Also, I just spent $40 to stock up on candy to hand out tomorrow. That kind of repelled me, maybe I’m a vampire.

I’ll start with a jack o’ lantern designed by Iliana. It’s a cat. I think the dead flowers around it makes for a pretty picture.

So we went on a drive to Wisconsin. On the Minnesota side, we’re clearly past the fall color peak, with mostly brown and barren trees, but the Wisconsin side…wow. Bright reds and yellows everywhere. If you want to see the autumn colors, now is the time to make the Sunday drive over there.

However, those aren’t the colors I’m talking about here. There’s a different stark difference between the two states: Minnesota was boring, empty highways along the route, but once you cross the state line, it’s animal carcasses everywhere. Every few miles there was a huge splash of rusty red splattered across multiple lanes, and then ten or twenty meters further on there’s be a horribly mangled dead deer, skin peeled off by the tumble, split in half with beige guts drooling out and drying on the shoulder, lying in an urecognizable pose. Ick.

Drive on further, there’s another bloody brown corpse lying in a heap.

A couple of miles on, fragments, shattered limbs, a head lying on the road with it’s tongue hanging out and drying.

It was very Halloween. The evidence of violence was horrific. These animals weren’t just knocked down, they were smashed and splattered. The cars had to have been totaled by the collision, too.

The difference between Minnesota and Wisconsin was stark, and had me wondering what was the cause.

Are there just more deer wandering alongside the highways in Wisconsin?

Are Wisconsinites simply far worse drivers?

Then I started thinking that maybe it’s a difference in highway management.

In Wisconsin, the highway patrol comes across yet another collision with a deer. They call for an ambulance for the dazed driver, a tow truck to drag the wreckage away, and then the cop takes a pair of meathooks out of his trunk, and drags the broken corpse out of the right-of-way and leaves it to rot on the highway shoulder.

In Minnesota, the highway patrolman calls the dispatcher.

“Hey, Madge, it’s a bad one. I got a guy staggering around, I don’t know whether his head is always shaped like a lumpy potato, or if he got banged up bad in the crash, so better get an ambulance out here just in case. Call Ole’s Towing and let him know there’s a crumpled Dodge Ram out here that he can scrap.”

“Oh yeah, also call the Cleaner and get the Meat Wagon here pronto before it goes bad. Nice little 8 point buck here, it’s a real shame. Tell him it’s a powerwashing job.”

“How about them Vikings, hey? Did you and Bob watch the game…[conversation continues for 20 minutes before he signs out]”

Anyway, we have lots of deer and bad drivers on this side of the border, so I imagine the difference has got to be in our diligence in doing road clean up. In Wisconsin, they seem to leave the blood and guts out as Halloween decorations.

It really is Autumn. We got home from Wisconsin and Mary decided this was the moment we need to tear up her garden. She was right, it’s looking pretty dead with rotting tomatoes and eggplants, with a few healthy pumpkins scattered around.

She was less concerned about the garden than she was this patch — those are gigantic sunchoke stems so large that they’ve started falling over.

So we pulled them up, and what we found were dense masses of tubers.

We filled up a couple of ten gallon buckets with these things.

They better taste good — we’ve never had them before, but they’re supposed to taste like sweet potatoes? Maybe? Mary grew them, so now it’s my turn to cook them.

The North Carolina congress has endorsed more funding for their university system, which is nice. There’s a catch, though.

The board approved new rules for which subjects can have distinguished professorships. They will now only be given in STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

Subjects outside of this category will keep the distinguished professorship positions they’ve already established, but are no longer allowed to create new ones.

Wow. I don’t know who decided that this was a good idea, but I’m certain they know absolutely nothing about education. You can’t have a good university if you treat the arts and humanities and social sciences as second-rate afterthoughts.

I hope the STEM professors at UNC are raising a stink right now. Although getting a 7% salary increase is a good strategy for buying silence.

Please don’t have me arrested. Last year, I went into the local hospital for counseling — the depression was too much, I knew I needed help. I only went in for a few sessions before deciding nothing was going to help, other than my usual thorough bottling up of everything, but now I am a marked man. If I do anything socially unacceptable, you know, like pissing on the shoes of the next Republican I meet, you can bet it’ll be on the local newspaper with the declaration that I have “mental health issues,” and the police will put out an APB for the “mentally ill” man wandering the streets of Stevens County.

I shouldn’t have tried. Everyone is supposed to be 100% capable of bootstrapping themselves into happy, well-adjusted confidence, no matter what their circumstances, and failure to be constantly grinning like a used car salesman is a sign of weakness. That glum fellow over there in the corner could snap at any instant, you know.

I’m seeing it right now. There’s a killer on a rampage in Lewiston, Maine, and what does every news story have to say?

Police said Card had spent two weeks at a mental health facility this summer and was subsequently released.

He checked in to get his mental health evaluated (a good thing), and was released (presumably a good thing). This will now taint every story about his criminal act. It’s front and center, even though it may be entirely irrelevant. I can think of a lot of prominent individuals who ought to get a mental health consult who don’t.

There are other factors that are far more indicative of a problem. A history of domestic violence, for instance.

Robert Card, the alleged perpetrator of the shootings in Lewiston, carries a troubled personal history that is now under intense scrutiny. A retired military officer, Card has confronted legal troubles in the past, including multiple arrests for domestic violence and other offenses. Notably, one of his ex-wives had obtained a restraining order against him, revealing the troubling dynamics that marked some of his previous relationships. While the investigation continues, no conclusive evidence has yet linked his past behavioral issues to the recent shooting incidents.

