You have to spend money to make money, am I right?

This letter is purportedly from Human Resources to an employee with an older, unsightly car. I don’t know if it’s genuine or not, but the attitude is certainly authentic — it’s just that usually they avoid making it quite so blatant.

We tend to drive our cars into the ground. My wife and I get the least expensive vehicle that has a good reliability rating, and then we drive it forever, or until it breaks down. We are not the types to buy a new car every year for the status (we can’t afford a new car every year, anyway), and I can’t imagine myself ever washing and polishing a utilitarian device like that, anyway.

Fortunately, we college professors can get away with a little slovenliness, but my wife did have at least one incident where she spotted her employer circling around her dinged-up car, scowling. You know there are lots of Americans who will judge you on the presumed prestige of your car, and that spending money on the right upscale things is an important aspect of performative capitalism.

It’s only surprising that, if this letter is genuine, anyone would make the superficiality of the attitude explicit.

How does Christian math work?

I don’t know how this adds up. So this Minnesota church is struggling with declining membership — only about 25 people show up each week, and most of them are elderly — so what they’ve decided to do is tell all those old people to stay home or go to a different church so … they … can … increase the numbers of … young people?

Grove United Methodist Church in the St. Paul suburb of Cottage Grove is closing in June, with plans to relaunch in November. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship elsewhere, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The church is asking that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.

There’s some funky logic going on here. They must have additional plans to reinvigorate the church, other than telling the old folks to stay away, unless they think somehow that older people actively repel the youth. But if they’ve got some dynamic plan to draw in more, younger members, why do they need to kick out the loyal congregation? And do they seriously think the ejected members will want to come back in two years?

They’ve got some new guy coming in as pastor, and I’d really like to know what magic he plans to work to get new people to join the church that just kicked out Grandma and Grandpa. Other Methodist churches are undergoing this peculiar division of their congregations, and it’s associated with deep splits over the inclusion of LGBTQ members. I wonder if that’s the unstated and unreported rationale for showing the membership the door.

What the hell, Chad?

After Chad and Yara hit it off and mated, I started shuffling Chad off to meet other spider ladies. First up, I paired him with Melisandre.

This morning, I find one live spider and one dead spider. My immediate thought was that the little witch had murdered the male, but no — Chad was fine, it was Melisandre’s corpse that was dangling from a silken thread. This is not right. Chad, you brute. Now I hesitate to move a known domestic abuser to a new cage, the rotten killer. Mate, don’t murder.

I suppose it’s possible Melisandre lost her magic necklace and just died of old age…

Anyone remember Pepsigate on ScienceBlogs?

Since we discontinued the ads on this site, I (and other bloggers) get lots of promotional crapola from people who want to put them back on — I will not. I thought this invitation from sourceglobalmedia.com was, well, unethical.

Please let us know pricing and options to place content relevant on your website but would have 1 link to Gaming Industry website. Further details:

● We will reimburse yourselves for a one off administration fee in uploading and maintaining the content on your website as long as the site is still live.

● Within the body of the content Please do not suggest the article is paid / sponsored / advertorial in the content

● We will provide you with the article that will include citations and images, as to make the content with editorial value, we request that all these are kept in.

Please come back to me and we can provide both content and payment.

It’s that second clause in particular. They’ll provide content, but we are required to pretend it is our own original work, and not mention that it was paid advertising. We won’t do that. That’s sleazy.

If you suddenly see posts written in an entirely different style, babbling about my amazing scores in fast twitch video games, you’ll know I sold out. The legal debts must be getting to me.

What if a priest is invited to my family gatherings?

Cardinal Raymond Burke was asked about what to do if a family member brings their gay partner to an event which, I guess, we can use as a guideline to answering the question in my title.

This is a very delicate question, and it’s made even more delicate by the aggressiveness of the homosexual agenda. But one has to approach this in a very calm, serene, reasonable and faith-filled manner. If homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered, which indeed they are — reason teaches us that and also our faith — then, what would it mean to grandchildren to have present at a family gathering a family member who is living [in] a disordered relationship with another person? We wouldn’t, if it were another kind of relationship — something that was profoundly disordered and harmful — we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it. And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.

And so, families have to find a way to stay close to a child in this situation — to a son or grandson, or whatever it may be — in order to try to draw the person away from a relationship which is disordered.

And we know that with time, these relationships leave the person profoundly unhappy. And so it’s important to stay [as] close as one can. But, that particular form of relationship should not be imposed upon family members, and especially upon impressionable children. And I urge parents or grandparents — whoever it may be — to be very, very prudent in this matter and not to scandalize their children or grandchildren.

Well. I certainly do regard the priesthood as a festering tradition of ignorance and evil, and I am concerned about not doing harm to my children and grandchildren, but I’m not going to accept the recommendations of an evil person. We should do the opposite. If a priest shows up at your garden party, don’t shun them, or call the police, or throw them out — treat them with sympathy and understanding. Explain to your kids that sometimes people fall into a bad crowd and make poor life decisions, but we still have to treat them with the dignity and respect owed to all human beings, no matter how flawed. Don’t try to convert them, no matter how obvious their suffering, because we don’t know what led them to this disgraceful state, and disrupting their life may cause even greater misery.

