Hey, I recognize that octopus illustration!
It’s an illustration of the “eight armed cuttle” from the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1871. It’s used on a new article on “The Octopus That Ruled London”, about the “cephalomania” that swept across the city when people were first able to get a close-up look at the majestic mollusc. It’s not a mania, though, if everyone is doing it. Then it just becomes a sign of a normal, balanced, healthy mental state.
Wait…maybe it’s too complicated. I have a simpler guide: just vote Democrat. The time for thoughtful consideration of policy on a case by case basis is over, until we get an opposition party that hasn’t lost its collective mind.
Trump2016trauma was exaggerated
It’s become the standard trope: college students are whiny, delicate, over-sensitive wimps who can’t take the real world and demand safe spaces
and trigger warnings
. These complaints about students are usually made by ignorant jerks who don’t know any, and who will also be complaining about too PC
and of course, the regressive Left
, and before you know it, they’ve put all college folk into the cultural Marxist
category. Those phrases are good tells to let you know you’re dealing with an idiot.
The latest cause célèbre for the regressive trolls is an incident at Emory University, in which someone scrawled “Trump 2016” on the sidewalk. As the right-wing twits tell it, the students were shocked and horrified and demanding protection from the administration, and the administration rushed to coddle them.
It was all a lie.
The Australian Giant Cuttlefish aggregation is truly one of nature’s great events. Thousands of cuttlefish congregate in the shallow waters around the Spencer gulf in South Australia, to mate and perpetuate the species. The cuttlefish like alien beings, display an array of patterns, textures and colours to indicate their intentions. As male courts a female or wards off other males, and entourage of suiters stay poised for an opportunity to mate with the female. A visual delight and a rare glimpse of nature in all its glory. Scott Portelli
Lately, my genetics class has taken a turn, by intent. I start the semester with the basics: Mendel, simple crosses, learning the terminology, all of that simple stuff that most of them see as a review of high school biology. But then, once I’m reasonably confident they know the commonly understood rules, I start adding all the complications that Mendel knew nothing about, and then we start getting into epistasis and the complicated business of translating genotype into phenotype, and I essentially end up telling them that everything they learned before wasn’t exactly true, because real world heredity is a heck of a lot more complicated. You can’t usually reduce complex traits to one gene with alleles that are dominant or recessive.
So what do you know, the New Yorker comes out with an excellent article that highlights complexity and real world genetics: Runs in the Family, about the genetics of schizophrenia.
It’s going to be playing here in Morris this weekend. And while I’m usually quick to get in line for escapist fantasy, I think I’m just going to sit this one out. I’m going to catch up on my grading, instead, which sounds like more fun.
The problem with this movie that I can see coming is that it’s a Zack Snyder film, and takes everything far too seriously. 300 was fun in the sense that the joke was on him — it went so far over the top that it became campily bad, and you could watch it for the meta-mockery of raging ahistorical libertarian machismo (and of course Snyder is an acolyte of Ayn Rand.) Battling ubermenschen is right in Snyder’s wheelhouse, and he’ll stuff it full of pseudo-seriousness and completely overlook any human story.
And that humanity is what I’m looking for. Let’s all remember these are all comic book stories — they can deal with big themes, but there should always be a bit of light-heartedness beneath it all. These are stories about people with impossible powers dancing about in brightly colored leotards, after all. A sense of humor is required, but Snyder doesn’t seem to have one.
Of the superhero movies I’ve enjoyed, there’s an inverse correlation between the scope of the story and the pleasure of experiencing them. Those Avengers movies with a giant cast and city-demolishing cosmic enemy? Thud. Boring. The fun movies? Deadpool, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy? The magnitude of the drama has to be compensated for with sufficient silliness. Man of Steel was possibly the worst of a bad bunch because there wasn’t a scrap of joy in the whole thing — they might as well have painted a scowling face on a wrecking ball and filmed a day of it smashing stuff. It would have been just as entertaining.
