Gladiatorial games, now open to the public

I’ve got a research student, Ade Atolani, and we’ve been in the lab recently, learning the basics…which mainly involves learning how to configure and aim a camera at a spider, throwing in a few flies, and talking about what’s going on during the bloodthirsty gladiatorial games. Then we do a few things to figure out how to transfer files and upload them to YouTube. Here are a couple of examples, nothing too exciting, but just the ordinary routine of getting a student comfortable with observing spider behavior.

This one is an adult:

This is a month-old juvenile:

Maybe we should start selling tickets to the spectacle? We can’t do betting, though, because the spider always wins.

Shilling for Big Vitamin!

Hey! Attention, consumers! I need to give you Important Informations!

I used to be like you, tired, worn out, full of aches and pains. It used to be a regular feature of my life that one joint or the other would flare up and start misbehaving. I’d injure myself rolling over in bed. I’d plan my summers around my annual knee eruption, which I could do nothing about but suffer. I’d think, well, this is just life, this is what getting old feels like, it’s just going to get worse and worse until one day I shatter my spine by breathing, and then it’ll be over.

Last spring, though, I had a routine check up with my doctor, and he mentioned casually that, you know, a lot of Minnesotans, we of the Northern climes, have vitamin D deficiencies — the vitamin you can synthesize with sunlight — because while we do have plenty of sunshine, we tend to huddle indoors all winter long to avoid freezing to death, and some of us have jobs that are performed under fluorescent lights even in the summer. I think he may have noticed my pasty-pale complexion and had reason to suspect I was one of those subterranean creatures who shun the light and live like mushrooms.

So I’ve been taking vitamin D supplements every day, and I just want to say…I think it worked. This has been my most pain-free summer in years, and I haven’t had a single knee or ankle or other random joint explode on me even once! It’s a miracle!

Anyway, just drop my name or use promo code…oh, wait, I don’t have a promotional deal with Big Vitamin, so never mind. These things are fairly cheap and seem to have made a big difference for me*.

It’s also given me exuberant hair growth and a minor derangement of some sort, but that’s a small price to pay.

*Possible confounding variable: I did a lot of summer research outdoors, so a fair bit of walking and far more sun than usual. That might have helped.

OK, also, major dietary change. My wife and I have thoroughly embraced the Mediterranean diet, so a bit of keto (but not over the top), lots of fish and olive oil and green vegetables and eggs. Possible slight contribution there.

Yeah, and I’ve lost 25 pounds or so since March. No way that could have done anything, right?

Oh, and I’ve been avoiding filthy, disease-ridden humans for half a year. Nah, that couldn’t possibly have any health effects.

It’s the little bottle of vitamins, yeah, that’s the ticket! But seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d been running a vitamin D deficiency for several years, so it’s probably a good idea to have corrected that.

First lab a success!

Hey, I survived my first lab of the year! It’s a bit strange to me that it’s taken until early October to get around to having an in-person lab, but it’s what we had to do, and I would have started two weeks ago if I hadn’t been quarantined. But we did it! It worked!

The students filed in quietly (eerily quietly) and impressed me by doing their work professionally and efficiently. Did I mention that they were quiet? That’s one thing I missed today — usually there’s a lot more back-and-forth and conversation, but we’re not doing group work this year and everyone is wearing masks and staying two meters away from each other, which does seem to squelch the typical lively interactivity. We can keep going, at least.

At least until we all catch COVID-19 and die! No, that won’t happen. It’s just my ongoing existential dread speaking.

Ugh. Lab.

I have to go in to prep a student lab 2 hours before it starts, which means my day starts at 7am today. Gotta get the yeast started, which means at least I’ve got something in common with a baker.

I’ve also got to don my armor, lab coat, goggles, face shield, and mask. Having to wear PPE is the insult added to the injury of an early start.

Am I terrible for thinking…

…every one of the people in this charming video from 124 years ago is now dead? Even their children are dead?

Yes, I must be feeling morbid. But I also want to know what happened in the rest of their lives.

Bloody-minded stupid people bother me

I thought I was pissed off when Trump took a joyride after being hospitalized with COVID-19. That was disgracefully irresponsible and exposed who knows how many people to his disease — at least his driver, that’s for sure — to accomplish nothing, other than to advertise his insensitivity. I mean, I had a few symptoms two weeks ago, and went in for a coronavirus test that turned out to be negative, and I was still told to quarantine myself for 10 days in case it was a false negative, and I did. That was ten days in which I didn’t even leave my house, and my spiders were hungry and I was desperate for escape, and I was scrupulous in following the recommendations of my doctor.

Trump was diagnosed with a positive case, the disease is spreading rapidly through the White House staff, and he decided to do a ridiculous publicity stunt? Fuck him, and all his little sycophants.

But my annoyance is nothing compared to this woman’s.

I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine. My family has been spared so far, but I fear every day that the slapdash stupid way we implement basic hygiene procedures is going to catch up to me and mine personally, and I’ll probably snap and turn into the avenging angel who wanders through the local grocery store punching every ignorant asshole who wears a mask below their nose in the face.

Hey, Americans — do you even realize how idiotic you look when you wear a mask below your nose, or worse, below your chin?

Does it even cross their little, selfish minds that their irresponsibility might cause suffering?

Old drama, and TERFs revisiting

I seem to have recently stirred up the TERFs, who have been making the usual TERFy accusations, including this one.

Apparently, the only reason I support trans rights is that if I don’t, the all-powerful Trans Lobby will rise up and cancel me and cast me into the outer darkness for all eternity. There are just a few little problems with that imaginary scenario. For one, my accuser says she was one of my “gaggle of blog subscribers”, and I wasn’t so protective of her views at all, since I drove her away.