Let the kids learn from this person’s example…but by no means allow your children to be alone in a room with a Catholic priest.

Little Women was lovely!

I used the last day of my winter break to see Little Women. I hadn’t read the book, and if you’d asked me yesterday what it was about, I’d have waved my hands vaguely and mumbled “Period drama? About girls growing up?”, which wouldn’t have sounded interesting at all, but you know, I see all kinds of crap because we have one theater in town and the selection is limited, so I’d go see it anyway. Jeez, but I was clueless. It’s a fantastically thoughtful film about women who are all different and have different aspirations and have to navigate oppressive social structures and often compromise their goals…but can still sometimes find happiness. Or not. I honestly thought at the beginning that I was going to have trouble keeping track of all these women, who was who and who was trying to do what — I am infused with patriarchal bias myself — and figured it was going to be Sex and the City in rural Massachusetts in the 1860s. It is so much better than that, and the acting was phenomenal, and Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth all stood out as real and important people.

Go see it if you can.

I am now in the unusual situation of having seen three excellent movies in the last month. Little Women, obviously, and The Lighthouse (a story of a descent into madness that didn’t rely on jump scares and gore), and Parasite, about class warfare and artificial dichotomies and opportunities between the rich and the poor. There hasn’t been a single superhero in tights in the bunch, and I’ve been really, deeply enjoying my outings. Superheroes have an appropriate niche, of course, and I’ll almost certainly go see any that show up in my town, but it turns out that movies that illustrate real issues and don’t resolve everything with punching and explosions are much more satisfying. It seems I need more fiber in my cinematic diet, with only occasional bites of flamboyant desserts.

(Oh, wait, I just remembered — I also saw Jo Jo Rabbit, another terrific movie. I am overwhelmed with great films lately!)

100% ready and champing at the bit

I am organized! Now ready to face the spring semester, although I’ve also learned that I’m apparently up to be the biology discipline coordinator*, so I may not be as ready as I think. I got a lot done today, at least, and will be able to walk brightly into my new classes, not looking at all like a pole-axed cow.

Tonight I’m going to take a deep breath and relax by going to the movie. Little Women is playing, which I hear is very good, and also Dr Doolittle, which is getting panned. I think I’ll go to the one that I might have a chance of enjoying.

*There are no perks at all associated with being the discipline coordinator, not even a fancy hat. Maybe my first agenda item as I rise to power is to propose the creation of a fancy hat, to make it all worthwhile.

Flying Homosexual Chemtrail Fire Ants

Does she look gay to you?

Now we know why Texas is full of homosexuals: it’s all the fire ants down south. And they’ve been spreading to England since 2015!

The World Heath Organization has put England on high alert as swarms of genetically engineered fire ants have been seen swarming the countryside in quick approach to London. The ants have been laced with chemical homosexuality via a modified homosexual chemtrail containing liquid sweat from gay men.

WHO has not issued any alerts about genetically modified fire ants swarming England.

There is no such thing as “chemical homosexuality”. You cannot “catch the gay” from sweat, especially not sweat that has been ingested by ants.

These mutated ants are thought to be the first filial (F1 hybrid) generation offspring of the the fire ants Obama deployed in Texas to bite Christians and turn them to homosexuality, a part of the Jade Helm invasion.

I amused at the use of technical genetics terms (“first filial (F1 hybrid) generation”) as if that makes the claim more sciencey. It doesn’t.

Obama didn’t deploy fire ants in Texas.

Texans bitten by fire ants don’t turn gay.

A likely unforeseen consequence of putting raw homosexual endorphins into the parental generation of the fire ants was that it gave the ants genetic diversity at a rate even higher than Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. The flying homosexual chemtrail fire ant purportedly shows all the classic signs of homosexuality: an insatiable appetite for straight men, ravenously snapping its jaws and becoming agitated when a non-gay man’s flesh is in prox restless and its sleek body fueled by an eccentric cocktail of lurid chemical drugs.

Putting “homosexual endorphins” (which don’t exist) into a fire ant won’t modify their genetics, and it won’t increase their genetic diversity.

Homosexuality is not associated with an insatiable appetite for straight men, and ants wouldn’t recognize human sexuality at all.

I’m non-gay. I haven’t noticed any gay men ravenously snapping their jaws when I pass by, or even becoming restless when in proximity.

I have known gay men with sleek bodies fueled by eccentric cocktails of lurid chemical drugs, so maybe that part is true.

All I was doing was looking up some simple Mendelian genetics problems for my impending genetics class! Maybe I need to turn “safe search” on. Is there a setting to turn off stupid search results?

I have to go back to work today!

I know it’s a holiday, but it’s also the day before classes resume, so I have to go in and make sure everything is ready and perfect. It’s also my last day to work in the lab before an unusually hellish week — we’ve got job candidates coming into town to interview for our ecology position, and I’m on the committee doing phone interviews for our biochemistry position. It’s going to be a killer couple of days, but the good news is that this first week should be the worst week.