We have another podish-sortacast tomorrow, and the theme is redemption arcs.
Know anyone, famous or otherwise, who thoroughly screwed up, and then somehow got back in good graces (I think it has to start with a sincere apology, and it’s amazing how few people get that)? Any characters from literature who worked their way of a pit? Tell us in the comments or show up and shout it out in the chat.
I got an interesting comment over on Mastodon, in response to the Tommy Tuberville story. There’s a classical scholar always ready to sic some ancient poetry on philistines.
Sappho, “To One Who Loved Not Poetry,” ca mid-600BCE:
κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα
μναμοσύνα σέθεν
ἔσσετ’ οὐδὲ †ποκ’†ὔστερον· οὐ
γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων
τῶν ἐκ Πιερίας· ἀλλ’ ἀφάνης
κἠν Ἀίδα δόμῳ
φοιτάσεις πεδ’ ἀμαύρων νεκύων
ἐκπεποταμέναBut thou shalt ever lie dead,
nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter,
for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria;
but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades,
flitting among the shadowy dead.
That’s a fitting end for a stupid old football coach — eternal obscurity, lost and forgotten, with only mockery left to remember him by. Respect poets, or suffer that fate yourself!
It’s Homecoming Weekend at the University of Minnesota! The cool alumni are coming back to town, and that includes my daughter, Skatje. And she’s bringing our granddaughter.
She has an ulterior motive, though. She’s moving from Eau Claire (to a place farther away, unfortunately), and all of my kids use our house for storage when they leave. Our upstairs bedrooms are all more like a cluttered personal museum, so she’s going to add to it, and is also bringing stuff from our granddaughter Iliana. The tradition continues!
We don’t mind, it’s an excuse to see the kids now and then. We’ll also get our revenge in a few years when we die and they inherit a hoarder house in a remote part of the country.
You may have noticed that Tommy Tuberville was holding up military appointments. We now learn what kind of thing he thinks justifies his dilatoriness.
Tuberville responds to the Navy Secretary by saying the Secretary has to get wokeness out of the Navy because “we’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers” pic.twitter.com/JiTgCrFb2q
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 6, 2023
Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”
“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”
OH MY GOD. Sailors might hear poetry. Real men don’t read or listen to poetry, or pay any attention to song lyrics. It is not surprising at all that a moron like Tuberville lacks all music or prosody in his brain. Poor man.
I saw the mommy spider spin the egg sac on 21 August, and this morning, the 6th of September, they finally emerged. These are Parasteatoda tepidariorum — note the leopard pattern on the abdomen. That’ll turn into a more complex mottling as they get older. Also see how the legs are mostly pale, but with distinct bands.
Steatoda triangulosa has a longer incubation time of 30 days, and the spiderlings emerge with pale abdomens and black, hairy legs.
The important thing about this is that we can nail down how long the incubation period for both species is under our specific culturing conditions. Now we wait for the Steatoda borealis egg sac to hatch out so we know its incubation period. Then…comparative embryology!
By the way, the lab was hectic this morning, with 150 tiny baby spiders, each about 3/4 of a millimeter long, emerging all at once and immediately trying to disperse. There was a cloud of barely visible dots all radiating out instantly from the locus of their home vial, while I was frantically trying to gather up individuals and put them in separate containers. Some, I’m sure, escaped.
Hmmm, is it ever a good thing when a scientist says that?
Since I avoid posting spiders here, you’ll have to go to Patreon or Instagram to see the baby picture.
Maybe. This outcome of the January 6 insurrection trials gives me hope.
Former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, described by a judge as “the ultimate leader” who “was motivated by revolutionary zeal” in organizing members of his far-right group to spark the breach of the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison, the longest sentence yet among the hundreds convicted of disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.
Let the punishment match the crime, and I think that’s a good punitive sentence that will discourage others from repeating this escapade. Even better: Tarrio was not one of the stupid goons who smashed windows and pounded on cops and barged into offices — he was a high level officer who stood back, wasn’t even in Washington DC, but incited the stupid goons and fired up the insurrection.
Tarrio, 39, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and obstructing the congressional proceeding meant to confirm the 2020 presidential election as part of a riot that U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said broke America’s long democratic tradition of peaceful transfers of power. Tarrio was the last of five Proud Boys to be sentenced after all were convicted in May following a 15-week trial.
Tarrio, of Miami, was convicted even though he wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been arrested two days earlier for burning a “Black Lives Matter” flag torn down from a D.C. church during an earlier protest in the city following President Donald Trump’s defeat. He was banned from the city as a result.
Who else is now pretending innocence because they didn’t actually swing a stick? Who else was just telling goons to smash things? Maybe that person is going to face a sentence as severe as Tarrio’s. Lock ’em up for a decade or two.
