cherry picker up to an upstairs window and hack through with some power tools. It’s so crude and simple that no one could have imagined pulling it off!

Yesterday, I took advantage of the university health clinic to get both my flu shot and my COVID shot. The important part is that I got my sticker.

Today, my right arm (flu shot) is fine, but my left (COVID) hurts like heck, and I’m feeling a general malaise…but it’s not as bad as previous COVID vaccinations. Maybe my body is getting accustomed to them. It’s still going to be a good day to take it easy.

I’m surprised that Siouxsie Wiles has had to fight with her own university — after she’d been fighting the good fight for science for so many years and striving against the ignorance of anti-vaxxer. The University of Auckland failed in it’s obligation to protect and support its employees, and that’s not just my opinion, since the courts definitively agreed with her.

Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles‘ employer breached its contractual obligations to protect her health and safety in the wake of harassment she experienced as a result of her work, an Employment Court judgment today has found.
The long-awaited judgment comes around two-and-a-half years after she and then University of Auckland employee Professor Shaun Hendy initially filed their claim with the Employment Relations Authority in January 2022.

Dr Wiles alleged the university failed to protect her from a “tsunami of threats” she received for her public commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic. She said she had raised concerns to the university about her safety since April 2020, shortly after the pandemic began.

The university has denied unjustifiably disadvantaging Wiles, breaching their agreement or its statutory obligations. It said it had also acted in good faith towards her. However, the Employment Court’s judgment does not agree.

She won! Unfortunately, as I know from ugly past experience, trials are absurdly costly. She won…but what she won, in addition to a moral victory, was $400,000 in court costs. Rebecca Watson is rallying her followers to help her out.

I’ll join in that call! Go to this site to donate to Siouxsie’s court costs!

Minnesotans will be prowling the farmlands with rifles this weekend through 23 November. I think I’ll stay home, not just because of all the people with guns, but because who knows when the deer will have had enough?

I just noticed that this tree in our front yard that usually drops boring brown leaves every fall has had an upgrade to brighter colors this year.

I made a quick run to St Cloud today, to visit Spirit Halloween after Hallowe’en, when they are busy dumping everything left over at half price. Get out there quick! Like any mysterious fantasy shop, it’s going to vanish, leaving only a dusty empty space off an abandoned alleyway — our local stores disappear on November 3rd. I stocked up on weird fake spider crap for next year’s celebration.

More importantly, my wife sent me on a mission to get a new vacuum cleaner, because our old one is busted.

It’s Hallowe’en. It’s a dark and rainy night. I’m home all alone. The trick-or-treaters have been sparse — I’ve only had twenty kids all night, so I’m handing out great fistfuls of candy to each. You know what that means…

It’s time for Rocky Horror!

I’ve turned the sound way up and am soaking up the vibes. I’d put on fishnet stockings if I had any.

This movie is right there in my happy place. I’ve been watching it yearly since about 1976.

Uh-oh. The elevator scene just started. Bye.