Stupid cat. Lately she’s taken to leaping into my lap and taking a nap when I’m trying to type.

It’d be fine if she weren’t crap at composing biology lectures.

Whoa.

That is an informative work of art. Why aren’t all labels like that?

Minnesota is shrinking? By about a millimeter a year?

I agree. Minnesota should not be squishy, and it’s going to be all we talk about around here.

In tangentially related headlines, the Washington Post announces that Tired of hostile Washington, China courts Indiana and Minnesota. I’m all for more international cooperation, but all they talk about is EV busses and exchange programs. There’s nothing about China helping us alleviate this terrible squishing.

You may have heard of the concept of retrospective coronation — the idea of looking back, and well after the fact deciding that a moment or phenomenon was the key event in history, even though at the time there was no sign of its significance. In evolution, for instance, there’s this idea of “mitochondrial Eve,” that a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years ago there was one human woman walking around who was the ancestor of everyone living today. If we had a time machine and went back to that era, though, she’d be unrecognizable, no one special, and the only thing that actually distinguishes her is future events, many of them driven by chance. That’s the retrospective part, that such a person can only be recognized with hindsight.

I think I’ve found a complementary concept: retrospective invisibility. Or maybe it’s the same thing? It’s the idea that because we didn’t see something happening in the past, it isn’t real now or then. Here’s a perfect example:

Cool. Amazing. How true. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t know anyone who’d been diagnosed with autism. Not a one!

I did know lots of kids who couldn’t concentrate, or who were weird, or could never get their homework done on time, but we just called them stupid and let ’em fall through the cracks.

I didn’t know any kids with life-threatening allergies, but that was because it was their own look-out. You couldn’t expect other kids to worry about whether a peanut could kill another kid; that was their problem. I imagine there were quite a few parents who were quietly desperate about keeping their kid’s failed biology quiet while trying to insulate them from a dangerous world.

I did know kids who had chronic illnesses that kept them out of school all the time. I don’t know what the heck was wrong with them. They were just weak, I guess.

I did get exposed to some of the secret stuff, though. My grandfather was a custodian at a ‘special school,’ and I sometimes helped him out. I met a few of my peers there, kids I’d grown up with until suddenly, they disappeared. If a kid had behavioral problems, or if a young girl got pregnant, whoosh, they were whisked off to Thomas School, and all the mainstream kids could forget about them.

A few times, I talked to a girl my age there. I liked her. She’d gotten pregnant — a bad influence, so they disappeared her. They later took the child away. She stayed in the “special school,” where she suffered from depression, another of those things that didn’t exist in the 1970s for teenagers.

There was also another “special school” on the other side of town, a Catholic school for boys where all the troublemakers were sent. It had a terrible reputation. But on the bright side, all the kids who were bouncing off walls were kept there, so we could pretend they didn’t exist!

Another tremendous bonus: now people of that era can look back on their youth and proudly brag about how wonderful those days were, without a single cloud in the sky. We clearly need to bring back special schools for bad kids and juvenile halls and good ol’ sanatoriums where we can lock away our troubled youth and forget they exist. Workhouses and prisons! The wave of the future!

An American has weighed in on the proper way to make tea. The great Anglo-American War will commence shortly.

…Michelle Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania with a new book on tea, has suggested techniques for making a perfect brew that are unfamiliar to many Brits.

She advised that adding a dash of salt could help the tea to taste less bitter. She went further, recommending a squeeze of lemon, which helps to remove the “scum” that can sit on the surface of the water. She is also a fan of vigorous dunking and squeezing of the tea bag.

She’s a scientist. She can’t be wrong.

Francl seems to be serious about her tea advice. In her new book, “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea,” she documents tea-making practices that date back more than 1,000 years. She advises using short mugs, with less surface area, to help keep the tea warm, and she says warming up the cup beforehand is important as it increases the amount of caffeine and antioxidants released.

Throwing caution to the wind, Francl bravely weighs in on the Great Milk Debate and concludes that it’s better to use warm milk and to pour milk in after the tea. This, she says, will reduce the chances of it curdling.

Of course, we recognize that that is the perspective of a radical professor at a liberal arts school. We have to consult the US Embassy for the more conservative, diplomatic method of making tea.

My wife will be relieved that she has been following the recommended American protocol in making all that tea that she drinks.

Don’t tell anyone, but in addition to being a socialist, atheist, DEI-loving liberal, I also have an electric kettle in my office. I know, my list of offenses is already long enough.

Right now, I’m trying to herd 8 students taking an independent writing class into two regular meeting times, that is, I’ll run two review sessions per week with four students (ideally) in each one. It ought to be a trivial scheduling exercise, right? Except nothing is working so far. I had some of them send me their schedule, and the problem became obvious. They’re working too hard!

Most of them have collegiate athletics in there, with nearly daily practice times. Some are taking two lab courses. Some are double majors, or at least working on a minor on top of their biology degree. I’m looking at these solidly packed calendars and wondering how I’m going to fit my class in. Madness grows.

At the very least, I’m feeling exhausted looking at all that they’re cramming in, and feeling guilty that we charge them lots of money to work this hard.

Mondays are going to suck all semester long. For every Monday, I have to put together a shiny new lecture, and I have to assemble a set of thought-provoking, sophisticated questions to accompany that lecture, which students will think about during the talk and discuss afterwards. That was my day, and then I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class, which is not ready yet, but will be by 9am. Wednesday will be easier, because I’ll have done all the prep work to get that discussion going.

At least now I’m home and tired and ready to take a shower and then read in bed before succumbing to fatigue. I’ve more or less front-loaded every week with lots of work so I can coast through to the weekend…except that my writing class is going to produce lots of stuff I’ll have to grade, and I’m not sure where I’ll wedge that in yet.

I still can’t believe I get no sabbatical next year, and that I probably have 4-7 years go on my sentence, before I can retire. Maybe I’ll drop dead sooner and surprise everyone.

The idea below is a bit misleading. Most spiders don’t favor garages — garages aren’t great environments for most flying insects. Orb weavers don’t care much for buildings, for instance.

Yes, I’m being overly pedantic.

They incinerated Uhura and Scotty!

Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke’s ashes were on board a private US lunar lander that, after a failed moonshot, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday and burned-up on the way down. The intention had been to leave the ashes, among those from around 70 individuals including actors James Doohan (aka Scotty) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), on the moon’s surface following a successful landing. Rodenberry’s ashes have previously been a part of other space missions.

Don’t worry — they were pre-incinerated. It was a PR stunt in the first place. Celestis, the company playing this game, launches one gram of cremains from a person willing to pay the price of $13,000 to splat a little bit of ash on the Moon (Bonus! Send 3 grams for only $26,000!). One of the bonuses of this grift is that they can launch bits of individuals in multiple expensive missions, like Gene Rodenberry’s. The poor guy’s ashes seem to be a staple to send in tiny doses to outer space.

Although to put the whole enterprise into the proper context of dignity and reverence, also lost on this failed mission was a sample of a powdered soft drink. Yes, a tiny bit of Arthur C. Clarke was mixed with a bit of Kool-Aid, set on fire, and spewed into the atmosphere. Breathe deep!

I hope it was cherry flavored author, that’s my favorite.