Well, it’s time for my usual wild night of partying…oh, wait. I never do that.
My wife is out at a neighbor’s party, while I’m sitting at home, nursing a painful tendinitis flare-up, and drinking…tea. Sorry, image. I’ll probably just read for a while, and if I’m feeling rambunctious, I might have a wee glass of wine before bed. Or maybe not.
I really can’t get overly excited about rolling over a calendar.
So, what are you fashionable and exciting people doing tonight?
Well, actually, it is getting rather gray. But I was just out on my daily walk on this very cold Minnesota day, and in addition the the usual coating of rime that accumulates on my face, I took off one of my gloves for just a minute to snap this picture.
Really, it was just a quick exposure of bare skin to the cold…and my hand is still burning. Ouch. I think the swiftness of the transition contributed, but you know what? Cold weather can be really dangerous.
I’m warming up in the coffeeshop for a bit, and then I’m bundling up again and heading out. Don’t worry, it’s broad daylight, along well-trafficked roads, and it’s a short hike, but still — y’all be careful out there.
I got interviewed at Eschaton, and now it’s available on the interwebs. And they didn’t just ask me about poutine and hockey!
We’ll soon be sitting down to a vegetarian Mediterranean style Christmas dinner at my daughter’s house, but before that, my son Connlann had to revive an old family tradition: he insisted on fixing lutefisk for an appetizer. So he bought some, did the usual salt extraction and soak, and baked it for a half hour (my mother assured me that it is much, much worse boiled — I remember the grey translucent goo from childhood Christmases). In case you’ve never seen it, here’s a platter of the stuff, drenched in melted butter and with some interesting lighting that gives it an appropriate eldritch glow.
Would you eat that? Connlann dug in enthusiastically. He actually seemed to like the stuff.
Skatje tried a tiny little sliver of it, aided by tissue paper noseplugs — really, this stuff reeks. She didn’t die! But I don’t think she’ll ever eat it again.
By the way, that’s Alaric smirking in the background. He’d already had a couple of bites, and was only there to crack a Nightstalker stout to wash the taste out of his mouth. I ate a goodly chunk of the palely pellucid processed piscine gelatin…it went down smoothly enough, like boneless slime — but I also welcomed the stout afterwards to thoroughly cleanse the palate.
The downside now, unfortunately, is that Santa will take one whiff of this place and turn around and flee.
It was a hellishly busy semester, and wouldn’t you know that the grading would also be hellish? One more day, I think, and I’ll have all this done. I’m about to stroll down to the coffeeshop and surround myself with papers and red pens again, but I think this should wrap it up. Bear with me a little longer.
In case the trolls are thinking to exploit my absence, the monitors have been doing a good job, and all they need to do is send me an alert and my iPad goes “boing!”, and once I peel my eyes away from the papers I take care of it.
The last student has turned in the last final exam of this semester! I’m done!
Wait, what’s this?
A pile of papers?
I have over a hundred exams and term papers to grade now.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
NOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
<curls into fetal position, sobs pathetically>
This video is going around twitter among the usual suspects right now. It’s by Reap Paden, and it’s about how I’m not a feminist. Well, it’s also about “hypocrisy…and a dream”, but it never gets around to showing either. And while it’s by a known idiot, it really is just clips of me and Rebecca Watson at Skepticon 3, with titles that say more about Paden than either of us.
Hmmm. You could argue that I’m a bad comedian, but there’s nothing anti-feminist in any of those clips…that is, unless you think that humor and joking about sex are somehow incompatible with feminism.
It gets worse, though, and Paden left it out — I did have that woman come up on stage so I could have sex with her. Of course, it was in a talk about sex and genetics, where I used a deck of cards to illustrate recombination, so it was a little less provocative than you might think — we swapped cards for a bit. Lasciviously.
And the clip with Rebecca is a bit that John the Other didn’t understand, either — it was Rebecca yanking JT’s chain, and the handler she was “abusing” was in on the joke from day one.
It’s revealing when this is the worst dirt he can dig up on us, isn’t it?
I gave a final exam today. I’m grading it. I’m giving another one tomorrow. I’ll be grading it then. I am straining to put this semester completely behind me by Friday…so my appearances here will be intermittent.
I know. I’m no fun at all.
I thought poutine was poutine until I visited Canada and every single person at the restaurant ordered a different kind. Larry Moran and I were caught in the act; also, he reviews my talk.
I staggered home last night at about 2am, fresh from Eschaton 2012. It was a very good conference from my perspective (and probably everyone else’s, too!). There was a familiar mix of good friends from Freethoughtblogs — Natalie Reed, who was given a well-deserved award from CFI for her social justice work, Hank “Beta Culture” Fox, Ian “Zombie Slayer” Cromwell, Ophelia “God Hates Women” Benson, and me, who bored everyone to tears with a primer on some very basic principles in population genetics (why do these people keep inviting me?). Then there were some familiar big names: Larry Moran, Chris DiCarlo, and Eugenie Scott. And then what I really look forward to: meeting new people who either are, ought to be, or will be big names: Veronica Abbass (why haven’t I been following Canadian Atheist before?), Dear Ania, and of course people like Heina, Eric MacDonald, Udo Schuklenk, Vyckie Garrison, and Jeff Shallit. There were others I missed; it was a surprisingly diverse and ambitious conference with two parallel tracks so you couldn’t see everything. That was a cunning ploy, I think, to whet our appetites for more so we’ll come to the next one. I learned stuff and had good conversations and that’s all I really ask of a conference.
Now, unfortunately, while I’m physically back in Morris for a good long while, I have to warn you that this is the last week of the semester and the chronic distractions of a heavy workload are about to flare into acute intensity: this is the week I have to give and grade the last unit exams of the term, grade term papers, advise worried students on their status in my courses, and do a bit of essential committee work, too, so I’m not going to be able to do much blog writing for a bit, despite positively aching to get a bunch of science and atheism stuff hammered down in words. The blog has to wait a bit longer while I deal with my top priority teaching.
But the end is in sight! These demands on my time (really, I’m looking at staying up much of tonight trying to get a stack of exams graded promptly) will begin to ebb around mid-week, and then finals aren’t that bad — they’re like the last paroxysm before the fever breaks. I shall persevere. You’ll have to bear with my boringness for a bit longer.
