Classes resume one week from today

I’d like to know how someone smuggled a camera into my classroom to record our interactions in the future.

I’m not at all concerned about urine drinking going on, but I feel like I need to pass a rule prohibiting breathing, just to be safe. At the very least, NO SINGING.

When life gives you a pandemic, make lemonade

I’ve lost of all the quack remedies for COVID that have been invented by grifters: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bleach, betadine, etc. Here’s one we could have predicted — urine. There’s a weird fringe of urine-drinkers who have been around for a long time, so it’s unsurprising they were ready to leap into the fray.

Anti-COVID-19 “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key has a new quarter-baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19: Drink their own urine. “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need,” Key said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over a trespassing charge. “This has been around for centuries,” he added. “When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt,” the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is “cray cray.” “Now drink urine!” he continued. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” he concluded. “I drink my own urine!” Reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Sunday night, Key doubled down on what he calls “urine therapy” and railed against “foolish” people who took the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective.

Oh, you think that’s awful? Here’s something worse.

Never take a popsicle or a glass of lemonade from a stranger, and don’t let your kids take drinks from their weird friends.

Darth Sweater

My last video was edited in such a way that you could only see hints of what I was wearing, and some people were curious. It’s winter, so I was wearing a sweater, and it’s the holiday season, so of course it was a Christmas sweater, and I’m an atheist, so I don’t worship Jesus, so instead it celebrates my Lord and Savior, Darth Vader.

I know you’re envious and want one of your own, but don’t ask me where I got it, I forget.

This one isn’t any more cheerful

What nonsense, you may wonder, is going to afflict us next? Surely we’ve hit rock bottom. Nope.

Cult-like extremist movements appear to provide an antidote to the potent mixture of isolation, uncertainty, changing narratives, and fear we have experienced during the pandemic by offering a skewed form of safety, stability, and certainty, along with a cohort of people who are just like us, who believe us and believe in us. As the activist David Sullivan—a man who devoted his life to infiltrating cults in order to extricate loved ones from their grip—pointed out, no one ever joins a cult: They join a community of people who see them. In 2022, this appeal of cults will only grow, and those that arise next year will make QAnon seem like the good old days.

Yeah, great, I’m going back to bed. Wake me up in, oh, 2025 and I’ll reassess.

Christmas is finally CANCELED

An interesting local development: we were supposed to have a Division of Science & Math Holiday party back in December, but it got postponed to 13 January because of rising pandemic concerns. I was just notified that it has been outright canceled because those concerns have gotten worse.

I didn’t feel like a party anyway, and was planning to not show up.

We’re a bunch of scientists, you know. It’s not like we’re Boris Johnson.

There is no news about UATX

Sorry. We can try poking the University of Austin with a stick, but it seems to be just lying there, inert, after the scathing laughter at the announcement of its existence. I guess Doonesbury is going to try prodding it a bit.

Do the kind of people who found fake right-wing universities read Doonesbury? Probably not. The corpse will continue to lie there, rotting.

Twenty twenty too

New year, same as the old year. In 2020, I went into the spring term worried about this new virus everyone was talking about, and then it just got worse and worse until all in-person classes were cancelled mid semester and everything fell into chaos as we struggled to turn our courses into something new.

I’ll be content if 2022 doesn’t turn into a reprise of 2020, or 2021, or 1350.