If you’re just sitting around, digesting rubbery muffins like I am, may I recommend the Namib Desert cam? Right now there’s a herd of oryx hanging around the waterhole.
My wife has us on this Zoe nutrition test, as I mentioned yesterday. Today we’re on a tightly constrained dietary test: we have a supply of muffins we have to eat on a fixed schedule, with intermittent fasting, while the glucose meter installed in my flesh records my responses, and then later today I have to do a blood test. Funzies!
I had to eat three of these within 15 minutes.
They have the texture and taste of foam rubber. It’s not a flavor I associate with Christmas — maybe I should have sprinkled them with nutmeg and cinnamon? Nah, that would violate the experimental protocol.
Now I’m instructed to fast for four hours, and then I get more muffins!
I hate this. Where’s my lefse and krumkake?
Even lutefisk would be better than this!
What a nicely decorated Christmas tree!
As a final touch, it really needs a dessicated corpse dressed in a red suit somewhere beneath the tree.
Since I’m not celebrating anything, and am lacking in family obligations, and don’t have to cook dinner, I was at a loss for things to do…so I got my genetics syllabus done, put together a quiz, reviewed the material for the first lab, and prepped my first lecture. I am such a good boy! It’s going to be especially galling now when Santa leaves me nothing at all this year.
This is a bizarre (but very short) video talking about a letter written by Eric Hovind, about his father, Kent Hovind. It’s a bit inside baseball — Kent Hovind divorced his wife, Jo Hovind, the woman who got dragged into prison as a consequence of her participation in his scam to defraud the government of taxes. He then married a woman named Mary Tocco, who later left him because she suspected he was up to no good again. Hovind told everyone that his divorce and remarriage was fully endorsed by his family and all the good Christians he knew, but apparently not. This letter lists all the people who told him this was a bad idea.
Kent Hovind lied, no surprises there.
The video was posted by his current “wife”, Cindi Lincoln (he seems not to have divorced Tocco before the wedding), who is also the woman he was convicted of abusing, and at this point I am overwhelmed by the soap opera and give up. Lincoln tries to explain.
Eric’s email lists 17 professional counselors, attorneys, Board Members, family members and friends who advised Kent NOT to marry Mary, but Kent refuses to heed. Kent also lied to the public about “everyone telling him to marry Mary, and that only 1 or 2 people told him not to.”
Just like with me, Kent and I had several friends, DAL leaders, family, legal, and counselors give advise for Kent to pay me what he signed for, and to put his wife over Steve, and to NOT torment me with Steve, Ernie, and Brady’s abuse. Kent refused to heed their advise.
Here’s a PSA: don’t ever get romantically involved with Kent Hovind. He’s a psychopath, and it will always end badly.
Matt Powell, I hope you’ve got everything in writing.
I hope you’re all a lot less depressed than I am. This is not a good time of year for me, but maybe you’re still doing fine. Good! Celebrate!
Here’s my Christmas misery.
My father died quietly, in his sleep, on Christmas 28 years ago. You’d think it would stop hurting after 28 years, and no, it doesn’t, and it’s what I think of when I hear the word “Christmas”.
That is not to say that there aren’t good associations, too — I had many years with kids getting deliriously happy at Christmas. Unfortunately, we’re not going to see any of them this year. We’ll all hunkering down in our houses and refusing to see anyone, or to have parties, or to even go outside. The family aspect, the best part of the season, is gone.
Then, I got my Christmas present from my wife. Christmas presents are good, right? Nope, not this one. She signed me up for this thing called Zoe Personal Nutrition, which is all about microbiome analysis and monitoring the effects of your diet on your physiology. The science is appealing. I like contributing to a scientific project as a subject. The reality is a little less thrilling.
Yesterday, I stabbed myself with this continuous glucose monitor that I’ll be wearing for two weeks. That’s not so bad.
Christmas Eve is poop sampling day. I got some gloves and a disposable sheet to spread across the toilet and a scoop and a sealable test tube and a mailer. Oh boy.
Tomorrow I get to stick myself to take blood samples, and all I get to eat is some special muffins for breakfast and lunch. That’s my Christmas feast: prepackaged frozen muffins.
After that, I’ll be scanning and weighing every single thing I eat for the next six months, and Mary is going to be monitoring my diet closely. Doesn’t that sound fun? I tried to tell her she could have saved a lot of money and labor if we just got a pizza for Christmas dinner, but apparently I don’t eat pizzas anymore.
The end result, though, will be Science, I guess. A research team will know all about my microbiome composition, and how my body responds to various factors in my diet, and they’ll tell me all about it, and get a publication or two out of it. I have no idea what I’ll do with the information — giving me a catalog of what species reside in my colon is about as useful as telling me that I’m a Pisces.
