The UMM commencement ceremony is on Saturday. I’ll be attending in my black robes and funny hat, reluctantly. I go to celebrate the students, but the program is so predictable, and they usually get the most boring speakers. This year, it’s the interim president of the university and former bigwig at Hormel, the spam company, and I’ll be surprised if he says anything but platitudes.

It could be worse. Ohio State’s commencement speaker was a guy named Chris Pan, an entrepreneur, who wrote his speech with the aid of ChatGPT and ayahuasca, led the graduates in a sing-along, and spent a chunk of his time promoting BitCoin, which prompted loud boos from the audience. At least I don’t think we’ll have to suffer through that this weekend.

Maybe it’s for the best that we don’t have any weird speakers.

I have just submitted all of the grades for my Spring 2024 classes.

I wish I could say “that is all,” but now I have to start planning for Fall 2024.

This is the first day of my summer break.

Of course, then, in the middle of the night, the toilet float assembly breaks. The water won’t stop running. My wife is disturbed by this, and gets up at 1am to fuss over it to no avail — she can’t close the water valve to the toilet — and wakes me up. I tell her it’s too late to be worried about this, just turn off the main valve in the basement and go to sleep, which she does.

This morning I get up, close the shutoff valve to the toilet, turn the main valve back on, and make coffee. Then I start disassembling the float valve so I can replace it. No rush; we have another bathroom upstairs.

But then, I’m informed that as long as I’m doing this little job, she’d really like a whole new toilet that’s a bit taller, since this one is practically a squat toilet, and as long as I’m doing that, can I get a bidet installed? This has turned into such a big job that I’m going to just call a plumber on Monday.

Maybe it’s a good thing I haven’t retired yet, I had a terrifying vision of what life would be like if I didn’t have a formal job.

If for no other reason than to help them avoid this kind of mistake.

Is that how Medicare works? I have another excuse to avoid retirement.

It’s time to go read about the Haymarket Affair and the Great Upheaval.

Unfortunately, what I’ll do instead today is go to work…the US hasn’t quite figured out what May Day should be about, or more likely has been actively covering up the meaning of the day. Also, I have to pay bills today. I don’t think I’m quite in the right spirit for the holiday.

It’s been raining off and on for the past week, and we have rain forecast for the next ten days, right up through commencement, and the trees have started vomiting up leaves.

You’ll notice even our bedraggled lawn is turning green.

Spring won’t actually be here until the grass spiders start putting up tents all over the yard. I’ve been watching a couple of places where I know Theridion always lurks, and have been seeing traces of silk; we also found a Parasteatoda building a cobweb in our compost bin. Once classes are over, it’ll be time to get down in the weeds and see who else is emerging.

Remember this story about Mitt Romney?

In June 2007 the Boston Globe reported that in 1983, current Republican presidential hopeful (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney had placed his Irish setter in a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to his parents’ cottage on the Canadian shores of

Lake Huron. He’d built a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog. He’d also made it clear to his five sons that bathroom breaks would be taken only during predetermined stops to gas up the car.

The dog spoiled this plan by letting loose with a bout of diarrhea during its rooftop sojourn, necessitating an unplanned gas station visit for the purpose of hosing down the pooch, its carrier, and the back of the car.

The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, says “Hold my beer.”

Noem reportedly writes in her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, that Cricket had an “aggressive personality” and that Noem hoped taking her on a pheasant hunt with older dogs would help to calm the young Cricket down. Instead, Noem writes that Cricket spoiled the hunt by being “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”

The Republican reportedly writes that she failed to get Cricket under control with voice commands and an electronic collar, but then an even worse incident occurred after the hunt had ended. While traveling home, Noem writes that she stopped to speak to a local family—at which point Cricket escaped her truck and set about killing the family’s chickens, getting hold of one bird at a time, “crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”

So what do you do with an out-of-control dog? Discipline? Find a professional trainer? Not this Republican!

Noem explains that she grabbed her gun and took Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “But it had to be done.” Afterward, she writes, she decided she also needed to kill a male goat she owned that was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, complaining that the buck “loved to chase” Noem’s children around and would wreck their clothes by knocking them down.

She reportedly writes of the goat that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” like Cricket, but the killing did not go as smoothly. The goat jumped when she pulled the trigger, Noem says, meaning the goat survived the shot. She adds that she went to her truck to get another shell and then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

What’s most surprising about this story is that she wrote it up and published it in a book for everyone to read, and doesn’t show even a glimmer of regret. I guess that’s what conservatives want, a politician who will kill without remorse.

Meanwhile, the Stevens Community Humane Society, our local no-kill shelter, is having their big annual fundraising dinner next Saturday. I’ll be there, come on by and support a group that doesn’t believe in clumsily gunning down animals we don’t like.

Sometimes, we do have to respect the humanity of those we despise, no matter how repugnant we find them.

What do you think, isolation and electroshock therapy? Or something milder and kinder?

I am all caught up on my grading — until Friday, when it starts all over again — so I could have used some happy, wholesome news. Instead, I got this:

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender.

The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out, sometimes killing the baby long-tailed macaque monkeys in the process.

I mentioned this horrible monkey torture ring before. Does it count as good news that several people are going to prison over this activity, or is it bad news that such horrors exist at all? This is a better question than whether the stupid cup is half empty or half full — should we regard the existence of monkey torturers as an indictment of humanity, or the existence of anti-torture laws as an example of humanity’s virtues? I can go either way.

Unfortunately, then I read about 764, the torture ring that’s all about kids torturing kids. We should probably all just get off the internet.

The last time I met Dennett was at a Darwin Day event where we were a double bill. We had a good time, he told me stories about his heart surgery, mentioned that all he really wanted to do was get away to his farm and make apple cider, we got to talking about evolution, and I told him I didn’t care much at all for his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — it was naively adaptationist. He asked my opinion of free will, and I told him I never argue about it, because it was all an illusion and it didn’t matter whether minds had it or not. We got along famously, and corresponded for a while afterwards, until the fact that I was disenchanted with Dawkins, despised Harris, thought the whole idea of the “four horsemen” was disappointing jingo, and that sexism was poisoning everything, made me persona non grata among prominent atheists. Oh, well, we were friends for a while.

Now Dennett has died. That’s a sadness, because he was a good guy and brought a thoughtful, humanist perspective to atheism. I hope someone is taking care of his apples.

With Hitchens and Dennett dead, and Dawkins doddering on the edge of irrelevant crankiness, I guess that leaves young Mr Harris, the least of the quartet, holding the legacy of the Four Horsemen, and that propaganda concept can now fade away, unlamented. Dennett’s legacy will continue and his books are worth thinking about, even when I disagree with them.