The pandemic is/is not over

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!

I needed a laugh

Awww. Mythicist Milwaukee got their Twitter account suspended, so they’re trying to take legal action to get reinstated. They’ve start a fundraiser that allows…well, I’ll let Thomas Smith explain it.

I like the Pray Now button. If I were to visit that site (I won’t), I’d click the Pray Now button for them.

By the way, as someone who has had to deal with lawyers before, a $2500 goal is paltry.

I don’t have a ‘technical difficulties’ sign

The combination of an early morning physical therapy session and the need to go in to the lab as soon as that is done (today might be the day a big egg sac opens up and a spider swarm emerges — cross your fingers) means I’m going to be out of the blogging game for a while — I should be back later this morning. Until then, enjoy the Spider, illustrated with a picture of a cephalopod.

Before the Bat, there was the Spider

If I asked you to think of a masked comic book hero, the alter ego of a wealthy multimillionaire, who wore a costume chosen to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, and who had a battery of gadgets he used to foil crime, who would you think of? Batman? WRONG! It’s…the SPIDER, Master of Men!

Yeah, I never heard of him either.

That’s rather interesting, actually, because he was a phenomenally popular character in pulp novels of the 1930s and later. He was in several movie serials, and published in multiple novels over the decades. Apparently he was revived for some comic book series in the 1990s and 2000s, too. Before there were superheroes with magic powers, there was a collection of mysterious detectives in the popular literature — the Shadow, the Green Hornet, Doc Savage, and of course, the Spider — who were all eventually eaten by the Bat who now dominates comic books and movies.

The only thing that seems to distinguish the Spider from the Batman is that the Spider relied on the two pistols he was always running around with, and which he used to straight-out murder his foes. I wonder if the Batman’s evolutionary success, since he was always portrayed as avoiding killing, was a product of Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code Authority, which made publishers leery of excessive violence? The gunslinger heroes seem to have faded away, to be replaced with overpowered superheroes who don’t carry guns, but can raze whole city blocks with a punch. Maybe the Spider needs a Zack Snyder movie? (No, he does not. No one deserves that.)

Here’s a video with some clips from the old Spider serials.

I’m a sucker for that old pulp fiction graphic style, but I have zero interest in watching any of the old serials or reading the pulp novels of the time, and I’m not going to mourn the absence of the Spider from modern movies. What I find interesting is that this one successful, popular franchise could so thoroughly disappear over time, and not even occupy any space in my memory. It gives me hope for the future, it does. I can look at the current glut of comic book movies and tell myself that this too shall pass.

Or that they’ll be replaced with a different glut of franchised fantasies.

Pity Elon

This is just the worst. In time for Father’s Day, Elon Musk’s daughter filed a petition to change her name and gender.

I am definitely not a Musk fan, but I don’t wish this kind of pain on anyone. Her explanation for why she’s doing this is a knife right to the heart.

He’s the richest man in the world, and that is a statement that demonstrates he’s a total failure in the game of life — he can’t even win the respect of the child he presumably raised from infancy. I’m just saying that if one of my kids said something like that to me I would be shattered and would seriously be questioning my whole life. Maybe Musk is so unconscionable and so disinterested in his children that he is unperturbed by such a statement, but I can’t imagine myself feeling that way, so maybe I’m reading my own values into him, but man, I couldn’t help but feel some deep pain on reading that.

Now I’ve gone and made myself vulnerable to my kids, handed them a knife and told them exactly where to stick it, but I’m fairly confident that they wouldn’t do me that kind of harm.

Distantly related, but weird: I did not know that Musk’s former partner, Grimes, had a Minnesota connection.

Back in 2009, when Grimes was just a 21-year-old college student eager to go on an adventure, she paired up with 23-year-old William Gratz, who she met at school in Montreal, according to a 2009 Star Tribune report. The couple packed chickens, a sewing machine, and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat that they built from scratch. They named the boat Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and called themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox, seemingly with the goal of taking off on a journey worthy of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a book they packed for the ride but had not read.

They had spent more than a month constructing the 20-foot boat on a friend’s property in Bemidji, Minnesota, from where they hauled it to Minneapolis. They installed “accordion folding doors, glass windows, pink shutters and painted murals in black, white and red paint of fantastical creatures on the sides. Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries).”

According to the Star Tribune report, they intended to sail from Minneapolis to New Orleans, but their journey ended up being only a few miles downstream after boat engine troubles and run-ins with law enforcement…

Okaaay. They hadn’t read the book, and their trip only lasted a few days. What a strange story…

The schadenfreude continues

I don’t follow crypto religiously — there’s no way I’d ever invest in such an obvious grift, just like I avoid MLMs and Ponzi schemes — but I do have to occasionally chortle when the fraud becomes obvious. Apparently, this past week, Bitcoin dropped below a significant threshold.

Bitcoin had bobbled along all this week just above $20,000. Ether similarly bobbled along just above $1,000.

This was not a psychological level. There were large DeFi loans that would liquidate if the price number went down. Liquidations like this were what had just destroyed the crypto investment funds.

You could watch the charts as borrowers frantically poured millions of actual dollars into the markets, desperate to prop up the price. Often, a seller would dump straight into the pump, a minute later. Thanks for the exit liquidity!

This, too, worked until it didn’t.

This morning, Bitcoin broke below $20,000 at 06:51 UTC on Saturday 18 June 2022. It plummeted from $20,300 to $19,100 in just a few minutes:

Ether finally went as well, at 07:18 UTC. Someone on /r/buttcoin got live video of the $1,000 buy wall on Coinbase ETH-USD being destroyed. Beauty, grace and style, 10/10 from all judges.

They’re doomed. Really, the only reason I pay attention at all is for David Gerard’s entertaining descriptions of the circus.

It’s a huge Rube Goldberg machine slapstick custard pie clown car, where each custard pie triggers three more custard pies. A clown’s tie pops up, causing three other clowns’ ties to pop up. Several tons of organic cow manure fall from above. The clowns stick their heads up out of the poop, proclaiming how clean they are and what a mess everyone else is.

As long as you haven’t invested in crypto yourself, the show is totally free!

The bubbles have fizzled out of my champagne

I’m feeling beaten down by everything — chronic pain wears one out, and also wreaks havoc on sleep — so I’m just sort of withdrawing from everything for a day or two.

Last night while I was dragging around the edges of sleep my brain kept going around and around in obsessive circles over my fall term teaching (No! Not now! It’s only mid-June! The end of summer is rushing at me.) So this morning, to be somewhat productive, I started mapping out and scheduling my intro biology course, dividing up the readings and figuring out what I’ll do each week. Maybe I can at least get my syllabus done while I’m malingering about, whining.

You don’t need to tell me, I’m godawfully boring. It’s a good thing that nothing really matters right now.

See? All I have to do is fill in little boxes, a step at a time. I can do that.