The Menu is getting a very short run at the Morris Theater, only a couple of days and then it’s out tonight. It’s not exactly holiday fare, I guess. I got in to see it last night, in a nearly empty theater (the competition running on the second screen is Avatar, which doesn’t interest me in the slightest).

It’s worth seeing! I didn’t know what to expect, and was continually surprised. I could summarize it as your standard horror/slasher movie: obsessed chef with a cult following invites obnoxious upper-class snobs to a private dinner in order to kill them all, the sort of thing you might expect a Vincent Price to headline. But that’s not it at all. Ralph Fiennes is marvelously intense as a chef who has lost all joy in his craft, and plays it with a sorrowful despair. His guests might be frightened at first, but mostly they sink into resignation. “We’re all going to die tonight,” one says, while passively remaining seated at the table. They all stay and eat — no, taste and savor — the weirdly finicky plates of little tidbits artfully tweezered into miniature tableaus in front of them.

Instead of the traditional grisly-murder-one-after-the-other, most of the diners survive to the very end. They instead face psychological torture, becoming increasingly aware of their doom. Even the one set-piece event, in which the men are released onto the island with a 45 second head start before the waitstaff will hunt them down, doesn’t end with any killing — they’re caught and brought back and sit down for the next course. It was more horrifying than culminating the hunt in gore and splatter.

Even the staff are caught up in a cult of depression and despair. No one will get out alive, and all seem to welcome the release of death. There’s no point in living, you know. You’ll never be great enough, other people will suck all the life out of you eventually. Serve the chef, that is all.

The exception to all the doom-and-gloom is Anya Taylor-Joy (is she going to be in every movie from now on?) who plays a prostitute hired by one of the pretentious twits to be his plus one. She is mainly pissed off when she learns her client knew ahead of time that this dinner was going to end in death, and he hired her because he know he couldn’t attend without a partner. She fights back by reminding the chef of a time when he wasn’t jaded and cynical, and even gets an honest smile out of him.

The real monster in the movie turns out to be wealth and capitalism and greed, and how it consumes people with ennui. But it is at heart a true horror movie, it’s just lacking an Abominable Dr Phibes and replaces him with a sense of sorrowful futility.

A perfect Christmas movie!

According to grinning asshat Jesse Waters, its demographic skews atheist female — urban, atheist, overeducated female! We’ve seen the metrics on it. It is mostly single women that have graduate degrees.

Jesse Watters: "Musk can't poll Twitter. That's a rigged poll! It skews atheist female — urban, atheist, overeducated female! We’ve seen the metrics on it. It is mostly single women that have graduate degrees."

Katie Pavlich: "That's true." pic.twitter.com/zml2uTJyL6

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 19, 2022

Wow, really? That sounds great! Conversations with smart women, sign me up.

Except…that doesn’t jibe with my personal experience of Twitter, and, well, it’s out of the lying mouth of Jesse Waters, and the numbers don’t match up with reality at all, as we might expect of Fox News.

Women get harassed and abused so much more than men on Twitter, so that’s much more in alignment with my impressions.

A scene from our yard:

Remember when you were young, and you’d start frothing eagerly for Christmas on the day after Thanksgiving (or a bit before)? In my day, you’d get the Sears toy catalog in the Fall, and you’d obsessively study it day after day and make lists you’d leave for your parents to find. Now I was scarcely aware of the existence of the holiday until now. I guess I’m old and jaded.

New rules on Twitter.

You know, if Twitter really were the superior choice for social media, you wouldn’t need to block mentions of the competition. That’s something Musk himself argued a few decades…I mean, a few years…I mean a few months ago.

Twitter. It’s the bad one.

This is the way Musk has always operated…only his usual scheme doesn’t work with this kind of company.

Here’s the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

Elon Musk. He’s the bad one.

The university board of regents member, Steve Sviggum (for some reason, I always think of him as a Ralph Sviggum), who suggest that maybe the University of Minnesota Morris is too diverse, is still squatting on the board, despite calls to resign. The latest comes from student leaders at all the branch campuses.

Dear Regent Sviggum:

We write to you today asking for your immediate resignation from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

Your question at the October 13th Mission Fulfillment committee meeting, in which you asked whether or not the Morris campus had become ‘too diverse’, demonstrated your inability to fulfill the University’s institutional commitment to equity and diversity as written in Board of Regents policy.

While we acknowledge your public apology, what students have shared about your visit to the Morris campus last month make it clear that your apology was meaningless. We do not believe that your reported behavior when interacting with Morris students from marginalized communities is consistent with someone who truly believes that diversity is a strength.

Finally, we acknowledge that many of our campuses are currently facing enrollment struggles. We firmly believe that encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to attend our colleges will be a part of the solution to those struggles. A recent study conducted by Niche found that diversity was one of the top aspects high school seniors want out of their college experience. With that in mind, we are concerned that your continued presence on the Board of Regents will signal a hostile attitude toward diversity and deter prospective students from choosing one of the five University of Minnesota campuses.

He’s lingering on like a foul odor, and it’s quite clear that he has no intention of leaving until he is forced out. The latest bit of petty bullying from him occurred at a board of regents meeting to which student leaders were invited.

Yeah, he’s not leaving. Right now he’s clinging to his position out of spite.

By the way, here are the stats on Morris enrollment.