She canceled me! Oh, nooooo! Appeasing my readers is all I live for, as everyone knows.

Her complaints caught the eye of the one of our “best bloggers” to whom I gave “the witch treatment”. Ophelia Benson had a few things to say about that.

He didn’t defend me. He refrained from joining the other bloggers in trashing me, for a time, but he sure as hell didn’t defend me. He privately begged me to stay, while doing nothing to defend me in public.

Then, in the end, he broke down and did a post saying I needed to “own” my mistakes.

Also, I wasn’t dismissed. I left. That “her dismissal” is a lie. He may have forgotten by now, but the fact is I left.

I will most definitely accept that final correction: before Ophelia could be dismissed, she stomped off in a huff, in the same way that Richard Carrier was not kicked out, but eagerly left the network before we could investigate the accusations against him. They both knew the inevitable conclusion would disclose that he was a harasser, and she was a TERF, and neither are acceptable around these here parts.

But I disagree with the claim that I didn’t defend her, or that it wasn’t public. How else did it happen that I antagonized so many good people in the lead-up to her departure? I struggled with that. She was one of our best bloggers, writing frequently and well, and I was in total denial that such a good progressive feminist could also be hateful towards trans people — I defended her, but did not defend her repulsive views, and kept hoping that reason would bring her around. It did not. She turned out to be far more rigid in her beliefs than I expected, and thus her departure was just a matter of time, and a question of whether she’d leave willingly or we’d kick her out.

Finally, though, it seems to be an article of faith among internet TERFs that I’m held hostage by immense numbers of trans people who give me clicks, and that is the only reason I argue for trans rights. That’s nonsense. If I wanted blog hits, it would be far more profitable to cater to the mobs of cis bigots, who far outnumber the tiny minority of trans individuals. The reason I support trans people is more nefarious than that: I’m a biologist, steeped in the dogmas of biology, which state that sex determination and expression are far more complicated than most people can imagine, and that there are more possible outcomes of the process than just two, and that humans are much more socially and functionally diverse than can be encompassed in a mere two categories, as if we were primitive ants with two castes. I held those views since long before I became aware that TERFs actually exist and think that they understand biology.

That’s particularly galling. All weekend long I was getting indignant messages from TERFs telling me that I don’t understand biology and that real biologists agree that sex is a discrete binary. It’s a bit like being harassed by flat-earthers trying to tell me that a globe violates all the principles of physics, or by creationists confident that more and more True Biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution every day. These are claims that are contradicted by reality and by the experts in the fields, yet they persist in their delusion, and no amount of arguing will convince them otherwise.

I should know that by now, but I have my own delusions.

I voted last week, and I already regret it

Collin Peterson does not belong in the Democratic party.

I made a mistake in my ballot, and I can’t correct it. I mailed it in last week. I voted Democratic party across the board, and I came to Collin Peterson’s name (our conservative DFL representative, who is anti-choice and anti-conservation), and I hesitated — I generally don’t vote at all for that guy because he’s a regressive dinosaur. But then I thought, maybe this one time, because we have to crush the Republican party. And then I thought of all the laughable attack ads the Republicans made against him, painting him as hippy-dippy liberal who votes with Nancy Pelosi 4 out of 5 times, and … I moved my pen and blacked out the spot next to his name. I felt bad about it. But I felt worse about his Republican challenger.

Then I read this account of an encounter with Collin Peterson.

“Do you have any comment as to why you defended Ilhan Omar?” an employee with the National Republican Congressional Committee asked Peterson on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“I don’t defend her. She doesn’t belong in our party,” the 16-term lawmaker responded.

When asked to clarify himself, a COVID-19-masked Peterson repeated, “She doesn’t belong in our party,” as he walked away.

I will have Collin Peterson know that an archaic toad who panders to the right-wing jerks that populate rural Minnesota and has spent his entire long career walking the line to avoid offending conservatives doesn’t belong in my Democratic party, while a Muslim woman who promotes progressive ideas and aligns herself with forward-thinking colleagues does. I won’t ever make the mistake of voting for him again. I feel like I voted for a Republican last week, and it leaves me feeling tainted.

I possess a little spirit of vengeance

Donald Trump has been admitted to Walter Reed hospital “as a precaution”. More likely, the big ol’ bullying coward has been taken by a fear of death — he’s suddenly realizing that the Secret Service cannot protect him, nor can Mitch McConnell, and that he could become one of the statistics that he treats with so little regard.

Awww, poor little preznit. Cheer up! Here is a happy song for him.

Personally, I’m torn, because my humanist values tell me every life is valuable and we should do all we can to alleviate human suffering and even a creature as contemptible as Trump should have a right to basic human dignity…but at the same time, I want him to suffer long and terribly, I want him intubated, I want him to emerge from his ordeal a month from now drained and broken and weeping and helpless to discover that he’d lost the election by a landslide and that his creditors have snatched away all his assets and that the law is serving him a stack of subpoenas and that he has lost everything his greedy, amoral heart thinks is precious. I want him to discover that his trusted inner circle of friends have all been laid low by his own stupid, unconscionable policies. I want karma. I want retributive justice. I want what Damon Young wants.

Normally, I detest those stupid, lazy political cartoons that emerge after the death of a well-known figure, showing them arriving in an afterlife, but I’d make an exception for one that showed a screaming, feculent corpse of an orange man rocketing downwards, jet-propelled by a column of fire shooting out of his ass, with a splashdown in a flaming pit of feces. No pearly gates for that guy. Get to work on that, cartoonists. Just in case.

I feel bad for feeling this way, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I have to acknowledge my feelings.