But also, this got me wondering. I don’t know any Proud Boys, have never even met one, and if I did, I’m likely to just turn on my heel and walk away. Do you know any? It’s weird how this tiny, obnoxious fringe group is getting so much attention when what it deserves is revulsion, and how it has been a tiny bit successful in puncturing the stability of the country.
Similarly, who knows a real live Groyper? These are groups with insane, hateful ideologies that have somehow risen high in the popular (or, at least, media) consciousness, and have some strange aversive influence. I mean, seriously, if one of them showed up at a party at my house, they’d get the bum’s rush, and if they wouldn’t leave, I’d be calling the cops. I don’t understand how these people walk in public without getting their shoes spit on constantly.
I startled my wife into wakefulness by shouting “BAT!” in the middle of the night.
Alas, I am no Laszlo Cravensworth, and I was not announcing my transformation into a bat — I was merely noting that there was a winged mammal doing circles above the marriage bed. We leapt up, throwing on robes, and started leaping and waving our arms to convince it to move elsewhere. It did. It flapped into the hallway, and we closed the bedroom door and resumed our dance there. Then it moved into the living room where it could whirl about at a greater radius, and we added broom waving and towel flapping to our repertoire. It flew into our kitchen, and at that point we had it.
Our strategy was to chase it into increasingly confined spaces, closing doors behind us and opening them in the direction we wanted it to go. From the kitchen, there was one way out, to the outside world, and while it fluttered frantically about us, it was defeated. Like a Turk at Lepanto, it at last realized it was either going to be crushed between the two terrifying flailing wings of our wedded partnership, or flee up the center. It chose wisely.
These intrusions have been occurring rather too frequently of late. We are debating what to do next: I suggested acquiring a large cannon and loading it with grapeshot to teach them a lesson, but Mary’s proposal to purchase a good-sized butterfly net has won out. At least for the next round in our no doubt continuing battle.
Instead, I’ll let the Vagina Museum talk about spider vaginas (actually, they’re called epigynes…oh crap, I did it anyway.)
Very few people are interested in spider epigynes, so here, here’s a whole article about vaginas. They’re rather nifty organs, you know, with many different names.
Hah! You probably thought I was going to list a bunch of slang terms, didn’t you?
How about if I show you pictures of vaginas instead?
How it begins:
An Arizona pro-parent school board member, who was recently elected into office, leaked and alerted parents to a radical science curriculum that is currently being considered in the Peoria Unified School District.
Notice that it calls this new school board member “pro-parent,” to distinguish her from all the anti-parent parents on the school board. Aren’t you curious to find out what “radical science” she objects to? Someone who looks this smug must have oodles of opinions.
I bet you already know what she’s going to freak out about.
Within a month of being at the school board, Rooks leaked a proposed textbook that would be used in the district’s high school. She said she was alarmed that the science curriculum discounted the reality of biological sex.
“I mean, these are kids we’re talking about. It’s not adults making adult decisions. These are children. So their minds are… not developed completely yet,” Rooks said.
Here we go again. At least the news article actually quotes what the textbook says, so we can judge how “radical” it is.
According to a post by Nicole Solas of the Independent Women’s Forum, the textbook said, “The biochemical, physiological, and anatomical features associated with ‘males’ and ‘females’ are turning out to be more complex than previously realized, with many genes involved in their development. We now know that sex is not a binary state, with just two defined outcomes.”
“Because of the complexity of the genes and proteins involved in sex determination, many variations exist. Some individuals are born with intermediate sexual characteristics, or even with anatomical features that do not match an individual’s sense of their own gender (‘transgender individuals’). Sex determination is an active area of research that should yield a more sophisticated understanding in years to come.”
Yeah, no. That’s pretty conventional. Also true and valid.
Fox News also helpfully (?) includes this illustration.
Male and female chromosomes.
OK, which one is the “male” chromosome? Does it have a penis? Does it make little tiny microgametes? What’s with the blue and yellow and green and purple pseudocolor? Why even include the right panel, are some of those male and female chromosomes, too?
You’ll have to go to the link to see some truly triumphant stupidity, though. They bring on Jack Brewer to opine on the subject. Brewer is a former football player who then became a “wealth manager” for Merrill Lynch, and then founded The Brewer Group, a Christian consulting firm focused on Building the Kingdom through Business
. He is completely unqualified to contribute to the discussion.
Brewer mumbles along about how the transgender agenda is witchcraft
, literal witchcraft
, and also throws in the statistic that transgender teens are 5 times more likely to commit suicide, implying that being transgender is the cause, rather than the oppression brought on by Christian fanatics tormenting them.
I don’t normally watch Fox News. This reminds me why.
