Too many Christmases, and not enough Christmases

I have finished watching all these 8mm recordings my grandfather left to me, which have been converted into 8 20-30 minute mp4s. At some point I have to edit these down to make them presentable, because a) they’re in random order, b) the clips within each mp4 are in random order, and c) we are not a family of cinematographers or directors. Here are a few challenges for me:

  • What I’ve got is the story of the whole Myers family from 1958-1985. Except there is no story, it’s a hodge-podge of brief moments.
  • A lot of it is told from the perspective of doting parents and grandparents who are thrilled about their kids. It’s going to have limited appeal.
  • The filmographers are terrible. They don’t believe in dwelling on a single person or group, but jitter all over the place.
  • The actors all suck. The camera gets pointed at them, and what do they do? They stop, stand, and stare. The action freezes.
  • There are long stretches where the camera pans over scenery. The actors may suck, but at least they’re alive. Do I really need to see that hill? I can tell when my dad is wielding the camera, because he really likes lingering over the landscape.
  • There are a limited and repeated set of circumstances that trigger the family to haul out the camera: mainly, Christmases and summer vacation. There are too many Christmases, and sadly, not enough Christmases. Also, every summer we all immediately crowd into a tiny wading pool.
  • The biases are obvious — they used the camera a lot more when it was new. That means I have a lot of video of me at age 1 toddling stupidly about, but not as much of my baby sister Lisa. If I edit this to match the representation in the shots, it’s going to look like a vanity project.
  • Way too much sweetness. Seeing my great-grandparents laughing and hugging and kissing in their 90s was a bit overwhelming. We really had a happy family, but it’s exaggerated because the sadness and loss was never filmed.

I have a 3-day weekend coming up. Maybe I’ll be able to put together a short video from a small slice of this mess over the weekend — something that my surviving brothers and sisters will appreciate, at least. I have a project!

Visualizing the destruction of New York didn’t stop the nuclear fetishists

To those of us of a certain age, Chesley Bonestell is an evocative name. In the early days of the space program, he was the chosen illustrator for the future, painting spaceships and landscapes on the moons of Saturn and all those wild imaginary cities with flying cars and buildings wreathed with fins and arcing silvery ramps. There was a time when I’d lock in to magazine racks with a Chesley Bonestell cover somewhere on it, and my parents would have to drag me away.

But he also painted less enchanting illustrations. Here’s New York getting nuked in 1950.

If that isn’t horrifying enough, here’s the aftermath:

It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch would have painted.

What I find disturbing, though, is that American magazines were commissioning illustrations of American cities getting bombed, 5 years after America nuked two Japanese cities. What, reality wasn’t enough for you and you needed to fantasize about it happening at home to get people to care? The horror of this imagining didn’t stop the US from continuing nuclear testing. In 1954, the US would test the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, ‘accidentally’ irradiating a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon #5, killing one crewman and sending the others to the hospital, and inspiring protests in Japan and the invention of Godzilla.

Isn’t it nice that war can inspire interesting art?

If I weren’t a vegetarian already…

There is a company based in Virginia that makes high-end deli meats and cheeses. I didn’t know much about them, but I heard some gross, revolting stories that made me look. Rubbernecking the accident and all that, you know. Their main page is a bit daunting right now. They have recalled a lot of their products, saying they’re potentially contaminated with Listeria.

What they don’t mention is that 57 people so far have been hospitalized thanks to their food, or that there are 69 records of “noncompliances” flagged by the USDA in the past year. But don’t worry, the company says food safety is their “highest priority.”

Do you want to read about Boar’s Head’s offenses? No, you do not, so I’ll put them below the fold. Don’t read unless you have a strong stomach.

[Read more…]

You don’t get to control teacher’s lives once they go home

In the 19th century, there was a different set of rules for teachers.

Among the terrible crimes: “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.” But also “Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.” Those were the old conservatives. The new conservatives are just as dictatorial and demanding, but they have some different rules.


“And I think our conservative idea is that parents and families should determine what children learn and what values they are brought up with. It’s so many leaders of the left. I hate to be so personal about this, but they are people without kids who try to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said in the clip.

“And that disorients me. And it disturbs me. Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country, doesn’t have a single child, he added.

“If she wants to be brainwashed and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

So the party that thinks all women should be traditional homemakers, and doesn’t want to invest a penny on childcare, now thinks that skilled professional teachers should be required to have children.

How about if you leave the private lives of teachers the hell alone?

Wow, but Vance sure is a creepy weird autocrat. Don’t elect him, OK?

“Stanford’s Red Wedding”

Stanford University is rich — $30 billion endowment, all that silicon valley money flowing their way — and you’d think that would translate into well-supported education. Working against that, though, is that universities, even private universities, tend to be ruled by regents chosen for their wealth and conservative bias, and somehow they always decide against egalitarianism and education. Senior faculty also become jealous and protective of their privilege, and can do great harm to their discipline. That’s how great universities erode into mediocrity.

So now the university has decided to terminate a prestigious creative writing program.

I want to add more detail below to the decision made last week by Stanford University: All twenty-three Creative Writing Lecturers were told they’d be fired, some this academic year, some next academic year. This is a group of lecturers who have — along with our students — built one of the top CW programs in the country, and who have done so with very little university support over the last four years, since the death of our fierce, mighty, and visionary program director Eavan Boland.

Creative writing programs are an important part of a liberal arts curriculum. I can tell you having taught creative writing, a lot of students have a dull, plodding approach to writing and it takes a great deal of effort to teach them to add a little fire or music to their writing. Stanford can afford to maintain a great creative writing program, but apparently doesn’t want to. Why? There are hints in the pattern of firings.

