Everything everywhere all at once, spiderling edition

This week is a mess: I gave an exam, I need to get it all graded. I have two students doing senior seminars, with rehearsals tomorrow and the day after. We have two — count ’em, TWO — faculty meetings this week. And then there’s the usual course load.

So of course this is the day another Steatoda triangulosa egg sac has to start spewing spiderlings. It doesn’t look like much right now, that blurry dark blob is the egg sac itself, and I count a whole six newly emerged spiders, but more will be coming in the next day or two. Just these few are a handful, as soon as I popped the lid they were rushing to balloon off into the sunset. We have an experiment in mind for this batch, so we’ll be setting that up real soon.

Oh, right, this also meant that this morning I was frantically scrubbing the dishes I’ve been neglecting in the sink, because we’ll need a lot more containers.

It doesn’t look like much, but tomorrow that will be a seething box of baby spiders.

Copaganda

There was a time in my callow, naive youth when I’d see a show like Law & Order (or Dragnet — I watched that as a kid) and think it was an accurate portrayal of how the police worked. Then I’d see the news about, for instance, Rodney King or George Floyd, or all those untested rape kits (11,000 in Detroit!) and the disjoint between the reported reality and the television fantasy began to pile up. The TV tells me the police will deliver justice if I’m ever wronged, but the news is telling me it’s more likely they’d deliver pepper spray and a nightstick, and then ignore me afterwards.

I’m happy to see John Oliver delivering the truth. Law & Order is a lie.

That show really needs a disclaimer at the beginning and end of each episode stating, “This show is a fantasy about how we wish the justice system operated. There is nothing real about how the law works portrayed here.” Maybe bracket it with genuine statistics about case clearance rates and incidents of corruption and unjustified violence.

Jackie Chan of the spider world

They’re a little guy, capable of absurd acrobatic stunts to take out a bigger opponent. It’s Euryopis umbilicata!

“It has this crazy way of hurtling itself at an ant, doing this fabulous cartwheel then, like Spider-Man, attaching a piece of silk in mid-air to the ant,” said the study’s senior author, Prof Mariella Herberstein of Macquarie University.

“Then it keeps on twirling away from the ant while the ant is being captured. At that stage [the prey’s] fate is sealed.”

I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Yep. That’s Drunken Spider style.

I’ll have to show the video to my spider colony. They have a rather sedate and unspectacular style of just charging forward and stabbing their prey with a venomous fang, no flash or style.

Good god, when will this end?

The front page of the Washington Post:

The front page of the New York Times:

I don’t care any more. Shove the old dead parasite into her vault and move on, OK? I understand the slow procession of a corpse across a country might be the only news of importance in the world, but I have a suspicion that other things might also be happening, and it might be appropriate to balance a relatively mundane event with some matters of real import.

Oh, look! There was also a football game or two this week, and what? Biden declares the pandemic is over? Sorry, we’re out of time, need to talk about the queues of Brits lined up to watch a hearse drive by.

Is this really where the discourse is at now?

Fresh off his demented obsession with women, and trans women, and what is a woman, and making a whole dumb-ass movie in which he demands that he be provided with a neat, pat definition of a woman (and getting upset because no one could give him an adequate one, which ought to have told him that his tidy binary premise was false), Matt Walsh has found a new cause célèbre. He’s unhappy with a Disney remake of the Little Mermaid because…

You know what else is unscientific? Mermaids. Period.

At the same time, he tries to argue that the appearance of mythical creatures like mermaids is a reflection of the culture, not necessarily a scientifically valid truth. Maybe mermaids are just a cultural artifact, like centaurs or trolls or gods, Mr Walsh. Get over yourself. You’re just reaching for justifications to excuse your bigotry.

It would be reassuring if I could just dismiss Matt Walsh as a deeply stupid person, but I’m afraid the evidence so far is that he is definitely a hateful bigot.

He’s also a useful example to illustrate how reason and science can be twisted into bogus rationalizations for unreasonable and unscientific and even wicked conclusions.

Right on schedule, now Walsh is claiming it was all a “joke”.

Was I supposed to laugh?

Satan is a natural offensive line coach

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court made another of their stupid decisions, in this taking a first step in gutting the principle of separation of church and state by decreeing that a public high school football coach could hold prayer rallies on the field. It was just a “quiet prayer” and a “brief thanks”, don’t you know.

The court ordered the school to reinstate him. Curiously, they can’t.

It’s an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to “reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,” according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about “the prayer that got me fired” — even though Bremerton never actually fired him.

In 2015, he was put on paid leave near the end of the season after holding a series of prayer sessions on the field with students and state legislators. He still got paid for his full assistant coach contract, about $5,000. High school assistants often work on yearly deals, and Kennedy, at odds with the head coach and aggrieved by what had happened, never reapplied to work the 2016 season.

“He was not terminated,” Bevers said. The head coach at the time had moved on, as did most of the coaching staff.

The coach claimed to be eager to return.

“As soon as the school district says Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight, he said.

Only he’s not. He’s got a busy schedule of bragging to right-wingers about his non-existent martyrdom. He doesn’t have time to help high school football players to find Jesus. They’re on their own. I guess he didn’t really believe the team needed to begin every game with a public prayer, he was really all about being personally praised for his obnoxious piety.

The team has won their first couple of games without him, too. I guess he really wasn’t that essential as a coach.

Or maybe Satan is helping the team out, now that they’ve lost the Jesus-addled leader of their spiritual flock. I would think Satan would be a much more effective war-leader than that wimpy Jesus guy, anyway. That’s the lesson we should take from Coach Kennedy’s example.

Kent & Matt got nothin’

Kent Hovind recycled a video titled Aronra, Professor Dave, & PZ Meyers get OWNED by Kent Hovind’s Assistant, originally posted by Matt Powell as AronRa & his minions vs. Matt Powell (no link, sorry, they’ve received enough attention). It’s the same damn argument he’s been making for months: They said we didn’t come from rocks, but I found an article I don’t understand that says we did come from rocks. Sorry, guy, no phylogeny includes “rocks” in the tree of life. There is no line of descent from “rocks”. We’re all made of carbon, that does not imply that in the distant past there was a Mama Anthracite that spawned a little family of coal lumps that then led to us. I’ve pointed this out to him before, and he paid as much attention to that as he did to the spelling of my name.

What’s depressing about that is how intellectually bankrupt these guys are. Powell has three arguments he makes over and over again, that he thinks are clever: scientists think we evolved from rocks, scientists think squid came from comets, scientists think dinosaurs farted themselves to death. All wrong. I guess that’s better than Hovind, who has one: incredulously stating that you think you’re related to a mosquito. At least Hovind’s assertion is factually correct.