Today is the first day of Skepticon. I was supposed to be there. I wanted to be there. But instead, I’m at home.

What happened is that on Tuesday I had my second encounter with a transient ischemic attack — the first was about a year and a half ago. I was just sitting at the computer, typing away, when suddenly I couldn’t remember how to spell anything, and the letters and words were swimming about on the computer screen. It was disconcerting. After a short while, everything went back to normal, but I called my doctor anyway — I got a CT scan yesterday (alles klar, no gross observable bleeds or anything like that), and I feel perfectly fine now. I’ll be visiting a neurologist in the near future for a more thorough checkup.

I suspect it was recent grief and sleeplessness and exhaustion and too damn much travel recently that brought it on, so I’m treating it by getting enough sleep. I woke up at 4am this morning, and often I’d just get up and start my day, but this time I got up, walked to the bathroom, and came back to bed and got an additional 2 hours of sleep. No more absurdly early bird for me.

Unfortunately, one thing I cannot trust my brain to do is to hop into a car and drive for 11 hours to St Louis. Once upon a time, yes, no problem, but now I picture suddenly becoming disoriented and confused on I35 because I’d pushed myself too far. Of course, my other nightmare is that happening in the middle of a class, which would be a bit awkward. What good is a professor who loses the ability to read and write?

At least I’ve still got my fall-back profession of exotic dancer to rely on…unless there’s also motor involvement. I’d better take care of myself and stay rested for my own good.

I think it’s important to check the flow of misinformation. According to the Associated Press, JD Vance did not, I repeat, did not fuck a sofa.

This scurrilous accusation does warrant a thorough investigation.

The wild assertions sprang from people on X (formerly Twitter) writing that Vance, now the running mate for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that he simulated the act with a rubber glove anchored between the cushions as a young man.

“You have only been a Senator for 18 months, you are NOT qualified to be @VP plus you depravely humped a couch and wrote about it in your book!” a Kamala Harris supporter wrote.
Even comedian Kathy Griffin chimed in, declaring the country should not have a “couchf*cker” as vice president.

At one point AP appeared to have another headline, “Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch,” but the article has seemed to disappear. We’re checking with AP on that.

Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, AP did a PDF search of the book that produced 10 references of “couch” or “couches” but in none of them did Vance take liberties. “Sofa” and “glove” did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote.

I am mostly satisfied at this point, but I wouldn’t rule out the appointment of a Senate committee to investigate further. And I think that Vance needs to make a public disavowal.

I’m sorry, but I’m a cliche. I was lying in bed half asleep last night when my wife came to bed, and I’m fortunate that she didn’t ask what I was thinking.

Because my brain was whirling like a hamster in a cage about…kaiju. This past summer, I have watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (big meh, Hollywood exploding the whole premise) and Godzilla Minus One (really good), and of course I’ve watched the original King Kong, which is the only one to get even close to handling this problem properly.

Here’s the problem: energy defeats flesh. People successfully hunted elephants with sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. They hunted whales with harpoons tipped with flint or copper. Thick skin and scales are hard to penetrate, but apply enough force and you can punch through them. In an animal of vast bulk, it is going to be difficult to get through to a vital organ, but if nothing else, make enough holes and it will eventually bleed out. It’s probably going to be enraged first, and try to kill you, but that’s why you don’t pick on an elephant or a whale — it’s the risk, not the invulnerability.

It bugs me in a kaiju movie that everything just explodes on the surface or bounces off Godzilla. He can’t be denser or tougher than the steel and concrete buildings he smashes with nary a scuff or a scratch — there is no armor thick enough in a mobile animal to resist heavy arms fire. Yet the movies just show modern tanks firing at him, and he isn’t even set back, let alone scored with damage. Good ol’ King Kong gets it right, since [spoiler!] they killed him with repeated machine gun fire that caused enough accumulated damage that he fell down dead.

Don’t get me started on Pacific Rim. Why are they building elaborate, complex, giant robots to grapple with the huge biological horrors rising from the deep? One GBU 12 Paveway launched from an F-15, and it’s splattered. I don’t care what it’s made of, if it can’t survive getting punched in the face by a robot, it’s not going to cope with being torn apart by a 500lb bomb and falling back into the sea as a rain of gibs.

So that took care of my concerns about kaiju, and I could get back to sleep.

But then I thought of other problems. What does Mothra eat? Is she denuding entire forests to grow to tremendous size? And possibly, she doesn’t eat as an imago — all she might have on her mind is sex!

I’ll think about that some other night.