Built on trillions of refutations of their mythology

I’ve noted this before, that Ken Ham’s Ark Park is built on a deep, rich bed of Ordovician fossils. Every time a creationist asks where all the fossils we’re supposed to have are, just tell them to use a shovel and rock hammer around the Answers in Genesis cult compound and you’ll find billions and billions of brachiopods and nautiloids and various shelly marine creatures right there.

Dr Joel Duff makes the same point — the fake Ark is built on an immense marine graveyard that is hundreds of millions of years old, yet the creationists mostly ignore it. I wonder why?

I know what I’m doing today

Busy, busy, busy. The hatching yesterday means that I’m going to spend the morning sorting spiders, on top of the regularly scheduled feeding day. I’ve got a bunch of adults who need crickets, a lot of baby Parasteatoda who need fruit flies, a few score Latrodectus I set aside in new vials yesterday who are going to get their first meal, and another score or two to be extracted this morning, and it’s time to start a new batch of Drosophila. I’m sort of dreading the possibility that another egg sac could start oozing spiderlings any day now.

There’s a limit to how many of these spiders I can maintain. I hate to say it, but I may end up throwing a lot of cute, adorable, lively little baby spiders into fixative for later microscopic examination. Unless you want some? I’m heading off to St Louis this weekend for Skepticon, and I could bring along some Latrodectus mactans spiderlings if anyone wants to give them a good home.

Speaking of Skepticon, I’m kind of on the schedule. I’m doing a workshop on Friday — but it’s not about spiders or evolution, directly. I’m going to present some exercises I’m using in a writing course I’ll be teaching this fall. If you want to learn about writing creative non-fiction (and maybe, if you really want getting your own baby black widow), that’s the place to be.

So schön…

I finally got away this afternoon to check on the spiders in the lab, and behold…one of the black widow egg sacs has popped!

Close-up of a Latrodectus mactans spiderling:

At this age, they aren’t noticeably black, more of a reddish orange.

I was struggling to isolate the babies. What made it hard is that a) half of them looked up and saw freedom and rushed to disperse into the general environment of the science building, and b) the other half saw danger in that guy with the paintbrush trying to scoop them up and dived down into mama’s dense tangle of silk. I compromised and spent an hour plucking ballooning spiders out of the air, and left the rest where they were hiding. I’ll be back tomorrow to see if I can catch ’em all — black widow silk is tough and hard to break through.

Also, funny thing — when I left last week, I had 5 egg sacs, then when I got back, one had hatched, but I still had 5 egg sacs. I may have stumbled unto an algorithm for infinite spiders.

Laughter humanizes

It looks like one line of attack the Republicans will be taking is to disparage her laughter. This is a collection of clips compiled by the Daily Mail, so you know it’s a stupid complaint.

What’s wrong with that? It’s a hearty, energetic laugh, and I like that she can find something to laugh at nowadays.

Who is turned off by that perfectly normal laugh?

Now I’m wondering…what does Donald Trump’s laugh sound like? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.

Nosedive right into the sewer

We should have expected this. Donald Trump’s good buddy, Sebastian Gorka, responds to the news that Biden has resigned and will almost certainly be replaced by Kamala Harris:

Gorka joined Mark Dolan on GB News to discuss how Harris would stack up against Donald Trump in a race for the White House.

This disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin colour… he said before being interrupted by GB News host Mark Dolan.

She’s a DEI hire, she’s a woman, she’s colored, so therefore she’s gotta be good, and at least her brain doesn’t literally freeze in mid-sentence.

We can’t expect that most right-wingers will be that blatant. Another pundit, Chloe Dobbs, on GB News tried to rephrase the hate to be a little more palatable.

Political commentator Chloe Dobbs said she sympathised with Gorka’s view, but felt he worded it too strongly.

I wouldn’t have used exactly the same words, but he does have a point, she said.

Being a woman of colour in this world definitely gives you a leg up. She is very unpopular and she is often accused of using word soup, no one understands what she stands for, she is a very weak candidate.

How do you get to that position when you’re that unpopular? I think the colour of your skin and the fact you’re a woman plays some part.

She wouldn’t use the same words, she says, before saying exactly the same thing.

The reality is that she is an accomplished politician, and that Harris is as popular as Biden, even slightly more so, and she hasn’t even begun a prominent campaign for the office. I’m far more comfortable putting her into the oval office than I was for Joe Biden.

The Magical Misery Tour is over

I’m back home again. It was not a happy trip, but I did learn a few things.

  • Viewings are horrible, but my family insists on having them. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been dragged off to unpleasant funerals where the corpse of a loved one is put on display, and they never look like they did when they were alive, so what’s the point? The mortuary did the best they could, but my mother looked like a melting wax mannequin with a spray tan, heavily made up in a way she would never have done in life.
  • Being executor of the estate is a lot of work, even when my mother had done all the work of creating a legal will. I still have to bring in hired help to sell off the house, and there’s a stack of papers documenting savings and investments I have to shuffle through. I’m going to have to travel to Seattle again a little later this fall, after the lawyer has sorted through his responsibilities, to do things like close out old bank accounts and move money around.
  • At least her heirs seem to be obliging, so far. It helps that it was a small estate, so no one is squabbling over her fortune. There is a little money, though, and I just wish she’d spent it all on herself.
  • The memorial service was nice, at least. We just gathered old friends and family together and told stories. For instance, I learned that she was always quiet and soft-spoken in school, but one time she and a friend decided to go wild and get high…by buying cokes and adding aspirin. It didn’t work. But I think that’s as crazy as Mom got.
  • Anyone want to buy a nice little 4-bedroom, 2-bath house on the road to Lake Tapps in Auburn?

Another reason to dislike JD Vance

A terrifying visage

He’s a naive eugenicist. This review of Hillbilly Elegy (both book & film) notes that he blames all the problems in his family history on “bad genes”, and entirely ignores the issues of mental health and poverty.

The ways in which each version of “Hillbilly Elegy” avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.

But James Watson himself told me that he’s Scots-Irish, and that that is the best ethnic background to have!

Well, I guess if Vance has a “lurking” “ethnic component,” that ought to disqualify him for the position of vice president.