I’m ready to fly away from the damp foggy Pacific Northwest to return to the cold snowy upper Midwest. It’ll be good to get home, but at least I can say that I got to watch my mother get visibly stronger in the week I’ve been here. She is off the oxygen during the day, and is able to get up and walk to the kitchen to get a cup of tea all by herself. If she keeps up with her therapy, I expect her to be roller-skating and dancing and changing flat tires next time I’m back this way.

The only downside is that she’ll be complaining even more vigorously about her offspring taking her cigarettes away. It’s for her own good!

When I was a young boy, my grandfather had a special knife hung above the fireplace, one that he said he inherited from his father, and that he would pass down to me when I was grown-up. Things happened. My great-grandfather died, my grandfather died, I moved around chasing an education, my grandparents’ house was sold, the contents scattered, and heck, I was more concerned about my family and family values and all that then in some lump of metal.

The knife, as it turned out, had gone to my mother, and my sister found it, and she says I can have it now. I guess this is my inheritance, a simple, practical knife that brings back happy memories. Here it is:

I think those are silver fittings. The handle has my great-grandfather’s initials (PV, for Peter Westad) picked out with small nails, and an engraving “WESTAD 1908” on the sheath.

Here’s the blade.

It’s still sharp, but I think you can see the edge is a bit rough — it’s going to need some tender loving care. My grandfather always told me that it was good Norwegian steel and would last a lifetime. He was wrong. It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes.

The photo is my great-grandfather and his brothers, taken in Fertile, Minnesota.

My sister is going to ship it to me later (I don’t think it would be wise to bring it on a plane), so it’ll be returning to Minnesota at long last. I’m going to have to consult some experts about maintaining it — it’s in pretty good shape after a century of neglect, so it doesn’t need a lot of work, but I would like to buff it up a bit. After all, I’m going to have to leave it to my descendants now!

Here at my mother’s house, we’re reminiscing about old times, and out come the photo albums. You have permission to mock 1990s me.

This was not a one-off. Mary’s looking good in 1995, I’m just a big dork.

In contrast, this is a photo from 1943, of my grandparents holding my mother. Formal photos look so much better. Classy!

I’m hanging out in Auburn, Washington with my mother and sisters, and yesterday I go to see my son and daughter-in-law and grandson. Mom is looking pretty good, fortunately. I might get some opportunities to get around the area and explore.

As I anticipated, it’s cool, gray, and raining. Perfect weather!

Warning: Old Man Rant coming up.

My first flight on an airplane was in 1975. I was flying from Seattle to Indianapolis to start my first year of college. It was OK. My family went right out to the gate with me, I boarded by seat number, I happened to sit next to a schoolteacher from Brownsville, IN who told me all about Indiana — the weather, the history, geography, cool differences from Washington state to watch out for. I still remember his kindness.

The flight was only remarkable in hindsight, because the airlines now have fucked up a mundane form of transportation beyond recognition.

Security theater is ridiculous. Get in a long line, take off your shoes, pull out any personal electronics, go through a scanner, get patted down by a guy in a blue uniform. Today is a light traffic day, so I was amused that there were more security personnel than passengers in the terminal.

Boarding is a nightmare of privilege. Now we board in the order First Class, Diamond Medallion, Premium Select, Comfort+, Sky Priority, Main Cabin 1, 2, and 3, and Basic Economy (on Delta; every airline has their own series of ranks). You have to pay extra to go first on the plane. I’m afraid I’m a Basic Economy person, every time.

I’m flying on Sun Country today, which is one of those no-frills airlines, so maybe I’m something even lower than Basic Economy. You will pay extra for every piece of luggage you bring on, which is fair, I guess. I’ve pared everything down to the bare essentials — everything I need for 8 days away packed into one tight little backpack. I sorta fondly remember that first flight when I packed a year’s worth of clothes into an oversized cardboard suitcase held together with packing tape. No extra cost for the flight, but this was before wheelie bags and I blistered my hands dragging that thing across the university campus.

When you buy a ticket through Sun Country, you don’t actually buy a seat — you have to go through a map of the plane where each seat has a dollar value attached, depending on their desirability. I booked a $12 seat, the lowest, because I didn’t want to spend $50 for an aisle seat near the front. I assume standing in an aisle is not an option.

And then there’s the lack of reliability — you pay for a ticket, but that’s not a promise that they’ll deliver you to your destination. They can cancel your flight at any time, there’s no recompense. There are often delays. I’ve learned that if they announce a 15 minute departure delay, that actually means they’re going to nudge that time upwards while you wait. It’s going to be hours, at least, and often ends in cancellation.

It’s all about corporate greed anymore. They’ve taken a service that used to be routine and reliable, and turned it into a hellish gamble, with the only guarantee being that the airline will get its money, whether they deliver or not.

I’d rather stay home anymore. But I’ve put my money in the slot, pulled the handle, and I’m hoping what comes up is a safe arrival in reasonable time in Seattle. So far, I’m not enjoying myself.

It’ll get better once I’m out of an airport.

It’s just getting better and better.

Last week, Musk had said that “all” X Premium Plus subscribers would get access to “Grok,” a “rebellious” ChatGPT competitor with “fewer guardrails” that Musk has said was trained on Twitter’s own data, something that Microsoft once tried, creating the world’s most racist chatbot in less than 24 hours back in 2016.

Musk outright lied, saying Grok is “being opened up slowly to Premium+ users,” a statement he likely made because a popular account posted that Grok was a feature of Premium+ subscriptions, only to be met with a community note saying that “most users with X Premium+ still lack access to Grok,” despite Musk posting two days beforehand that you should “subscribe to Premium+ for no ads and access to our Grok AI.”

I am not at all interested in yet another chatbot, especially not one trained on Xitter content, and I’m not going to ever be a Premium+ subscriber, but I was entertained by this idea:

In the event that Grok is truly trained on Twitter’s posts (after all, this is an Elon Musk product), it will become what Jathan Sadowski calls a “habsburg AI,” a “system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”

I, for one, look forward to the hideous, inbred, mutant essays that will be unleashed on the internet by this development. They can’t be worse than what mere humans can generate.

Welcome to Stress City! Yesterday was exams and exams, all very traditional pen-and-paper things, and right now the ugly pile of pulp is festering in a bag, awaiting the kiss of my red pen. These have to be done by 1:00 tomorrow, because the cell bio students will want to know their standing so they can decide whether they should take the optional final or not. I stand between a decision to go home for the holidays right away, or stay in Morris through next week for another exam. There may be poundings on my office door escalating to deployment of Grond if I don’t get it done.

I cleared my desk yesterday by submitting the online exam for my intro course early. That one is due at 5pm on Saturday, which is cutting it close: I have to depart for the airport at 6am Sunday, so my Saturday night party is more grading. Also packing for a flight.

Oh, right, I also have a couple of term papers I have to finish grading today.

Between that 1pm deadline today, and 5pm due date tomorrow, I have to compose the two final exams that they’ll have to answer to next week, while I’m away in Seattle. That’s right, I’ll be grading exams while visiting my poor sick mother.

Normally, my end of semester work load isn’t this bad, but normally I don’t stack an urgent flight across the country on top of it.

This is my scientific history in a series of short acronyms.

I know the author is thinking of recent events in space technology, but it’s also applicable to biology. I’ve had embryos undergo “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

Although, actually, I’ve never felt a need to resort to euphemisms. “The experiment failed” is usually good enough.