Help! We’re being held hostage by a maniac child!

Our daughter and granddaughter are here, and the little one is in control. She has plans. Yesterday we played veterinarian for hours. Last night, before she went to bed, she wrote down her agenda for today: she wants to build a castle, and put name decals on her scooter, and feed some spiders, and ride her scooter (I helped with the last one, because she was using the list to procrastinate bedtime.) She put checkmark boxes next to her plans.

We’re in trouble. She’s a little girl with a clipboard, and an agenda, and she gives orders. I’m hastily scribbling this in our bedroom before she wakes up. I fear the daylight.

Judgment of Paris time

This could be trouble. Three of my favorite girls in the whole world — Mary, Skatje, and Iliana — are converging on my house this afternoon for a little holiday get-together. I hope they don’t ask me which one is my favorite, because I don’t have a good comeback at hand, and I’d rather not have an unfortunate encounter with Philoctetes.

“Scientist” is a gender-neutral term

I’d already known that “scientist” coined by William Whewell in the 19th century, but only today did I learn the context. The first scientist by name was Mary Somerville, and Whewell had to invent the term to describe her!

Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word scientist to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into scientist. Some scholars have suggested that he coined the term a year earlier in his correspondence with Coleridge, but no clear evidence survives. What does survive is his incontrovertible regard for Somerville, which remains printed in plain sight — in his review, he praises her as a “person of true science.”

He still managed to squeeze in some sexist stereotyping, but that’s cool. Read the whole article to find out what remarkable person Somerville was.

Wheel out the persecution complex

I mentioned before that Ken Ham and Ray Comfort were going to flood London with Bible tracts for the upcoming coronation. The Panda’s Thumb also noted the silliness of this effort. Here’s the complete text of their comment.

Ken Ham and his fellow creationist grifters plan to disrupt King Charles’s Coronation by handing out religious tracts disguised as money.

This is hilarious. They are raising money to print and distribute 3 million counterfeit “1 Million Pound” notes that will display fundamentalist/creationist tracts on the reverse side. They are shamelessly raising money to do this. I wonder if the British Secret Service will also be amused.

That’s it! That’s all they said. It was enough to fuel Ray Comfort’s outrage, though. He thinks that’s a serious threat to call the police on them, so he’s made a video in which he intercuts clips of people getting handcuffed, of gangster firing machine guns, and then delivers a po-faced explanation of all the ways their Bible tracts differ from genuine UK pound notes. Yeah, Ray, we know. You’re more likely to get arrested for littering than for seriously trying to undermine the British economy with fake money. Your greater crime will be inducing eye-strain in all the people who will be rolling their eyes.

That doesn’t trigger their persecution complex, though…gotta inflate the concerns even more.

So ridiculous. They’re trying so hard to pretend the world sees them as fierce and dangerous, rather than a joke.

Speaking of jokes, if you bother to watch the video, it starts out with breathless outraged innocence, but One-Trick-Pony Ray can’t keep it up for long, and it abruptly switches to another of his man-in-the-street interviews where he confronts a stranger with the question and accusation, “Have you ever told a lie? Then you’re a liar and are going to hell.” It’s a good thing for Ray that the Bible doesn’t condemn people for being a repetitive bore, because he’d be damned for all time. I turn off any of his videos when he starts on that tired schtick, which means I can never sit through any of them.

Scroogey. Very scroogey.

Well, the Republicans did it again.

Three buses dropped off dozens of migrants near Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington D.C. as the area experienced record low temperatures on Saturday night, per NBC News.

About 140 migrants from countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean arrived in D.C. from Texas, Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network organizer Madhvi Bahl told NBC News, calling the incident “awful.”

Some of the migrants that arrived had to battle the 18-degree weather wearing only t-shirts, according to CNN, and they were eventually given blankets and taken to local shelters in the area.

I’m not sure what game they’re playing. Is it “Be cartoonishly villainous”? Is it “Let Democrats be humane and kind”? Whatever game it is, could they please stop using innocent human beings as their pawns?

It seems the most likely asshole behind this cruel stunt is, of course, the governor of Texas. He isn’t issuing any denials, which is a little bit damning, and he isn’t claiming credit, because he knows it’s wicked. He probably spent his childhood pulling the wings off flies and hiding the evidence from his mom.

The White House placed the blame on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has sent busses of migrants to northern cities in the past, though it has not been confirmed that Abbott send the buses that wound up at Harris’ residence. In a statement, the White House called the deployment of the buses a “cruel, dangerous and shameful stunt.”

Somebody needs to explain to the Republicans that the callous factory owners and poor house managers in Dickens novels were the bad guys.

