Batman sans Batman

I saw Clayface last night, and mostly liked it. I appreciated the fact that it’s a movie set in Batman’s Gotham City, with no appearance by the guy with a cape, and no rehashing of Batman’s origin in the murder of his parents. It is set in the Gotham City milieu, which is an annoying flaw done only to draw in the comic book fans. It’s a bit grim. There’s a scene with a young woman alone walking into a subway that was the worst, most daunting cavern of industrial gloom which no one in their right mind would enter. Clayface is an interesting story set in the darkest environment.

It’s also a very dark story. It could have used a little contrast to alleviate the oppressive atmosphere.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone who is repelled by body horror. I’m undaunted by knives and needles and blood to the point that I have to offer another criticism: the scenes with blood were nowhere near bloody enough to be realistic. Of course, the notion that nanotech-infested flesh could crawl and reshape itself at will (I have concerns about the metabolic activity required, as well as the amount of information involved) is even more unrealistic, but that was the core premise of the movie.

However, the appeal of the movie is that finally it lifts the imaginative possibilities of a comic book movie out of the stultifying conventions of the past comics. Clayface may not be the great movie that is going to be taken seriously as a good drama, but I like the fact that I could walk into that theater and not know the direction the story was going to take.

Ugh. I am clayface. I just got back from the dentist, a filling on the left and another on the right, and now my face is totally numb. It’s supposed to wear off before my class, which is good, since I’m at risk of serious drooling right now.

Peak Republican

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad, but to briefly summarize: Ramaswamy is running for Ohio governor against Amy Acton. Acton had a horrible childhood, being sexually assaulted by her creepy stepfather as a pre-teen, and said creep fled the state to avoid prosecution, and Acton’s mother fled with him, abandoning her children. None of that is in dispute, and is a matter of record. Acton persevered, got a medical degree, and is now running for governor, admirable, even heroic, accomplishments.

Ramaswamy, in contrast, was a spoiled rich kid and pharmaceutical drug lord, who peddled a failed Alzheimer’s drug, and who always presents as a cocky arrogant loser. His image is…not good. So he chose to run an attack ad starring Acton’s deadbeat mother, supportive wife of a rapist, accusing Acton of lying. He chose to replace his face, the face of slick, rich, profiteering pharmaceutical grifter, with the image of a bad mother who abandoned his opponent as a child to live with a rapist.

This sounds like a very bad idea, but I don’t know — it does make him look like a peak Republican, an alpha with no morality, which has been a winning recipe for the party of authoritarians. There are people who actually consider obedience to one’s parents, no matter how awful they are, to be a virtue. They’re the ones who like to quote the ten commandments and argue that if you don’t honor your mother and father, you’ll burn in hell. It might lock down a few votes for him. From, you know, the kind of people who favor the parenting methods of Michael and Debi Pearl.

My mother was a sweetie pie, who I know would not stand by if her husband was abusive (my father was not, not by a long shot), so my personal experience biases me to favor mothers. I have heard enough stories of terrible parenting to know that excreting a baby doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, and have seen enough examples in the news of parents torturing or killing their children to know that evil isn’t a contraceptive.

I’ll be watching the Ohio election. If Ramaswamy gets elected, I’ll know that Americans are beyond hope.

It’s been a rough few weeks

But we’re back online again. First we had Bluehost arbitrarily decide to cut off the DNS, and the latest problem was a fart in the php that killed our cloudflare service. This stuff is all essential for functioning online, because the internet is a savage, ruthless environment. I remember when it was all just me running a blog on a computer in my lab with Apache doing all the hard work — I sometimes looked on incoming traffic, and there was a stunning quantity of spam and malignant stabs at the server every second, all blocked by Apache, and now the threats out there are even more common and more subtle. We’re working for now, though, until the next disaster.

There are worse disasters, though. To put it into context, watch this lethal level of sarcasm.

I won’t say it could be worse…rather, it will get worse.

Ebro Ahmed saves schoolbus full of kids

A bus driver was having seizures and lost control of his schoolbus, and a quick-thinking hero jumped aboard and stopped it. There’s lots of news about him, but they all seem to be careful to refer to him as a “Minnesota man” or generic “hero”, and strangely, they credit the TV show Grey’s Anatomy for the rescue. They all seem to gloss over the fact that he’s a son of immigrants from the Horn of Africa. His name is Ebro Ahmed.

Will this event be highlighted in Republican stump speeches? I doubt it.

Colossal Biosciences predictably scams again

Colossal Biosciences is one big flashy scam. They have not and will not be resurrecting the woolly mammoth, they have not brought dire wolves back from extinction, their whole pious schtick of working to prevent extinction is a lie. Now they have a new scam, one that will find favor with the department of defense war: they want to genetically engineer WARHOUNDS.

Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Andruil’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. That idea, on Thursday, announced its emergence from stealth as Warhound, armed with $200 million in funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC. The round values the company at $1.2 billion.

That’s a lot of money to fund a glorified puppy mill. I have no idea what they hope to do, other than putting a glossy high-tech label on dog breeding. They are aware of the dangers, but at the same time, not aware.

