Worst day ever, except for Thursday, which is worser. It’s just labs and classes and meetings all day long until the evening, when I get to drag myself home and spend a few hours grading.

To add a little flaming physical pain to the whole long process, my Achilles tendinitis has chosen to flare up again. For those of you who are blessed with ignorance, this is an inflammation of the Achilles tendon which sets my leg on fire and makes every step an agony, a lance driven up through my calf by a savage demon. I can sort of keep it under control if I don’t stand on it, and especially if I don’t walk on it, but even then it’s going to send sporadic spasm of intense burning pain to remind me that I’m not allowed to even sleep. Which means I’m on the edge of exhaustion right now.

Then, of course, to do my job on Tuesday, I have to go stand and lecture for an hour and a half, and then spend a few hours limping around a student lab. I’m thinking I might be able to perch on one of those wheelie office chairs to minimize ankle motion, but still — I’m going to need to be wrung out like a rag at the end of the day, and there might be some occasional shrieking.

This will go on for a few more days, I expect, and there’s nothing I can do but take pain-killers and anti-inflammatories, which go really well with — what am I talking about this week? — oh, yes, cancer and apoptosis pathways. Good thing I don’t need a fully functioning brain to do that.

I should have known — I remember when “Clapton is God” was a common phrase among the guitarists I knew. No more.

But when he saw Clapton at the Odeon theater in Birmingham in August 1976, Wakeling was gob-smacked. A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration. The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage. In remarks he has never denied, he talked about how the influx of immigrants in the U.K. would result in the country “being a colony within 10 years.” He also went on an extended jag about how “foreigners” should leave Great Britain: “Get the wogs out . . . get the coons out.” (Wog, shorthand for golliwog, was a slur against dark-skinned nonwhites.)

A citizen of the pre-eminent colonizing nation now thinks being a colony is bad? OK.

That was in 1976. Now, though, he’s jumped on the wacky anti-vax bandwagon.

Clapton does appear to have a credulous side: In the book, he detailed the bizarre incident in the Eighties when “a lady with a strong European accent” called him at home, told him she knew all about his difficulties with Pattie Boyd (his wife by then), and persuaded him to try all sorts of odd rituals — like “cut my finger to draw blood, smear it onto a cross with Pattie’s and my name written on it, and read weird incantations at night.” (At her suggestion, he also flew to New York and slept with her before realizing that none of that madness would bring Boyd back.)

Clapton’s current public views are a hot mess of those tendencies churned up by a global pandemic, fake news, and his own health issues. In the past few years, Clapton’s health — his hands in particular — have made more headlines than his most recent albums. In 2016, he confessed to Rolling Stone that he was having “a neurological thing that is tricky, that affects my hands.” The following year, he told the magazine he was having “eczema from head to foot. The palms of my hand were coming off.” He also was dealing with peripheral neuropathy — damage to a person’s peripheral nerves, leading to burning or aching pain in the arms and legs.

Last year, Clapton began watching videos by Ivor Cummins, a chemical engineer and author who has questioned the British government’s handling of the pandemic. “I was trying to keep my mouth shut, but I was following the channel avidly,” Clapton confessed. Clapton made his own feelings first known by joining with Morrison for “Stand and Deliver,” a single that connected the lockdown to individual freedom: “Do you want to be a free man/Or do you want to be a slave?” Clapton issued a statement about the collaboration, “We must stand up and be counted because we need to find a way out of this mess. The alternative is not worth thinking about.” (In a strange coincidence, Morrison was a special guest star at Clapton’s Birmingham show in 1976.)

I guess Clapton is not god, which is a good thing: we don’t have to kill him. We should just ignore him.

Why does everything it touches turn to crap? Hear me out. I have a theory, which is mine, which is clearly supported by the evidence.

It’s the cats.

Open your eyes. What is the internet full of? Cats (and porn, but that’s a different hypothesis^*). Cats everywhere.

What are cats? A predatory species that has seen what humans do to every cat with ambitions, like say lions and tigers. They know from experience what we do with the so-called “domesticated” species — we chop off their gonads and feed them the scraps we find unpalatable. They are not our friends. We open up a new environment for colonization, the internet, and what happens? They rush in and take it over first. Then they populate it with traps, wicked memes that will poison our psyche and lead us to destroy ourselves.

It’s so obvious. This is a clear case of inter-specific competition, and if we don’t recognize it, we’re doomed.

^*It may be that porn is Homo sapiens defense mechanism against the rising tide of cat photos. God help us all.

The university requires that everyone be vaccinated, as of 8 October.