So, yeah, I’ll choose to grade papers over watching self-absorbed Comic Book Guy pander to the oblivious hero-worshipping demographic — you know, the kinds of people who think critics ought to be raped for disliking the object of their idolatry. I’m pretty sure those papers will contain an occasional bit that will make me crack a smile — inadvertently or intentionally — so that sounds like a lot more fun than watching angry cartoons punch each other.
The people who occupied the Malheur refuge were more than just sanctimonious criminals — they were also disgusting. Here’s a gallery of photos illustrating the wreckage they left behind. They trashed the place. They wrecked the land. They disrespected the property of the people who worked at the refuge while demanding that their property rights were paramount.
That photo is of their legacy: a shit-filled trench.
That’s how I’ll always remember the Bundys.
The Republicans are flailing about to promote their regressive social agenda, and they’re succeeding, at least temporarily. While we’re all distracted by the spectacle of presidential elections, they’ve managed to control legislatures and governorships in many states, and that means they get to push through all kinds of ugly laws.
So North Carolina has passed a ‘bathroom law’, which seems to be the new strategy for getting public approval of odious legislation. They’re making sure men don’t get to sneak into women’s restrooms, how can you disagree with that? Well, I can, but appealing to modesty and privacy works as a great stalking horse when what you’re really about is oppressing minorities. The NC bill isn’t just about regulating bathrooms.
McCrory’s statement and tweets tonight only mention the so-called “bathroom issue” – but in fact the bill excludes LGBT citizens from protections in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The bill also overturns not only the LGBT rights bill in Charlotte, it repeals similar laws in eight other North Carolina municipalities.
McCrory also keeps emphasizing that it is a “bipartisan” bill. There were a few Democrats who voted for it initially, but how can you call it bipartisan when every Democrat in the senate walked out on the vote in protest? It seems to me that that is kind of the opposite of bipartisan support.
So not only are they passing oppressive legislation, they are constantly lying about it. Business as usual for the Republicans, I guess.
Remember this next fall. The election isn’t just about the highest office in the land, it’s also about the entire poisonous nest of scumbags at every level of government. Vote the Republicans out. Don’t even let a professed Republican be elected to dogcatcher.
A nice twist on the North Carolina law: see this manly bearded fellow? He’s a transgender man. He’s now required by law to use women’s restrooms in North Carolina.
It’s going to be spectacular, what with all the conservative crania exploding, when someone tries to prevent him from entering the room the law says he must use.
I’m sure there are also transgender women who are going to blow everyone’s mind when they use the men’s room. The proponents are all thinking about enforcing strict gender norms, and they’ve just taken an action that is going to make all the people who don’t fit in their narrow little boxes more prominent.
I’m just watching the whole brand morph into something contemptible — they held out the longest, but it seems to be a general rule that mass media that promotes science will eventually sell out to peddle popular pablum. That’s happening right now before our eyes. Two things leap out at me:
The rush to produce religious apologetics. They’re coming out with a new “documentary”, The Story of God, that from this excerpt is clearly total crap with a good budget (they hired Morgan Freeman) and some quality production values.
That’s terrible. Videos of people gazing wisely into space are not evidence for a deity. Subjective anecdotes from a guy who nearly died recalling the hallucinations his oxygen-starved brain generated are not convincing evidence of an afterlife.
There is potential for a fascinating analysis of comparative religion, but this does not seem to be that story. That story would be the story of humans grappling with their mortality, not the story of an imaginary being called “god”.
The lack of appreciation of good, solid content. I’ve just learned that NatGeo is going to discontinue Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog. That’s shocking, too: Switek puts out quality science regularly, every week or two, and he has an excellent reputation. The reason given for kicking him out is that he didn’t generate enough traffic to the site.
That’s appalling. That sends a message: NatGeo doesn’t care about the quality of your content, just how many eyeballs swivel in your direction. If that’s your metric, then you’re doomed to drive right down into the pit of popular garbage.
Maybe they can replace him with a Kardashian.
Watching something that was good and valuable slowly rot away is depressing.