  • The Jones Lecturers asked for a raise in 2023 (many lecturers made around $52,000), and exactly a year later, all of the lecturers who asked for pay raise were told they’d be fired. This seems beyond suspicious to us and to our students, and is in fact outrageous.
  • The deans and our own director clearly indicated in the August 21 meeting that we would be replaced with younger and lower-paid lecturers. This is also evident in the university’s online statement here. Again, completely outrageous.
  • It was the Senior Professors of our Creative Writing Program who voted to fire us, their junior colleagues, but interestingly… it was only the MALE professors who voted to fire us. Not one woman professor voted to fire the Jones Lecturers. And the decision to fire us was clearly not unanimous, and in fact received pushback from the English Department and in other quarters in the university.

Oh. They fired all the professors who had dared to ask for a raise ($52K/year would be a stretch in Morris, Minnesota, but Palo Alto? Insane), they are completely changing the program to be taught by adjuncts with one-year appointments, and huh…it was the men among the senior professoriate who decided to kill the program.

They’re turning a bunch of skilled writers loose with a solid dose of resentment? That’s a great way to build your brand, Stanford.

Meat’s back on the menu, boys!

I am a cruel and terrible spiderlord. I have just been overwhelmed with these black widows, which are awesomely fertile. The two adults I have just produced two more egg sacs! There’s a hundred spiderlings in each, and every few weeks another sac erupts and produces a spiderling swarm! I have limited capacity to incubate the horde (although I am getting another incubator from a colleague soon), and also, these are black widows — I have to be careful to prevent any escapes onto campus.

My horrible solution so far is to take advantage of the fact that I have the mothers in a large cage with lots of room for the sprawling horde, and I go in and scoop out a lucky few spiderlings to live in separate vials, and, terrible as it sounds, leave the rest to die. Or maybe die. I’m a softie, so I do shake out a bunch of fruit flies into the container — but not enough to feed a population of hundreds. I figured that eventually they’d winnow down to manageable numbers without any intervention on my part.

I did not take cannibalism into account.

What I’m seeing is that there’s an unexpected distribution of spiderling sizes. The majority are tiny, some are getting large, and a few are getting to sub-adult size. What are they eating? Sure, I’m throwing in some fruit flies, but not really enough to plump up a lot of adults. Therefore, the bully spiderlings must be killing and eating their smaller peers, and growing to a larger size that allows more bullying and sibling murder. Conceptually, it’s a bit horrific.

Today I broke down and decided to distract the bigger spiderlings with a larger, non-conspecific meal, and gave them some mealworms.

The mealworm is in the center, and looming over it with a massive leg span is the young Flashman of this mob, dining on this lovely non-arachnid flavored meal. You can also see the cloud of small juveniles all over the place.

This is not my ideal solution. In the future, I’d like to isolate each egg sac as they’re produced, and control the population more precisely, but I can’t do that now. There’s a new egg sac in this container right now, but it’s in the middle of a tangle of sticky cobwebs, guarded by a fierce mama spider, and to get to it I’d have to stick my hand into this scurrying mass of spiderlings. I’m not worried about getting bitten, but more concerned that I have to make sure no one escapes.

I am aware that this is actually a good problem for an evil spiderlord to have.

What kind of parent would you be?

There are two kinds of parents. 1) The ones who want their children to follow in their footsteps, take over the family business, continue their tradition as a farrier or door-to-door salesman or whatever. They live in dread that their child might turn out different, leave their faith, or someday disagree with their opinions. 2) The ones who encourage their kids to explore and develop their own interests and find happiness in their own skin. Guess what kind Richard Hanania would be if he, god forbid, were a parent?

The disclaimer that I’m for women living the lives they want is negated by the fact that he’s calling a successful young woman living the life she wants the nightmare scenario.

Just as the entire Republican party is echoing Hanania’s racism, they also share a love of misogyny.

Last week, Ann Coulter and other Republican bottom-feeders grossed normal people out by mocking Guz Walz for getting emotional during his dad’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). The insults didn’t just prove that the self-appointed protectors of “family values” wouldn’t know a loving family if they saw one. It was a reminder that the Trump campaign’s strategy continues to be appealing to ugly, bitter people with a message of resentment.

But the Walzes aren’t the only family whose evident happiness infuriates the extremely online MAGA movement. Harris’ family has drawn ire, as well. Especially her stepdaughter, 25-year-old model and designer Ella Emhoff, whose creativity, beauty, and easygoing love for her family has sent many on the right into paroxysms of rage. The daughter of Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, triggers the incel-minded online right by being a Brooklyn hipster who rejects the tiresome conservative rules for how women are allowed to dress or behave. In response, Donald Trump’s fanboys are in a total meltdown, unable to accept the existence of a woman who doesn’t care what they think of her. And they can’t hide that they’re furious that she looks great doing so.

In the real world, Ella Emhoff, who graduated from Parsons School of Design and has a modeling contract with IMG, is being declared “a fashion icon” for her effortless pairing of high fashion with her quirky tastes.

I guess I’m in category 2, since my 3 grown children are all living lives nothing like what I would choose for myself, and I’m proud that they’ve done that. Who wants to live in a world where half the people are forced to be tradwives? (Republicans, I guess.)

I should plug Kavin Senapathy’s new book, The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids.

Richard Hanania and the whole damn Republican party would hate it, which is why you should all run out and order it.