Brian Lauer of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association debated Mark Reid on the topic of creation vs. evolution and Reid slapped him down hard. I came on for a second round and tore up Lauer’s arguments further. Now there’s blood in the water: Mark Reid is coming back to mutilate the corpse yet further on Wednesday evening.
This should be fun. I’ll be watching and making comments in the chat. Join in! Maybe Lauer will show up to defend himself, adding to the hilarity.
Yesterday, I was looking forward to visiting a local airshow. I made it. I was disappointed.
It was not the fault of the airshow organizers, or the collection of planes they had on view. The problems were entirely due to the godawful weather we’ve had lately.
I left home at about 7:30, under dark gloomy skies, driving rain, and non-stop thunderbolts arcing across the sky, a most inauspicious morning, but it’s been like that sporadically for a couple of weeks. We get these horrendous storms that last for a few hours, and then they burn off and we get clear skies, so that’s what I anticipated. The drive was stormy, but the roads were empty, I saw only one other car the entire hour and a half I was on the road. That wasn’t a problem.
Once I got to the airport, though, I discovered that the whole show was delayed for two hours, which made sense. Visibility was only about a mile, the rain was pounding down hard, I wouldn’t want to fly in that weather, and as a spectator I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. So I turned around and went back to Granite Falls to nurse a coffee for a while.
When I went back, I encountered a new problem: no parking. There was a large empty field that was supposed to be used as a parking lot for the event, but this is what it looked like:
It was swamp with ambitions, trying to become a lake. This fit with what I’d heard on the drive — I was getting constant warnings of flash flood conditions, and saw rivers running over their banks, and fields that were underwater. So no convenient parking.
The organizers improvised. What they had us do is drive out on these gravel access roads and park on the edge…which meant that all the visitors were strung out in a long line from the airport to distant points. I did that. I had to park a mile and a half from the airshow and walk in.
I’ve mentioned that this was my summer of knee problems. I did not invest enough in my energy budget for a hike, nor was I prepared for the maintenance and repair costs of keeping shank’s mare running smoothly for a long walk. I did it anyway. I was stupid. The result: another blown out knee, and I’m going to be paying for this exercise for the next few weeks. Fortunately, when it was time to leave, they had local police and neighbors volunteering to drive golf carts up and down that road — I got delivered directly to my car, which was good, because otherwise I might have been a crying cripple laid up in a drainage ditch.
Finally, I’m at the airfield, there’s a selection of planes all lined up, getting fueled. The first set are about 8 Navy fighters/bombers/torpedo planes (ooh, look at that lovely Corsair), and they’re getting ready to taxi out to the runway. I was up close — I was standing right under the wingtip of a Helldiver as it was firing up it’s engine. It was loud, it reeked of fuel vapors, I could feel the vibrations in my bones. It was the highlight of the day for me.
Unfortunately, what followed was not so exciting. Three planes taxied out to the end of the runway, a Dauntless, an Avenger, and a Helldiver, and prepared to take off, when Minnesota weather struck again. One of them got stuck in the mud. It was a major anti-climax, because instead of planes, we then spent an hour watching forklifts hauling stacks of plywood to try and give them a firm surface to be dragged onto.
It was OK! I wandered around the hangars instead, where they had iconic aircraft on display.
They did eventually get some planes aloft, but at that point my knee was whimpering, and I decided the best thing to do was go home and stop making it work.
Despite the weather-related glitches, this was a good airshow. I’m going to come back next year when the fields have all dried out, there’s convenient parking, and runways that haven’t turned to glue. I did come away with an appreciation of the struggles the ground crews had to have gone through to keep planes and runways operational. My father-in-law was a bad ass Marine sniper in the Pacific theater, while my grandfather spent the war driving bulldozers and building runways on remote islands — much respect to both of them.
PS. One thing I was concerned about was that this was a celebration of military technology, and I was afraid I’d get there and be surrounded by a sea of red MAGA hats. I was not. I didn’t see a single red hat the whole time. I did see a lot of old veterans, though — maybe a celebration of a triumph over fascism scared away the Nazi wanna-bes from showing up.
I’m going to be passing through Clontarf today, and I’ve long wondered about that strikingly Irish name in a region settled by Scandinavian and German settlers. There has to be a story behind that, and I found out what it was. The Catholic Church had shipped over a lot of Irish people to live in Minnesota, creating what were called the Connemaras (after the region in Ireland they came from), surprising them by settling them in new small towns in the western prairies. The experiment did not work.
The history of this community can be traced to the arrival of a sizeable group of immigrants from the Connemara area of Ireland. They had been persuaded to come to Minnesota in the 1880’s by Archbishop John Ireland and were initially located on farms in the western part of the state. For a variety of reasons, the experiment was a failure and many of the settlers came to St. Paul and settled along the banks of Phalen Creek between Third and Seventh Streets below Dayton’s Bluff.
So Clontarf is a relic of brief Irish colony in my part of the state. Then I was left wondering about that “variety of reasons” that led them to fall back from this region to the big city of St Paul.
I learned about the winter of 1880-1881 from a compilation of newspaper articles published in Morris at that time.
I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) at how dependent the towns out here were on the railroad — I knew that these were all railroad towns, and even that Morris was named after some minor executive at the railroad company, but in the 19th century those rails were the lifeline for all these communities. Winters were rough, some more so than others, and it was predictable that the Catholic Church had provided poorly for the Irish. It’s a shame that the railroad is so poorly maintained now, and only freight is carried on it now, and not always successfully — we had a train derailment a few weeks ago.
Let’s all look forward to a Minnesota winter!