Lamm told TechCrunch he met Luckey about a year ago at a conference, where the Anduril co-founder brought up doing more for working dogs in the U.S. military. The two kept in touch, and Lamm did more research, learning about the breeding issues. Many dogs do not make it through training because of genetic dispositions for issues like poor eyesight or the high possibilities of cancer, hip dysplasia, or muscle atrophy.

How do you simultaneously breed for specific traits in a small population while avoiding the side-effects of unexpected pleiotropies? They have a fantasy of being able to target and modify specific genes in such a way that you do not generate effects that you haven’t planned for? And what do the biotechnology techniques they plan to use do that is more effective than the low-tech strategies that we’ve been using for centuries? What is your cure for hip dysplasia? That would be nice to have, given that people keep producing dogs that are prone to those problems.

Lamm believed dogs could be enhanced for health, longevity and “for things like speed and agility or enhance olfactory sensors for bomb sniffing and whatnot,” he said. His team looked at the top-performing working dog breeds — the Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd — taking the cell lines from them and putting them in a biobank. From there, they will edit the genes, adding the ones that will make the dogs perform better while taking out the ones that won’t, to create “a new type of dog.”

Tell me what you plan to modify, specifically. Given Colossal Biosciences habit of doing minor cosmetic changes and trumpeting it as a revolution — they did not make dire wolves, they modified pigment genes to make white dogs — I would not expect much of an enhancement of German Shepherds. They will make a few tweaks via some expensive biotech and tout it as a WARHOUND to sell it to Pete Hegseth and “earn” their $1.2 billion valuation.

House of Wax

I watched the English version, not the Italian…but Italian posters are so much more lurid

It’s been a long day, but after getting tomorrows lecture together and composing another quiz, I decided to unwind with a classic horror movie, House of Wax. Not the terrible 2005 version with Paris Hilton, but the original, the fabulous, 1953 version with Vincent Price in his prime and Phyllis Kirk screaming her heaving bosom out. This is, to my mind, the perfect horror movie. It has a simple plot, it clips along at a rapid pace, there is little gore (although Vincent’s makeup is rather horrifying), no sex or nudity (Kirk’s bondage scenes are carefully shot), and Price’s voice is perfection. It also features Carolyn Jones and Charles Bronson.

Despite being a tight hour and 28 minutes long, it also includes an intermission, which would be nice to have in some of these 3 and 4 hour movies we’re getting now. It was a little gimmicky — this was a 3-D movie, and the intermission featured a barker with paddle balls. Everyone remembers that scene. Our local theater ought to a have a carnival show outside the doors to draw customers in.

More impressive and terrifying is the scene where House of Was burns down, and the mannequins are all melting in rather grisly ways. I bet Spieldberg was inspired by that scene for the effect of opening the Ark of the Covenant on Nazis.

Here’s the original theatrical trailer, which is long on voice-over hype, but is also good for not giving away the whole movie. Movie makers should learn from this.

Go watch it and get ready for Hallowe’en. So good. And it came out 4 years before I was born!

Where did they go?

As usual, Republicans love to make absurd racist accusations, and the latest is from Trump, who hates our citizens of Somali descent.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, the president lamented that Minnesota had hundreds of lakes—until the Somalis arrived.

They’ve ruined a great state, Trump said, referring to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. You know I remember Minnesota in the old days, what a beautiful, beautiful, with lakes all over the place, they had more lakes than any place I’ve ever seen. It was so beautiful.

They’re destroying it, probably, maybe they’ve destroyed it, Trump continued, referring to the Somali immigrant community. And I only hope a Republican woman who happens to be very respected by everybody gets in because you will see a difference.

What does he think the Somalis have done with our lakes? Is this like accusing Haitians of eating pets, now Somalis are drinking our lakes?

I attended a community event tonight

It was good. The food was tasteful and enjoyable, and I’d be happy to back again (it’s a yearly event.)

But — and I hate to criticize — this was Minnesota chili. I was warned multiple times that “this one has a bit of a bite.” It did not. Flavorful, yes, but “bite”? I could have rubbed this stuff in eyes without a twinge. I could have brought some hot sauce and chili flakes, but I feared that might be seen as insulting. I shall be able to use the bathroom tonight without pain.

The problem may be that all the chili cooks were white people who looked like they attend the local Lutheran church every Sunday. Maybe they should invite a few representatives from our local Hispanic population, who aren’t timid about using a few peppers.

Maybe I should submit an entry next year. My chili is considerably more ferocious, and I’ve always toned it down for my wife’s benefit.

Sorry, Texans, you are so screwed

Texans are well aware of the fact that their Republican politicians are remarkably vile. Somehow Ken Paxton has a chance of winning election, in spite of being quite possibly the most corrupt politician in America. Also in the running, though,is Greg Abbott, who has been actively undermining public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools.

So don’t vote for Abbott. That’ll fix the problem, right? Get him out of office and everything will get all better.

Nope. The real problem is Texas billionaires.

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

As is familiar, billionaires are the problem, and especially Christian billionaires. Fundamentalist Muslim billionaires would be just as damaging, but the Christian billionaires would fight back.

You notice, the citizens of Texas don’t count. This would have to be a kaiju battle.