How awkward

I got into the doctor’s office today. I was hoping for strep throat (what a thing to hope for!), and they ruled that out fast. Out came the inevitable COVID-19 test, and I got the stick up the nose and my olfactory lobe scrambled, and that’s being sent off for testing, which will take a few days.

Then, surprise surprise, the doctor informs me that while my test results are pending, I’m quarantined! And I’m supposed to teach a lab tomorrow! Frantic backtracking and trying to figure out alternatives ensues.

I really, really wanted this to be strep. I could clear that up pretty quickly.

I guess I can’t trust entomologists anymore

One of the winners of the 2020 IgNobels was this study of attitudes in entomology.

Richard Vetter won an Ig Nobel for his paper looking at why people who spend their lives studying insects are creeped out by spiders.

His paper, “Arachnophobic Entomologists: Why Two Legs Make all the Difference,” appeared in the the journal American Entomologist in 2013.

Vetter, a retired research associate and spider specialist who worked in the entomology department at the University of California Riverside for 32 years, found during the course of his work that many insect lovers hate spiders.

“It always struck me as funny that when I talked to entomologists about spiders, they would say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, I hate spiders!’” he said in a telephone interview.

He found that many bug lovers had had a negative experience with a spider, including bites and nightmares. The fact that spiders are often hairy, fast, silent and have all those creepy eyes freaks out entomologists, he said.

Except…the entomologists I know are appreciative of spiders. Unless they’ve been lying to me, I don’t know that this is really a problem.

Besides, once you get to know spiders, everyone loves them.

Getting worse!

This throat thing I’ve got made for an unpleasant weekend, and this morning I woke up with a mild headache and fatigue on top of a grisly meat tube that is oozing slime and sending rude signals to my brain. It better have cleared up by this weekend, and I’ve got enough of a challenge in having to give a one hour lecture this afternoon with a voice that wobbles in and out of the void.

I’m hoping to go in and get tested for the ‘rona this morning, just to get that possibility out of my mind. Also, Mary wants me to do a salt water gargle. This does not sound fun.

Grifters gotta grift

That Catholic reactionary, Michael O’Fallon, is running another “Sovereign Nations” conference. It’s very important you know.

The funny thing is that their #2 speaker, after O’Fallon himself, is James Lindsay, the regressive atheist buddy of Boghossian, who is so desperate for attention that he sells himself off to endorse a religious organization with religious goals.

Double irony: if you look at that twitter thread, it’s got angry Christians complaining that the conference includes a liberal atheist, with O’Fallon insisting that no, it’s entirely secular, when all the other speakers are Christian ministers, and the blurb describing the con is this:

The Christian Church finds itself societally in interesting times; times of rapid change, uncertainty, and division, where all that was our sure objective standards seem to be melting into air.

Also indicative is that there are no women speakers, although there are an awful lot of truly secular events that also forget the womz.

Another entry in the Carnival of Curiosity: Dr Myers’ Menagerie of Itty-Bitty Monsters

Next Sunday, our Carnival continues with a tour of the imaging side of my lab. I’ll just aim a camera at my microscopes and cameras and talk about how I put together a macrophotography and microscopy lab on a budget, and maybe put a few critters on the screen.

I might also remind you that this is a fundraiser, and you can optionally leave a tip at

Take a look at our fundraiser next Saturday

I finally got the schedule for our Carnival of Curiosity fundraiser completed. Well, for all the Saturday events anyway (I’ll work on the Sunday events tomorrow). So now you know what you’re going to do a week from today! You’re going to be trapped at home, as usual, and you’ll be glued to a computer screen, doomscrolling through Facebook…no, wait, not that. We’ll have something better for you. We have events scheduled all day long! Look at the schedule! It really is all day Saturday! Instead you’ll be enlightened and entertained by the various freethoughtbloggers, and be intermittently inspired to click a link and send us money!

Remember, this is a fundraiser.

Of course, it’s also a voluntary fundraiser. You don’t have to donate a penny if you don’t have one.

Anyway, the new stuff I added this morning for our Saturday schedule:

  • At 3pm PT-6pm ET, 11pm BST, William Brinkman will do a reading from his novel, The Rift.
  • At 6pm PT-9pm ET, 2 am BST, a selection of bloggers will participate in The Quiz, where their knowledge and wit will be tested. The winner will be crowned King/Queen of Freethoughtblogs! Very exciting.
  • At 8pm PT-11pm PT, 4am BST, we will have a Sophisticated Literature Reading, dramatic renditions of some stuff people wrote down. There is a reason it is scheduled for a relatively late hour.

See? You’ll almost be happy to be quarantined/on lockdown/bored to tears, because you’ll have us to turn to. And us to donate some of your shrinking funds to, if you can.

P.S. You managed to donate over a thousand dollars to us in the last week, which we appreciate very much, and which will significantly help reduce our legal debt. Thank you!

Confirming that the Nazis have taken over

You should have already figured that out, but Trump had another rally in Minnesota yesterday and hammered the point home.

People are not racehorses that have been bred for a single defining suite of traits, and he wouldn’t understand the genetics if we had. That’s just a racist klaxon he’s sounding to call all the white nationalists to his yard.

He must go.