I’m driving to Granite Falls, MN this morning. It’s only about an hour SSE of Morris, so I’ll still be in the middle of nowhere in west central Minnesota. A while back, though, I was searching for local museums and discovered this one: the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. I was surprised. This looks like a big deal with all kinds of old US aircraft from the the 1940s, and many of them still fly. I’ve been planning to visit it all summer long, but those plans got wrecked by a torn meniscus that limited my mobility — I’m feeling much better now, so I think can handle walking around some hangars and watching airplanes fly by. My brother and I used to bicycle out to local airports all the time just to watch private planes buzz by, so this is going to bring back memories.
I’ve been to the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, as well as the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle, and while this museum is a bit smaller than those, tomorrow is special: they’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US Navy & Marine Corps, so an additional assortment of aircraft are flying in. How can I resist? I want to see a P38 Lightning, an F4U Corsair, and an F6F Hellcat. Eighty year old airplanes still flying!
Tickets are still available, so if you’re a Minnesotan interested in this sort of thing, maybe I’ll see you there.
And deciding to try starting at one end and eating the whole thing. This is the bold jumper, Phidippus audax, that I’m raising in the lab (I’ve got 6 different species of spider thriving there), and I gave her a large mealworm which did not intimidate her in the least — she’s bold, remember. This is a pattern with her. She starts eating a big mealworm, and gets full halfway through, and I’ll have to clean up half-eaten corpses in a couple of day.
(I know, not a great photo, but it was shot through some dirty plexiglas so that’s as clean as I could get it.)
And they’re no better than creationists elsewhere. I felt compelled to critique a bad creationist debate sponsored by the Twin Cities Creation Science Association.
Sorry, no transcript, I was just winging it.
Rabbits in Colorado are being found with these horrifying growths on their bodies.
The scientists have an explanation: the rabbits are infected with a papilloma virus.
The cottontails recently spotted in Fort Collins are infected with the mostly harmless Shope papillomavirus, which causes wart-like growths that protrude from their faces like metastasizing horns.
Viral photos have inspired a fluffle of unflattering nicknames, including “Frankenstein bunnies,” “demon rabbits” and “zombie rabbits.” But their affliction is nothing new, with the virus inspiring ancient folklore and fueling scientific research nearly 100 years ago.
Yeah, right. It’s a coverup. The truth is that the rabbits were nosing around in a blasted heath, and…
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule imbedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Run away!
The resemblance is uncanny.
I am relieved that I am not a gay or trans person, since this country is getting worse and worse at dealing with its raging homophobia/transphobia. Even in Minnesota we’ve got self-righteous busybodies harassing people on mere suspicion that they aren’t straight and cis. You can’t even go to a restaurant without someone demanding to inspect your breasts.
According to Gender Justice attorneys, Gerika Mudra went out for dinner with a friend at a Buffalo Wild Wings location in Owatonna. She went to the restroom, and a server allegedly followed her and banged on the door, calling her a man and yelling at her to leave.
Attorneys say Mudra unzipped her sweatshirt to show the server her chest.
In a statement, Mudra said she was shocked by the server’s behavior.
I’m wondering what grounds the server had for pounding on the door if she had been a trans woman? What cause does anyone have for interrupting someone who is peeing? Is that a crime?
It’s not just trans folk who are under attack. Remember Kim Davis, the awful religious kook who refused to do her job as a county clerk and would not issue marriage licenses to gay couples? She’s back. She is petitioning the Supreme Court to overthrow the Obergefell v Hodges decision that legalized gay marriage.
Ten years after the Supreme Court extended marriage rights to same-sex couples nationwide, the justices this fall will consider for the first time whether to take up a case that explicitly asks them to overturn that decision.
Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for six days in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple on religious grounds, is appealing a $100,000 jury verdict for emotional damages plus $260,000 for attorneys fees.
This is preliminary. The court could review the petition in the fall and decide not to take up the case…but come on. This court? It’s packed with conservative kooks who are slavering at the thought of overturning gay rights. They want to roll back everything, and they’ve shown willingness. Brown v. Board of Education? Loving v. Virginia? They don’t feel secure anymore.
It’s not just court cases. This administration is willing to deny people they don’t like their rightfully earned rewards.
The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits. One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move.
I have no confidence in anything gained in citizen’s rights in this country since the Civil War.
Fall semester begins next week. That means that we’re having all kinds of meetings this week.
I just got back from a morning of meetings. Tomorrow will be worse: I’ll be in meetings all day long.
But wait, you say, aren’t you on sabbatical? I am, but it’s a one semester leave, I have to get back in the saddle in January, and they present a lot of new stuff at the start of fall term, including some significant changes to the Morris Core Curriculum, so I had to show up this week so that I’m not clueless for spring term.
It was not fun. I found myself thinking that Aristotle never had to count credits, but I’m feeling like I’m supposed to be an accountant, with 7 (or is it 8?) categories that students have to work through in order to graduate. We also were given a 10-page assortment of information that we must include in our syllabi…which has me wondering, if every single class every term has to include all this same stuff, isn’t that a massive duplication of effort? And are any students going to bother to read all this repetitive material, most of which has nothing to do with the content of my courses? Twenty five years ago, when I started here, every syllabus had a paragraph or two of boilerplate at the end, with a link to where the student can get more details.
Now the curriculum is a collection of fiddly little details and every syllabus has a massive addendum that dwarfs the actual description of course content.
Good thing I just have one more day of administrative noise, and then 15+ weeks of blissful spider research which might reduce my cranky surliness a bit.
But don’t count on it.