Oh, well. Christmas sucks anyway. I’ll probably spend the day hanging out in the lab alone with my spiders.
I hope these fuckers have a miserable, broken-hearted Christmas, and an empty grieving life forevermore.
The cops are rotten, corrupt, and murderous.
Los Angeles police have fatally shot a 14-year-old girl who was in the dressing room of a clothing store when officers fired at an assault suspect and a bullet went through the wall, hitting the girl, authorities have said.
Officers also fatally shot the suspect on Thursday morning at a Burlington store in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando valley, police said.
Witnesses told KCBS-TV that a man began acting erratically, threatening to throw items from the upper floor, and attacked a woman with a bicycle lock shortly before noon as the store was crowded with holiday shoppers.
Since when is opening fire a reasonable response to a guy with a bike lock? So here’s a man going nuts in a crowded store, and the chickenshit police decide that the best way to handle it is a volley of gunfire, killing two people.
Here’s a Christmas short story for you: “Police found her dead in a changing room with her mother.” Jesus christ. 14. Christmas shopping with her mom. Blown away by a cop doing what, apparently, we expect cops to do.
There will be no reform of the police because we can’t have happy endings anymore.
Damn. I can’t even think of that mom without tears starting to well up.
I’m feeling heroic. For the first time in months, I walked all the way to my lab and back (a distance of less than 100 meters) on my own two feet. The secret was to wear a pair of oversized, felt-lined boots that did not tickle my Achilles tendon at all, although they made a clumsy gallumphing thumping racket as I shambled across the street. I think I just need to do this every day for a while to get back in shape for the 100 meter slog when classes commence again on 18 January. And then the cross-country hiking when field season starts again, maybe in May.
I had to go to the lab to feed my children, who are all doing quite well, and quite voraciously. I posted a photo of one of the husky young males on Patreon, but for the arachnophobic among you, you shall have to settle for a twig in the snow. It is quite a nice twig, sort of seasonally festive and all that, but sadly lacking spiders. I thought about sneaking in a subtle little Dictynid nestled in the needles, but even they are getting scarce here in Icebox World.
Regular readers of this blog don’t need to be told who Rhawn Joseph is, but for the rest of you, he’s the panspermist who gazes at photos from NASA and ESA of the surface of Mars and Venus, and then claims to have identified mushrooms. And spiders. And human skulls. He’s just a barrel of laughs.
He’s also been dabbling in the law. He tried to sue NASA, and more recently, he sued Springer Nature for refusing to publish one of his pareidolia papers, and for daring to retract another when people alerted the publisher about what a flaming ball of garbage it was. He’s litigious, but either too cheap or too weird to get a legitimate lawyer to help him out, so he’s filing these things pro se, which makes them particularly amusing. Here’s a succinct summary from a judge:
Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D., proceeding pro se, is a scientist who claims he found evidence of possible extraterrestrial life on Venus and Mars. To expound his ideas here on Earth, Dr. Joseph wrote two articles—one about life on Venus, the other about life on Mars—and submitted them for publication in an academic journal called Astrophysics and Space Science (“ApSS”). ApSS published the article about Venus, and the piece received some traction in the scientific community. But before publishing the article on Martian life, ApSS told Dr. Joseph that it needed to vet his findings a bit more. Dr. Joseph did not like the sound of that. So he withdrew his submission of the Mars article and demanded that ApSS remove the Venus article from its website. Rather than remove the Venus article, and after conducting additional peer review, ApSS told Dr. Joseph that it would retract the article.
The judge also made a few other comments.
The Complaint is at times difficult to follow. It is littered with speculation, confusing ramblings, conclusory legal assertions, and personal attacks against Defendants. See, e.g., Compl. ¶ 12 (“The Defendants are lying, confabulating, engaging in fraud and falsifying their references[.]”), ¶ 20 (claiming that “major scientific discoveries must pass through three stages: 1) Ridicule, 2) Violent opposition, 3) Acceptance as obvious and self-evident” and that Dr. Joseph’s work regarding life on Venus and Marks “is now at stage 2 (violent opposition)”); ¶ 23 (calling the two individual Defendants “mediocrities”); ¶ 30 (“Defendants libeled and slandered Plaintiff in April of 2020.”). Because Dr. Joseph is proceeding pro se, the Court endeavored to distill the facts from the Complaint as best it could and construe them in the light most favorable to him.
Yeah, that’s the shouty deranged Rhawn Joseph I know all right.
The best part: Rhawn Joseph was suing Springer Nature for…
FIFTY BILLION ($50,000,000,000) DOLLARS!!!
I’m pretty sure I know where I fit in the scale of spider people, where are you?