The University of Minnesota’s strategic plan calls for the Morris campus to have 1,700 students by 2025, but it had just 1,068 at one recent count. About 41% of students describe themselves as a person of color, up from 21% a decade ago.

I was here a decade ago (two decades ago even), and I’m here now. We’ve had no decline in the ability, the enthusiasm, or the brilliance of our students over that time. So much for “too much diversity”!

Finished. All exams graded. All final grades calculated. All letter grades submitted to the registrar.

A day at the beach would be nice, the best I could manage was a walk through the snow. Maybe popcorn and a movie at home tonight? Early to bed and sleep until Christmas? My ambitions are simple and uncomplicated.

Schläfst du, Lehrer? I did not sleep well last night. I was up and down all night long, struggling to get the rest I need today. You see, I did a terrible thing: I set the deadline for submission of all finals, final essays, and term papers in all three of my classes for the same instant, at midnight last night. I think I may have accidentally wired a connection from the digital bit bucket to my brain, so all night long as papers were sent in I’d get a jolt of electrons directly into the attention centers of my hindbrain.

Or it might have just been general dread at what I was going to find waiting for me in the morning. Those damn Valkyries were galloping through my head all night long, and now I must rise! Reite zur Wal!

Hojotoho! hojotoho! heiaha! heiaha!

I’ve been an aquarist for a few decades, but the largest aquarium I’ve ever owned was 29 gallons. I was more about assembling many aquaria, and I think maybe the largest total capacity I’ve ever had was about 150 gallons. Every aquarist has the nightmare of something happening to the aquaria — I remember George Streisinger (the original zebrafish guy) recounting his terrible dream about the quonset hut where the entire initial zebrafish colony was housed having a catastrophic collapse and all his work getting wiped out.

This is a setup for the fabulous Berlin AquaDom, a giant million liter aquarium housing about 1500 exotic fish. Here it is, isn’t it beautiful?

Fantastic. I wonder what kind of nightmares the owners had? Because they all just came true.

There was speculation freezing temperatures that got down to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight caused a crack in the acrylic glass tank, which then exploded under the weight of the water. Police said there was no evidence the incident resulted from a malicious act.

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

I imagine Australia doesn’t have the same problems we do here in Minnesota — the major artery to Morris is a sheet of ice right now, with drifting snow blowing around — but still this is a bad time to travel, as FDotM illustrates.

Trains? We ain’t got no stinkin’ trains. They even discontinued the bus service, and we have to somehow get ourselves to a town 45 minutes away to get a shuttle. My choice is the first one: stay at home with the pigs and chickens…only in this case, it’s a cat and a lot of spiders. My wife and I will be spending Christmas home alone in a small snowy midwestern town.

So what are you doing for the holidays?

First, I publicly deplore all stalkers, and apparently some people have been stalking and harassing Elon Musk, and someone was following his family around. This is despicable. There are people, irrespective of what political position they hold, who lose all perspective and turn their personal dislike for someone into a crusade, and that is a behavior that must be opposed.

However, it is interesting that rather than relying on the police, the law, and social opprobrium to deal with the problem, Musk is lashing out at journalism.

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

@ElonJet wasn’t stalking him. The account was posting publicly available information that you can still get online (although less conveniently formatted), and it had been arbitrarily closed by Musk, after he’d said he wouldn’t.

On Wednesday, @ElonJet was permanently suspended despite a tweet from Musk weeks earlier, saying he would keep it up as part of “my commitment to free speech.”

So much for his commitment to free speech. His latest spasm is even more revealing, though — he’s killing accounts for even mentioning the @ElonJet account, or reporting on confrontations with his stalker.

Around 11:30 p.m. Thursday, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces chat — essentially a public conference call — with several journalists, including some who had been banned, in which he reiterated his claim that they had “doxed” him.

The journalists challenged him on this.

“You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true,” said Harwell.

Musk retorted, “You posted a link to the address.”

Harwell replied, “In the course of reporting on @ElonJet, we posted a link to @ElonJet, which is now not online.”

Musk left the call abruptly about four minutes into it.

He has since shut down Twitter Spaces. Or maybe it just broke because he’s been starving the maintenance teams?

We’re now entering the tyrant’s paranoia phase, where he is afraid of all the enemies he imagines are out to get him. He’s losing everywhere — Twitter was never a money-maker to begin with, but now Tesla’s value is plummeting, people are beginning to look at his other business ventures with a skeptical eye (The Boring Company and Hyperloop were clearly useless scams intended to kill mass transit), and his Mars fantasies are pretentious delusions — and he’s seeing well-deserved criticism as personal attacks and even threats to his life. This is a bad attitude to have if you’re trying to run a company whose whole purpose is to allow and encourage free discussion about anything and everything. If his incompetence doesn’t kill Twitter, his eagerness to ban journalists who tweet will do the job.

It’s also hypocritical. Many of us have experienced online stalking that has risen to disruptive levels, far worse than what Elon Musk gets. The old Twitter just shrugged and ignored it, allowing Nazis and misogynists to harass whoever they wanted, and Musk has made it worse. You want to cry and complain about people picking on you, but at the same time you’ve dismantled what little machinery Twitter had in place to police that kind of behavior? I’m not going to feel much sympathy for your chickenshit fee-fees.