Another telling bias in the stories is that many say “he may have voted for Barack Obama” — as if that’s an unlikely, weird thing. Only a few so far have been bold enough to say he’s politically right-wing.

Heavy reviewed the page shortly before it was suspended by X. It shows that Card followed and/or liked posts by X’s CEO, Elon Musk, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as well as a professor who studies terrorism and a number of prominent conservative politicians and pundits, including Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson. He also liked and shared posts by CNBC, as well as posts on finance.

In March, he liked a tweet by Trump that read, “Given the incredible rise of trans/non-binary mass shooters in the last few years… by far the largest group committing as a percentage of population… maybe, rather than talking about guns we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender affirming bulls*** on our kids?”

Man, Twitter was lightning-fast in pulling that account. A fan of Elon Musk was a mass-murderer? Better cover that up quick. Also, he was transphobic? That complicates that Trumpian narrative. For the record, there have been only four non-cisgendered mass shooters.

“4 shooters out of over 300 mass shooters since 2009 are transgender or non binary. That’s just 1.3 percent of all shooters,” Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter. “You just proved our point: 99 percent of mass shooters in the United States are cis gendered.”

Also for the record, I don’t think liking Elon Musk or Tucker Carlson is indicative of a tendency to go shoot up a bowling alley, because an awful, embarrassing lot of stupid people like them without any attempt to go on a murder rampage. It is just an indictment of our media that they are doing this ill-informed pattern-seeking, looking for any feeble correlation to rationalize a contemptible crime.

Maybe we should be more concerned with condemning domestic violence, or any history of violence, than with people’s efforts to improve their mental health.

Or better yet, let’s also do a better job of regulating guns.

This piece of paper has survived the last couple of years, which is an accomplishment. I got my first COVID vaccination in March of 2021.

There are a couple more labels on the back, but now the card is full up, and the clinics don’t even bother with giving you evidence that you’re vaccinated. I’ve got 6 vaccinations documented on this thing, and yesterday I got my 7th COVID booster. Last week I got the pneumonia and shingles vaccine, too. I’m just fully loaded with vaccines at this time.

I’m still waiting for my magnetic powers to kick in, and I don’t pee microchips yet. Maybe my super-saiyan powers need one more dose? I’ll keep on getting my shots as recommended, because I don’t want to be responsible for giving my students a terrible disease.

The one thing I do have is a sore throat, a general ache, and fatigue, like I always get the day after one of these shots.

Soon, they’ll be black bones fleshed with snow.

Every year, my institution has a special set of meetings: the tenured faculty gather together and review our aspiring younger faculty. It’s our one evening of absolute power, in which we have three possible outcomes: 1) OK, we’ll let them linger on another year, 2) we promote them to a tenured position, so they can join us in this exercise next year, or 3) you’re fired, you’ve got one year to clear out your office. I hate it. We take it seriously, which means we have to read all these big tenure & promotion files the week before, and sometimes these meetings go on for hours. And there are two evenings of these meetings!

The first meeting is tonight, the second is tomorrow. At least it’ll be over soon…and I’m sure the faculty we’ll be reviewing will be even more relieved.

On top of that, I’m grading exams. They’re mostly done, except for the grand essay question that I told them would require a couple of pages of discussion, to be graded for grammar and quality. That I will get done today, or die.

I still teach classes and have spiders to take care of! To make it even more fun, I’m getting my COVID vaccination tomorrow. Whee.

Imagine a million dollars dropping into your lap, all yours free and clear. It’s a nice fantasy. It would soothe a lot of my anxieties for the future, although honestly I don’t see it happening very often. It’s the kind of delusion that drives lottery ticket sales, though.

Now imagine the reverse: suddenly, you’re handed a million dollar debt. That’s a real nightmare, but it’s also a much more common occurrence. One serious health scare, for instance, and your savings are wiped out and you’ve got hospitals dunning you for huge amounts of cash for the rest of your life.

Sorry for the too-real horror moment, everyone, but now imagine a different scenario: the worst people in the world get hit with massive debt — not you, you’re safe, just a few people who deserve the most awful misery. That’s different, there’s a bit of schadenfreude mixed in with a little sympathy for the rat, and a general satisfaction that justice came through for once…but also a weird feeling that they’re going to find a way to worm out of it.

Behold, Alex Jones.

Courts in Connecticut and Texas have already ruled that Jones intentionally defamed relatives of school children killed in the mass shooting, and they have ordered Jones to pay $1.5 billion in damages.

Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys’ fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.

Negative $1.1 billion. That’s a sum that might weigh on one’s mind. Alex Jones deserves it.

Also, Kim Davis. Remember her?

A former Kentucky official facing a $100,000 judgment for refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple could have to pay an additional $260,000 to attorneys who represented the men.

Attorneys who represented a couple in successfully suing Davis for damages have requested a total of $260,084 to cover their fees and expenses.

If a judge approves the request, Davis would owe more than $360,000 as a result of the court case.

It’s only a third of a million dollars, so it’s a bit less extreme than Jones’ case, but it’s still got to burn that her sanctimony has probably erased any savings she might have.

Keep ’em coming. I like to see conspiracy theorists and judgmental Christian bigots getting their comeuppance.