I just learned that the Blogess has “giant squid phobia”.

Several people are aware of my severe giant squid phobia and lovingly (?) sent me this video of a giant squid attacking a Greenpeace submarine, and that’s unsettling enough, but WHY IS THERE ANOTHER SQUID BEHIND IT SPITTING OUT FIRE?  Is that a real thing?  Because I was scared enough without adding: “Oh, and also they can shoot a blinding inferno out of their butts like a tentacled, aquatic bonfire.”  It’s like half giant squid and half underwater maritime flame-thrower, and that’s not natural and is a sign that all giant squid are literally demons from the depths of hell.

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Good thing the BBC was keeping count: my heart has beaten 2 billion times in my lifetime. It also tells me I’ve just turned 30 on Mars.

Check out all the information the BBC has about you.

It’s FOX NEWS, eschewing fear-mongering and partisan politics to speak plain common sense about Ebola. Pay attention, this is rational and informative:

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Guess what it covers?

Little ol’ Morris got that hashtag trending last night — I guess when essentially everyone in a small town suddenly starts tweeting exactly the same thing, it shows up as a bright blip in the data. It was an impressive reaction by the audience, too. These were college students who grew up with Bill Nye, and apparently even the ones who were too young to have watched his show when it was on the air got regularly exposed to episodes that were shown in the public schools. So he was welcomed like a rock star.

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Clearly, for grooming.

Bill Nye is arriving in Morris sometime today, and I’m looking forward to his talk — I’m hoping it will be material from his new book, Undeniable, which won’t be available until next month. But look at that subtitle: “Evolution and the Science of Creation”. If he does, he might drive some of the locals to a foaming fury, if they show up for the talk, which they probably won’t. I might have to read the town paper for a week or two to see if there is any reaction, or if it just gets buried.

But it also means I’m going to get tangled up in a wild social whirl on top of my usual teaching obligations today. I might be a little busy for a while.

October 28th. Wheat. Be there!

I would be irresistible to the ladies if only I had bright blue inflatable throat sacs, like Hoplobatrachus tigerinus.

Anti-vaxxers sometimes go off in reprehensible directions. A woman exaggerated her child’s symptoms to blame vaccines.

A leading British “mother warrior” campaigner, who claimed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is responsible for autism, fabricated accounts of injury to her son and persistently lied about his health, a London court has ruled.

The mother, “E”, who cannot be named so as to protect her son’s identity, concocted a story about how he reacted to an MMR shot.  She said that he became distressed with fever and then lost speech, eye contact and play immediately following his three-in-one in January 1991, at the age of 18 months.

She claimed that he screamed after immunization, and that this was followed by six hours of convulsions and vomiting, and then six months in a “persistent vegetative state”.

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