Every year, just before Thanksgiving, the city of Morris puts on a Parade of Lights, always in the dark and the bitter cold. The citizens line up along the streets, freezing our butts off, while hyper-excited kids are bouncing off the curb, waiting for the candy to start flying. Then along come the floats, with local beauty queens waving, lights flashing, Pounce (the university mascot) looking terrifying,crews running alongside with bags of candy, and then, most importantly, along comes Santa.

It was all very exciting, especially for the kids. I guess the holiday season has officially started.

I have a long list of places I’d like to visit, but am aware I’ll probably never get the opportunity: Florence, Italy; Lagos, Nigeria; both Antarctica and the far North; Istanbul (but that one scares me, I’d probably get arrested); and many others. I’m fortunate that I have been able to visit the Galapagos Islands, Beijing, China, and a scattering of places in Europe. If I had infinite money, I’d probably be flying off to a new place every week.

But one place I never, ever want to see is Dubai. My infinite money has a limit, and that limit stops cold at hellholes of vast wealth (I know, that’s a contradiction, but I will never have infinite, or even large amounts, of money, but Dubai actually does exist.) One journalist visited the place and now regrets it.

I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.

I am ashamed to have visited. There are some experiences that journalism cannot excuse. I add nothing to the record by having gone. I thought the trip would present a grotesque tapestry that might disclose some new truth about the reordering of the world. It got the better of me. I imagined a gonzo-style reveal about ordering a mojito in Russian from an Indian barman while gazing towards Iran. All of this is possible, but none of it makes my visit worthwhile.

That’s about how I feel about the place. It’s an abomination, the end result of shameful wealth inequity, and I have no empathy to share with the rich tourists who fly there to do…what? I don’t know.

I was sorta disconnected yesterday. My router was down for most of the morning, but mainly, my wife had one of her infrequent days off from work. She has an erratic schedule, and seems to work approximately 6 days out of 7, and her days off are unpredictable. Working in elder care is one of those difficult and under-appreciated jobs that should be paid better but never will be.

So we took advantage of the time to get a lot of mundane things done.

• We reorganized my home office, clearing out a lot of the clutter, moving the futon I never used to a different room. Now I actually have room to move!
• Our clothes dryer wasn’t working. It turns out the vent was clogged, and we pulled it out of its niche to clear it, which was a revelation. This appliance was here when we moved in almost 25 years ago, and we’d never looked under or behind it until now. We finally discovered what happened to Mary’s favorite gardening hat. To put it in perspective, we found old Howard Dean signs that had fallen behind it.



• We went shopping for a new bed. Mary has some minor respiratory issues, which means she often has to sit up in bed, so we’re looking for one of those fancy adjustable beds that will let us both be comfortable. I think it might be a Christmas gift to each other. I think we’re also sinking into degenerate decadence here in the waning years of the American empire.


It’s not supposed to be bent like that

• I’m also looking for a bookshelf with doors — the evil cat destroyed a camera lens (an inexpensive one, fortunately) by flicking it off a shelf, so I need a cat-proof way to store electronics and camera gear. I’ve ordered one that will arrive next week. Until then, I’m hovering over my lens collection like a dragon over its hoard, and snarling if the cat approaches.
• Of course I went into the lab to tend the spiders.
• Mary restocked her bird feeders. My job was to hold the ladder.

Lots of red and green shimmering in the sky tonight.

This was a handheld shot, ISO 6400, f4, 1 sec exposure. Maybe I should drag a tripod out next time I want to shoot the aurora.

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I think maybe my iPhone did a better job.

After a long morning cleaning up after so many spiders, I had to pick up a few things from the grocery store, and fixed a light lunch of rice cakes with strawberry yogurt and berries on top, which is simple and quick and good for me and my wife.

This teeny-tiny package of blackberries cost $4.

I remember standing in front of a big blackberry bush and stripping off more blackberries than that in one handful and stuffing them into my mouth. Wouldn’t even have to move, just pulling them off a single branch.

I went ahead and bought them out of a sense of nostalgia. They were good, but I’m not going to be able to afford to do that very often.

I nearly went blind stepping into that store.

My favorite alien organism in Predator Badlands was the brachiating carnivore with trilateral symmetry. That was neat.

I also like the novel communal (?) branch like thing that would strike like an army of snakes. Cool.

There was a grazer with a weird set of mouthparts that I didn’t get a good look at, unfortunately, but it had to be good because they were adapted to feed on razor-sharp fields of leaves. Show more next time.

I was mildly disappointed with the main big bad monster, which was just kind of ape-like, and had unrealistic powers of regeneration. I want to see the energetic breakdown of the metabolic costs of rebuilding whole body parts in seconds — that’s pure fantasy. Not going to happen.

Also, and this was a problem with the Avatar movies, too, if you’re going to get creative with strange background animals, do think in evolutionary terms. There should be some shared continuity of structure in various clades, not just random odd beasties with no visible relationships between them.

I was deeply disappointed with the main “alien,” the Yautja, who was just a man — a perfectly ordinary, familiar human being — wearing a mask with funny flexible fangs on it. Pathetic. Unbelievable. Cheap and cheesy. Drop that transparently fake alien from future episodes (you know they’re going to keep making these “predator” movies, and the weakest prop in the whole franchise is the predator.)

I’m also a bit tired of the “warrior alien” trope. Advanced alien cultures are going to be more diverse and complex than the “everyone fights for honor” nonsense that’s affected the genre since at least the Klingons, and it’s boring and makes those aliens into one dimensional characters. Stop it.

I guess there was a plot that I didn’t pay much attention to — it was something about big fights with an evil corporation trying to exploit alien monsters, don’t care, been there, done that. Elle Fanning stood out as a good actor who was playing two synthetic humanoids, but I never understood why, if you have mastery of building artificial organisms with intelligence that you’d put them in a limited human form. Get funky with it next time, and let the synth engineers imagination run wild. If I could do that, you know I’d have giant spider-squid hybrids with vaguely human minds running rampant over the cosmos.

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!