Mary is off to spend a week with our granddaughter, and it’s been a struggle. She’s supposed to have just gotten her own priorities straight — you know, packing, loading the car, that sort of thing — but instead she’s been fussing over me, as if I’m going to be helpless.

The cat’s even worse. When she sees luggage appear by the back door, she knows something is up and has been freaking out and puking all over the place.

I’ll be fine. I got a week’s worth of lectures organized and queued up this morning, and am looking forward to making a jambalaya loaded up with shrimp (Mary doesn’t like shrimp, so usually have to leave them out), and then, of course, the wild parties at my house starting tonight.*

*There will be no wild parties, sorry to say. Teaching resumes Monday.

Some people have been pushing the idea that COVID-19 was artificially created in a Chinese lab. There’s no real evidence for that — the virus itself doesn’t contain any labels of its origin, that a research lab in China was studying the virus isn’t evidence of manipulation (a research lab researching is what research labs do), and the people promoting the ‘lab leak’ theory all seem to have a political agenda to blame someone. I sure haven’t been convinced. Now there’s a new revelation: they’ve found genetic evidence from samples collected at the Huanan wet market that infected wild animals were there.

Way back in 2019, researchers were swabbing locations in the market and filing away samples for later analysis. Guess what? It’s later. Swabs sampled from a stall that was selling raccoon dogs have been sequenced, and they’ve found … raccoon dog DNA, which is no surprise. But they also found lots of SARS-CoV-2 mingled with it, which tells us that these wild animals were already infected with COVID.

A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.

“This really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory who wasn’t involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”

I’ve never been that interested in the question of its origin. I already know that we live on a planet of viruses, with an unimaginably huge population of diverse viruses squirting their DNA and RNA into every available creature, genetic material that is constantly mutating at a rapid rate, and what we ought to be amazed at is that we have molecular mechanisms of resistance, an immune system, that can cope with it at all. It was inevitable that something would evolve to get past our defenses, and that we’d have to adapt or die. That’s what we’ve been doing for the entirety of the existence of life on Earth.

That life changes and that there are naturally inimical forces that exist is an uncomfortable truth for many people. They’d rather think that a threat is by intent, that it had to be designed, and that the solution is to march out and do battle with a hostile, and purposeful, enemy (in this case, all of China. Good luck with that, I’d rather deal with it by improving public hygiene and developing new medicines.)

Now, can we stop wasting time looking for someone to blame, and refocus on dealing rationally with the pandemic? Unfortunately, there are many people who think the way to deal with a threat is to ignore it and pretend it has gone away. It hasn’t. The viruses keep on changing, thriving on the neglect that gives them an opportunity to proliferate in all these hosts who have given up, and it’s only going to get worse.

Today is our 43rd anniversary, and this morning I was thinking about our wedding.

It was a nice wedding, not too fancy, not too stressful, exactly as my wife-to-be planned it. There were many people there: family from both sides, and lots of familiar friends from the University of Washington, where both of us had attended (I’d recently graduated and had moved to Eugene, Oregon, where Mary would shortly follow). We’d been living in the dorms on campus, and had a close-knit crew who’d been applying to the same rooms year after year — 5th Floor Lander Hall, represent! There was the gang I played D&D with. Of course my two best friends since Junior High, Steve Klopfstein and Steve Dixon, were in attendance. These were all people I liked very much, and was happy to have a little party with them.

As I was reminiscing, though, I realized that this was also the 43rd anniversary of leaving all those good friends behind. I was never very good at being sociable, and immediately after the wedding Mary and I were off on our peripatetic academy journey, and we lost contact. I didn’t tell them how much our friendship mattered, and I drifted away, no forwarding address provided (not that it would have mattered, we moved so often over the years), and didn’t even try to stay in touch. I was the flavorless marzipan groom, I could stand woodenly on the cake, and do nothing but fail to communicate, no matter that I wanted to.

I guess my shriveled little heart only had enough love for one person there. At least that’s held up for a good long while.

Susan Hassol and Michael Mann say, “Enjoy the weather. Worry about the climate.”. No. I refuse to enjoy this weather. “Warm” in Minnesota means hovering around freezing, and we’ve got deep piles of snow everywhere, and another storm on the way that’ll dump more snow on us. I’m not looking forward to what other parts of the country call “Spring,” because for us it’ll be the time everything melts producing seas of mud and slush, with sheets of ice lurking underneath. There’s nothing enjoyable about this season.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better is my feeling.