Elon Musk has ascended to avatar status

We watched Glass Onion this weekend. It’s good, entertaining, a little bit off-kilter compared to most whodunnits, and expresses a contemporary point of view that’s clearly becoming more common. Most of the cast are playing the true detritus of society — influencers, fashion models, vapid sportsball types, etc. — and most of them aren’t very likeable. They’re spending a weekend at an extravagantly appointed Greek island that a ridiculously rich posturing fool, Miles Bron, had purchased, when, of course, murder occurs, and the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc has to figure out who the killer is. The key to the case is when he realized that he had assumed, like everyone else, that Miles Bron was a complicated genius. After all, he’s very very very rich. But the break in the case comes when he realizes that…Miles Bron is an idiot.

As were most of the people at this party. That’s not really a spoiler, because early on you should realize yourself that most of the likely killers are stupid and superficial.

You’ll probably also instantly recognize Miles Bron as a proxy for Elon Musk. Tech billionaire who clearly doesn’t understand anything? Elon Musk. Elon has become an archetype! Lots of people have noted that resemblance, but it’s not quite true (warning: there are actual spoilers at that link).

It all makes Miles Bron the perfect villain for 2022: a tycoon far dumber than he realizes.

Thanks to recent headlines, for many viewers, Bron’s mixture of bluster, hubris and half-baked ideas will likely bring to mind Twitter owner and part-time car enthusiast Elon Musk. But, as Norton has noted, he and writer-director Rian Johnson based Bron on multiple (unnamed) real-life billionaires and tech figures, not one specific person. The movie’s root conflict — Bron’s ouster of Helen’s sister Cassandra (Monáe) from the company they co-founded based on Cassandra’s idea — evokes Mark Zuckerberg’s battles in building Facebook. His proselytizing for a not-ready-for-prime-time technology — in this case, an unstable hydrogen fuel — recalls Elizabeth Holmes. His wardrobe of T-shirts and necklaces suggests Sam Bankman-Fried and other casually attired entrepreneurs.

Like all these figures, Bron is utterly convinced of his own genius. He speaks passionately of being a “disrupter.” He portrays himself as an innovator, even though he stole his co-founder’s ideas. His island is only accessible via a glass dock that looks impressive, but is only accessible at low tide, with the local police referring to it as a “piece of s—.” He brushes aside warnings that his hydrogen fuel is too unstable — heedlessness that literally blows up in his face.

This is a promising cultural shift, that many people are coming around to the realization, like Benoit Blanc, that billionaires are just greedy, wicked, dumbasses. It’s the one good thing Musk has accomplished.

Scanning…

For Christmas, my wife and I got a new dishwasher, and I also scanned in a lot of old photos for her. Here’s my mother- and father-in-law in the 1940s.

He was a Marine. Fought in the Pacific. Won a few medals for it, too.

For meritorious service in connection with operations against the enemy while serving with a marine infantry battalion on Iwo Jima, Volcano islands Feb.27, 1945. The light machinegun section of which Cpl. Gjerness was section leader was attached to a rifle platoon assaulting a vital ridge commanding the approaches to Hill 362. The platoon was repulsed by a superior enemy fire. The platoon again assault the ridge, this time suffering heavy casualties, among them the platoon leader. The platoon became disorganized. Cpl. Gjerness, realizing the severity of the situation, and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, took charge of the platoon and through his courageous leadership the platoon was orderly withdrawn and the wounded were evacuated with the highest traditions of the U.S. naval service.

Whoa, I don’t care for that “disregard for his own personal safety” bit. He had an obligation to get home and father my wife 12 years later.

Merry humbug

I don’t have much Christmas spirit left. There hardly seems much point when you’ve got no religion and your kids have grown up and moved away, and so many of the aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters you used to share a groaning table with have gone and died. It’s mainly a wistful echo of a holiday to me anymore.

There’s still one thing to bring me a little Christmas joy, though. No matter how depressed I might get, I’ll never get as bitter and spiteful and nasty over the holidays as a conservative Christian. Behold, I bring to you the gift of Kevin Sorbo and some well-fleshed grinning skulls at Newsmax sharing their gift of ludicrous resentment.

President Joe Biden talks about the Christmas myth of following a star to a child, the Son of God, bringing hope, joy, and peace. At his speech at the lighting of the national Christmas tree, he says the banned (according to Trump, anyway) word “Christmas” a half dozen times, and says “God bless you all, and may God protect our troops.” Yet smug announcer claims he was dancing around to avoid the religious sentiment, and the other one claims it was empty of the meaning of Christmas, and Kevin Sorbo responds by claiming the Democrats are hypocrites for not mentioning Jesus and leaving Christ out…and then plugs his new movie a couple of times.

Don’t worry, they move on to the true meaning of the holiday, which is about buying toys for the kids and complaining about teenagers and their cell phones.

That made me feel better about this cold dismal holiday. We’ve won the War on Christmas, and our opposition is reduced to joyless, bitter anger over their own holiday.

All right! I’ll now leave with the gift of advice: the most important thing for weathering the current icy cold is…warm dry socks. Keep your feet warm and you’ll feel so much better. I speak from experience — I went for a walk yesterday in the -25°C air with 30mph winds, a bad idea, I tell you, and a chill settled into the bones of my feet that made me miserable all day long. Be smarter than me!