We weathered that weather just fine

We had a night of howling window-rattling, but that was the worst of it. We dropped from 4°C to -12°C overnight and acquired a thin layer of snow — hard to tell how much because the wind scoured it off of exposed surfaces. We are on the northern edge of the big storm that ripped through the midwest, so we still have power and all that good stuff — Iowa, SE Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan suffered far worse.

So, I selfishly wonder, will my flies arrive safely at the lab today? That’s the real test.

Oh, no…this might be all my fault

I’m sitting here all innocent-like when suddenly all these alerts come streaming across my desktop.

Uh-oh, that’s not good. We’ve got students planning to go home today and tomorrow.

Volatile weather? Never seen here before?

Plummeting temperatures and slippery roads…what could be causing this?

POTENTIALLY HISTORIC HIGH WIND EVENT! Wait, I might be responsible. You see, I ordered a whole bunch of mutant flies earlier, thinking the weather was going to be mild during the middle of the week — I check the weather before ordering these things, because it’s a bit dicey in December, and I’ve received shipments of biological specimens frozen rock solid before. I honestly thought this would be good timing to sidle past the Weather Gods and the Fly Gods. They are expected to arrive…

TOMORROW. <duh-duh-DUUUHHH>

I taunted fate, and this is what I get.

I guess we better batten down the hatches and make sure everything movable is secure — I remember a year when our garbage cans took flight. Everyone be safe. I hope my flies make it.

Anne Rice is dead

Or she better be — I thought her series usually started off provocatively and interestingly, but then dribbled off into confusing and weird Catholic mysticism, and also got increasingly self-involved, so any Anne Rice revenant is likely to get tedious fast. She did manage to define a whole horror sub-genre, so I’ve got to give her credit for that.

She was…unique. What else can we hope for?

Oh no, I was just reminded of her response to criticism. Authors who chew out readers for not liking their books is always cringe.

The things you learn on the internet

Hey, Ladies — according to this trash website, I’m available.

The most frequently asked questions are, is PZ Myers single or dating, and who is PZ Myers’s girlfriend? We are here to clear up and debunk dating rumors surrounding PZ’s love life and girlfriends.
…
According to our records, the American 64-year-old biologist is most likely single now. PZ Myers remains relatively quiet when it comes to sharing his personal life and makes it a point to stay out of the public eye. He may not be dating anyone publicly, but PZ may be seeing someone in private, and details were not made public yet. So it’s probably not safe to jump to conclusions.

Don’t tell my wife.

I think this site autogenerates gossipy nonsense for anyone who has any public information available on the internet.

Entertaining misery

Well, I have no appetite now. I just read this review of Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy, and even at a distance of thousands of miles and with no prospects (or desires) to visit this pretentious little place, it quite killed my interest in food for a while. It was 27 “courses” dribbled out over four and a half hours.

This, for instance, is one full course: it’s a cast of the chef’s mouth filled with some kind of foam. There were no utensils, you were expected to lick the ‘food’ out of there.

I think, if ever I get to Italy (which I would love to do sometime), I’ll just order the pizza.

It may be cold out there, but this is fake

So stop sending it to me!

I have no idea how that could have formed naturally, but the first big clue that it’s fake is the lack of provenance. The second clue is the shape of the capture lines — this was made by someone who never really looked at an orb web. A third clue is that when you look for where it came from, you discover that it’s cropped to remove the ice sculpture of a giant spider at the bottom. Or you find that an entomologist had already debunked it.

Good morning, omicron!

We’ve got the omicron variant in Minnesota.

Minnesota has the second confirmed case of omicron COVID-19 variant in the United States, after California announced the nation’s first confirmed case on Wednesday. The Minnesota resident tested positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 24, shortly after attending an anime convention at the Javits Center.

The Minnesota Department of Health says they confirmed the presence of the omicron variant Wednesday afternoon. They say the man, who lives in Hennepin County, is quarantining at home. He experienced mild symptoms and is recovering. The man “most likely” contracted the variant in New York, authorities said.

This is not grounds for panic. We don’t know enough about the omicron variant to get too worked up about it — it may be a bit nastier than the delta variant, but if you’ve been vaccinated, it’s probably not going to affect you directly. Of course, that’s only the case if you’re some kind of weird Libertarian hermit with no friends who has retreated from society. The rest of us should be concerned about our unvaccinated (for any reason) loved ones, or other contributing members of our communities.

What does worry me is that this is a symptom of our lackadaisical approach to dealing with a worldwide pandemic. It’s like our health care system is an old car that we maintain poorly — sure, there’s some rust on the body, and the muffler is held in place with a twist of wire, and the engine makes a funny noise when it first turns over in the morning, but it would cost money to patch it up, and it still runs, so we can ignore it for a few more months or years. So what if it just now started leaking oil? It’s fine.

New variants are what you get when you let the virus run rampant in large segments of the population, when you slack off on basic preventive measures, and when you figure I’ve got mine, so what if there isn’t enough vaccine in India or Bulgaria or whatever — that’s not our problem. Until it is.