This week sees a “meteorological battleground” setting up across the continental U.S., pitting a massive winter storm from the West against far-too-early Spring heat in the East. This major winter storm is dumping heavy snow and ice across the northern U.S. from the West Coast to the Northeast. Widespread very strong, gusty winds are expected across the West and High Plains while heavy rain with the potential for flash floods and severe weather are predicted for the Midwest and Plains. Meanwhile, historic heat is building across the Southeast and mid-Atlantic states, with record-breaking February temperatures soaring into the 80s. Almost the entire country is experiencing some form of extreme weather this week.

It’s miserable here in the upper Midwest, so don’t try to tell me to enjoy the weather, which has been nothing but bad news all winter long. Maybe there’s good news about the climate?

The good news is that clean energy and other climate solutions are abundant and available. Although there is much work that remains to be done, recent U.S. legislation makes it increasingly profitable to tap into natural flows of renewable energy, such as from the sun and the wind, and to use that clean electricity to power our buildings, transportation and more. We do not have to simply accept an ever-worsening torrent of tempestuous weather. We can act with urgency to rein in the climate emergency and remake our civilization into one that respects the gift of a stable climate we inherited — one that we can pass on to our children.

What, that’s the good news? We can hope that the US government acts with urgency to switch to clean renewable energy sources? Right. Or we can pray that a host of fairies shows up with magic wands that will make everything all better.

I’m sorry, I’m a pessimist.

My daughter might appreciate this. She’s writing up papers, getting ready for her Ph.D. thesis defense, and trying to raise a four year old, and all I have to contribute is…it could be worse.

I don’t think she has any mad Australian guardians living next door, unfortunately.

I have turned 66. Don’t bother to wish me a happy birthday, though, because I still have to go through another 600 of these before I come into my full beastly power, and you will all have to bow down before me.

Or is it 550 years? I don’t know. Some people say the number of the beast is actually 616, and that there was a mistranslation or something.

I don’t even know what the beast is supposed to do. Am I going to have to sprout some more heads? That wouldn’t be particularly cool. I guess I have time to figure it out, not going to worry about it just yet.

Anyway, if you needed an excuse to party, go ahead and celebrate that I’m not of an age to go all Revelation on your butts.

Elon Musk keeps sinking to new depths. In his latest escapade, one of his employees was so baffled by the confusion that reigns at Twitter, he asked for clarification on whether he was still employed or not. He responded by firing him, insulting him, and ridiculing him for having a disability.

That’s a lawsuit right there. The man’s disability is muscular dystrophy — he’s going to die from it. Also, one of the reasons for the confusion is that his employment was a special case. He’d founded a company that Twitter bought for $100 million, and he’d generously taken his buyout in the form of wages over an extended time, and the whole sum will come due when his employment ends. Like, when Musk fires him.

Also, he seems to be a genuinely good guy, a kind of anti-Musk.

Musk keeps detonating these bombs of incompetence. I agree with this fellow who thinks Twitter is doomed, and the collapse is coming fast.

It’s already real bad over there. Elon Musk said yesterday that ad revenues have fallen 50%. The site is experiencing major outages almost once a week. During the most recent outage earlier this week, Elon was laser-focused on the important stuff: reply-guying Jordan Peterson. The Twitter Blue rollout has been such a disaster that he fired almost the entire team. The company isn’t paying rent on its office space. It recently tried to create a new income stream by selling office plants to employees.

But take a deeper look and the company is in even worse shape than it appears. Twitter has two financial time bombs waiting to go off. My hunch is that Elon will file for bankruptcy as soon as one of these time bombs self-detonates. I can’t say exactly when that will be.

I give it about six months.

The two time bombs are 1) a battery of lawsuits from all those fired employees for unlawful termination, and 2) a collection of massive fines from the FTC and the EU. He can’t avoid those. He paid too much for a company he bought as a present to his ego, and he’s been making it cataclysmically worse. I’m just biding my time, waiting for the inevitable and spectacular splash when Musk crashes.