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.

Too much ick this morning. Even grading is suddenly looking pleasant.

Here’s a palate cleanser: our granddaughter Iliana gets to take care of a couple of cats for a few weeks, and she seems happy about it.

Not our cat, obviously. Iliana has met our cat, it did not go well, but our cat seems to be a feral outlier.

Huh. All I had to do was write the title and my review is done. That was easy.

OK, a little more.

I’ve got so much grading to do that I have to prod myself with little rewards. I had to compose an exam yesterday, and I told myself if I got it done before 7 I could go to the theater. I finished at 6. The choices available to me were Creed III, which is probably the better movie, but I’m not into sports movies at all, or Cocaine Bear, which looked entertainingly stupid. I went for the light entertainment.

There was a real cocaine bear, a black bear that discovered a drug dealer’s stash, ate 70 pounds of cocaine, and died. That would make for a short, sad, boring movie. In this movie, a plane drops cocaine into a park, and the bear finds scattered drops and turns into a raging drug fiend, flitting everywhere and ripping the limbs off various ne’er-do-wells and goofballs while collecting face-fulls of cocaine.

It was Ray Liotta’s last movie. It features a couple of kids who are cute, sassy, and don’t get eaten. The adults meet their demise in various creative ways. It’s a bit gorey.

Final assessment: it was honest schlock, and much, much better than Quantumania.

(I’ve got lots more grading to do, and am about to head off to the coffee shop with a stack of papers. When I get that done, the reward is to spend a little spider time. Then more grading this afternoon — maybe I’ll goad myself on with something on Netflix tonight. Then more grading tomorrow.)

Somebody needs to give that man an enema.

We got word yesterday that the University will have “reduced operations” for a few days, all because of a little snow. Are we not Minnesotans? We can handle this!

Coursework should move to distance/online learning between 8 a.m. Wednesday and 12 p.m. Thursday. If your course cannot be delivered via distance, it should be canceled. Faculty and instructors should be in touch with their students as soon as possible to inform them about how to connect to distance learning or to determine how missed classes or related assignments may be made up. Students who have not heard from their instructors are encouraged to reach out for more information.
Only designated “essential on-campus” employees must report to work on campus while we are in reduced operations. Managers and supervisors have identified affected employees and should promptly notify them about scheduling. A number of employees are necessary to maintain our campus’ 24-hour operations and we greatly appreciate their service. We urge managers to work with essential on-campus employees to ensure they are taking proper safety precautions.

Yeah, I know, heavy snowstorm, blizzard conditions, yadda yadda. On the one hand, I agree: if you have to travel to get here, it’s going to be hazardous, stay home and stay safe. On the other hand, the weather news has been playing up this storm for days, talking about two feet of snow, etc. I’ve gotten used to discounting these predictions — I’m going to estimate we’ll probably get about 10 inches, because I tend to cut all the predictions in half. That’s not nothing, but it’s nothing to panic over.

This is Minnesota, and we’re equipped to handle this stuff. The snow plows were out in force overnight, we’ve got a snowblower, we’ve got a pantry with supplies to keep us well fed for a week or two (although meals will get boring by the end), our house is snug and warm, I’m not at all worried by this storm.

I’m reminded of my grandfather telling stories of growing up in northern Minnesota. They had to tie a rope from the house to the outhouse so they wouldn’t get lost and freeze to death on the way to relieving themselves. Now we have something better than a rope — it’s called indoor plumbing.