All enrolled University of Minnesota students (whether taking courses in person or online) are now required to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination or provide documentation for a medical or religious exemption. Students received an email with the link to the UMN Student COVID-19 Vaccination Form in their University email on Friday afternoon, August 27. To meet this requirement, please submit the form electronically by Friday, October 8, 2021.

There’s that ridiculous “religious exemption,” though. If your god says you don’t need to take basic steps to protect the community, that means nothing in my godless state.

Better late and half-assed than never, I guess, although this feeble response is going on my list of reasons I have lost confidence in the University of Minnesota administration.

I’ve told you before that the content I made on Scienceblogs years ago has been hijacked — the site was bought up (legitimately, I can’t do anything about it) by a conservative asshole who simply uses it as a vehicle to host ads. It’s a shame, but at least all that stuff I wrote didn’t disappear into the ol’ bit bucket. But now I have learned that they’ve added insult to their legally sanctioned theft.

“pharyngula” (at least they spelled that right) by…who??!?

Man, I ought to give up and have my name legally changed to PZ, just PZ. They couldn’t misspell that, could they?

Oh yeah, they could. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been called PJ.

I dreamt that William Shatner was going to be launched into space, which was odd since I really don’t care about an over-the-hill celebrity and I generally don’t have that kind of random dream. But then this morning I learned that it was really going to happen next week! This was not a prophetic dream, I must have just fleetingly encountered a news item last week that just sunk out of my awareness (I really, truly don’t give a fuck about Shatner) and then resurfaced while I was asleep.

Science fiction will soon become reality, as William Shatner is scheduled to launch on the next crewed spaceflight of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

The company plans to fly the Canadian actor, who famously played Capt. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” television series, as one of the passengers on the company’s New Shepard rocket.

The launch is planned for Oct. 12. Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations, Audrey Powers, is joining the flight, with the crew of four rounded out by previously announced members Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen and Medidata co-founder Glen de Vries.

But wait! This is insane! Shatner has no qualifications for this mission, and he’s 90 years old! It’s pure PR. Bezos is just stuffing random attention-getting bodies (and a few of his corporate cronies) into his rocketship to sit quietly and do nothing. This is precisely what the phrase “spam in a can” means.

Also, Bezos has sold $100 million in tickets to willing hunks of wealthy spam. None of them earned the privilege of going into space, they’ve just got connections and money that’s going to give them bragging rights at the next cocktail party. Just lumps of spiced ham, heavily processed, shot into space, and unfortunately returned.

You know what this means? Elon Musk is going to have to bag a Kardashian, or maybe a Star Wars cast member, for his next flight.

By the way, did you know that Bezos is suing NASA for awarding a contract to Musk? Fight, fight, fight! Can they please kill each other, or at least cripple themselves, in a bloody time-wasting spectacle of profligate money-flinging?

Have you no decency, Joe Rogan? Here we go again, with the popular podcaster peddling another conspiracy theory.

Joe Rogan’s streak of terrible COVID-19 takes continued this week when he baselessly suggested the White House faked President Joe Biden’s booster shot on live TV out of fear that he could have dropped dead in the moment.

After Biden took questions from reporters while he received his third dose of the Pfizer jab earlier this week, Rogan used his massively popular Spotify podcast to wonder aloud if it was a “real booster.”

When his guest, former CIA officer Mike Baker agreed, suggesting that it was merely “performance art,” Rogan dug deeper into his latest conspiracy theory.

“I don’t think they would take the chance,” the host said. “I think if they were going to give him a booster shot, the last thing they would do is give it to him live on television. What if he dies? What if he blacks out? What if he gets it and faints? Because people have had very bad reactions, like in the moment, for whatever reason.”

Such nonsense. This is a common trope, pretending that the vaccine is actively harmful. It’s not. Claiming that is leads to horrific situations like this, in which an evil quack goes into a hospital and lies to an elderly man suffering with COVID-19.

Watch as 67-year old Joe McCarron, hospitalized with Covid-19 in Ireland, is urged by a fanatical anti-vaxxer and covid-denier to check himself out of the hospital while a doctor calmly, kindly, and patiently explains why that would not be a good idea for someone in his condition and urges him to stay, saying that he was very ill and could die if he went home. But the person with McCarron badgered him to leave and he finally acquiesced. Two days later, he was back in the hospital with breathing problems and subsequently died.

The quack, Antonio Mureddu Gravegliu, literally told the man that the hospital was going to kill him. The Garda are “investigating”, I don’t know what — they’ve got the guy recorded lying to the patient and urging him to leave the hospital’s care.

Rogan is part of the chain of chaos and death. Why isn’t he being investigated?