There was a call for campus bodies today — they were recording a recruiting video, I think, so they just wanted a swarm of college-like people to mill around on the mall. I dutifully showed up to do my part to serve the UMM community, like a good boy, and they started splitting up the mob. You walk here, you walk there, you two throw a football around, etc. Reasonably enough, they started organizing the young photogenic types first, setting them in motion. I was predictably the last one…and the organizers walked away, leaving me aimless, so I just moved out of the frame and hid behind a tree.

At least now I know my job. I’m the creepy old guy lurking in the shrubbery while the co-eds and jocks frolic in a bucolic collegiate scene. You can still sign up for the university, because you all know I’m mostly harmless, just kind of unsightly. The worst I might do is show you a spider.

We visited Minneapolis-St Paul this past weekend so we could watch Iliana and Skatje walk on Mars…

…and Iliana and Grandma going undersea.

I am reminded that little kids are exhausting. We thoroughly enjoyed our weekend with an energetic 3 year old, but it was necessary to get home to recover. Except…yikes, things are heating up in the lab.

I had one egg sac open up 12 days ago, and another this weekend. A third is imminent — I dread going into the lab today to see even more spiderlings. Then there are two more that will open up in a week. I got home last night and had to sort out and move a cloud of adorable baby spiders into separate containers. I’ve got two small incubators in my lab, and they’ll be full today; I’m running out of the small plastic containers I keep the small ones in. Then I’ve got a Parasteatoda egg sac that is threatening to hatch out any day now.

I am beginning to realize it may be possible to have too many spiders.

I think you know the answer.

Richard Dawkins joins the advisory board of the…

Sorry.

The "University…"

Sorry.

I'm laughing too much. I can do this, I swear.

… UATX, alongside Glenn Loury, Andrew Sullivan, and more!@theUofAustin @UATX_phys @RealUofAustin pic.twitter.com/7ctVJKdbKI

— Jonathan Jarry (@crackedscience) July 7, 2022

This is not a joke.

Somebody really needs to take him aside and explain that he’s making a lot of really bad decisions lately.

There’s an American fetish for “businessmen” and “entrepreneurs” that I can’t quite understand. I’ve never been particularly impressed by “businessmen”; they generally seem to have a very narrow perspective on the world, but somehow, they’re supposed to be our ideal. And sometimes, they can be unbelievably stupid in service to their money-making goals.

I don’t expect that man to have taken a biology course, but has he ever actually talked to a woman?

To me, Mike Lindell is the apotheosis of the American businessman.

First Dog on the Moon does adequately capture our current sense of the state of the pandemic, although saying “10,000 dead” is so quaint — but then, it’s an Australian comic. American policy has been so consistently stupid that we have over 1,000,000 dead here. Also, I don’t know what a “bbg*” is, someone will have to explain it to me.

The fourth panel hits home, too.

Do you know someone who has had COVID? Was it you? I was at a rare bbg* on the weekend with a bunch of scientists and only two of them had ever had COVID. WHY? Because they were animal scientists. They are only ever at home or in the bush pointing their fiendish science machines at unsuspecting furry animals or birds and then they go back home again. No COVID.

I’ve never had COVID. WHY? Because am only ever at home or in the field or in the lab pointing fiendish science machines at unsuspecting spiders. I’ve been scrupulous about social distancing and masking everywhere I go, I’ve gotten 4 vaccine shots, and while I had to teach a mob of disease vectors, they all had to wear masks and spread out (former university policy), and I took measures to move as much of my courses online as possible. That’s why.

That was at some cost, too. My big pre-pandemic project was to do community outreach and get a baseline spider population count in homes around here…well, that got monkey-wrenched hard by the disease so I’ve been focused on just the spiders, forget the plague carriers. And oh, man, all the work involved in transforming my classes, without compensation other than not getting sick!

Now all those protective measures have been torn down by my university, and I feel like this is the year they’re going to reward me for 22 years of service with a potentially deadly disease. They’ll be saving on pension expenses, at least.

This is true.

A new Minnesota law lets people 21 and over buy and consume food and beverages with a small amount of hemp-derived THC, but some legislators might not have fully understood the bill before passing it.

The new law says food and beverages cannot contain more than 5 milligrams of hemp-derived THC per serving and no more than 50 milligrams per package.

Although marijuana-derived THC is still illegal in Minnesota, THC derived from hemp is chemically the same. Marijuana and hemp come from the same cannabis plant, though the plants are bred differently, with marijuana plants high in THC and hemp plants very low in THC.

THC, or delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical that causes the high of marijuana.

They didn’t mean to. They didn’t understand the law they were voting on.

Minnesota state Sen. Jim Abeler, a Republican from Anoka, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune he did not realize this law would allow THC-infused edibles of any kind and thought it would only apply to delta-8 THC products.

No takesie-backsies!

I know everyone is acting as if it’s won and done, but it isn’t.

The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization.

The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

It’s annoying how the people who actually know the science are saying one thing, while politics is pretending the opposite.

“This pandemic is changing, but it’s not over,” Tedros said this week during a press briefing. He said the ability to track COVID-19’s genetic evolution was “under threat” as countries relaxed surveillance and genetic sequencing efforts, warning that would make it more difficult to catch emerging and potentially dangerous new variants.

Here’s a fun one. I want to know what reasonable precautions I can take in my classes, but here’s how my university dodges the issue:

So sure, you can ask your students and colleagues to take reasonable action to protect you and each other, but they are allowed to ignore you, and you will respect their decision to endanger everyone’s health.

Great. This is going to be the year I get COVID. Hope I don’t die!