Clean up the corpses of your victims before they begin to stink

That’s an important lesson I learned from my spiders. I’m going out of town for a week, so over the weekend I made sure that everyone was well fed and watered, stuffing them full of waxworms. Which meant that today I had to go in and extract all the blackened, shriveled corpses of their prey so they wouldn’t just be sitting there rotting for days and days. A pile of dead flies or larvae do acquire a distinctive aroma, so I wanted everyone left with clean cages before I abandoned them.

Also, wow, were these all plump, sleek, shiny spiders. They’ll do fine without me for a few days now.

Teaching cooking, teaching science…lessons to learn

Classes start up again in a few weeks, but I thought I’d take some time to get inspired by a master teacher, watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

That’s sarcasm, by the way. I think Ramsay has real talent as a skilled chef who knows what he’s doing, but he’s a terrible teacher. His show is an excuse to put him in situations with low-talent chefs, where he can explode entertainingly and then reshape the restaurant with his genuine expertise…but really, the entertainment value comes from the raging meltdowns. The effective teaching moments come from the occasional moments of empathy where he explains with real sincerity to the bad cooks what they must do to get back on track. It’s actually a series of demonstrations of how not to teach, interspersed with rare moments when a little light shines through and you see what really works.

It reminded me of science in a lot of ways. We have the same problems. Ramsay sometimes fondly recollects his training, when he had to work 7 days a week for long hours and got yelled at by demanding masters; I knew labs like that, but was fortunate to have had mentors who were much more understanding and treated their students like human beings. After seeing him in action a few times, I just want to tell Ramsay that he was abused by people seeking to build their reputations and their income, and that he is now perpetuating that abuse, while pretending that it is necessary to be abused to become a great chef. It shouldn’t be. It’s obvious that being a line cook is intense, hard work that requires discipline and focus, but screaming and throwing food at the wall and calling the cook making the mistake a donut doesn’t help. It’s counterproductive, even if it does make for flashy reality TV.

Both science and cooking excel when the people doing it love their work, have a passion for their subject, and are creative. They both also require discipline and focus. Glorifying grueling expectations and taskmasters who torment their lackeys is a poor way to instill discipline, and is antithetical to that passionate embrace of the work.

Yet after watching him work for a while, I still kind of like Gordon Ramsay, but only for those moments where he lets the mask slip and reveals that he likes at least some of the people he’s yelling at, and has these brief moments of heart-to-heart communication. That’s where the real teaching gets done.

T.S. Eliot trembled in fear

Here’s a good opening to a story that makes me want to read more.

So my dear friend and podcast soulmate, Whiskey Jenny, recently made casual reference to “the TS Eliot batshittery,” and when we asked for more details, she sent a link that I will share with you shortly. First, some context: TS Eliot once had an… affair? with a woman named Emily Hale, over the course of which he exchanged many, many letters with her. He destroyed all her letters to him. She saved all his letters to her, and she donated them to Princeton with the stipulation that they should not be opened until 2020. I learned about this many years ago, and my imagination was captured by what it must be like to be a scholar of TS Eliot. Imagine knowing that over a thousand personal letters existed, written by the object of your study-slash-ardor, and that you could not have access to them until 2020. Wow.

Imagine being TS Eliot, learning in 1956 that a thousand of his old love letters were archived and scheduled to be released to scholars in 2020. Imagine…wait a minute. Isn’t it odd that he wrote a thousand letters to Emily Hale, and then abruptly turned around and married a different woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, about whom he later writes of their time together as “nightmare agony of my seventeen years”, and that the only thing worse would have been marrying Emily Hale? And then when Vivienne died, he turned around and married a third woman, Esmé Valerie Fletcher? Eliot was concerned that the passion expressed in those letters was, I suspect, stuff so embarrassing that Eliot wrote a preemptive letter explaining himself that had to be released at the same time as Hale’s letters. He sounds desperate to protect a legacy that he thought would be compromised by the contents, so he has to disparage the woman.

The letters seem to be about what you’d expect: passionate declarations of eternal love from a poet.

“You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.”

He continued: “I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead; at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age.”

Describing himself to be in a “kind of emotional fever”, by December he confessed that “the pain is more acute, but it is a pain which in the circumstances I would not be without”.

The only thing terrible in it all seems to be Eliot’s later letter, which is embarrassing in how pompous he is about shooting down the contents of the adoring letters he wrote to that ghastly-after-the-fact woman. He would have been better off adding nothing.

By the way, the volume of letters isn’t so surprising. There was a year before our marriage when my wife-to-be and I lived apart, in Seattle and Eugene respectively, and I wrote lots of letters, maybe once or twice a week. This was before email, you know, and when long distance phone calls cost a fortune, so yes, we actually wrote physical letters on paper and put a stamp on them and sent them off. Also, no word processing, no printers, they were all hand-written. That was only about 40 or so years ago, kids.

Alas, I hope you aren’t waiting to see them appear in the Princeton library in 2040, because she burned them all.

No good deed goes unpunished

She’s pretty, white, and blonde, but at least she used her privileges for good. Kaylen Ward, an Instagram model (not a very noteworthy accomplishment, it means she looks good and takes pictures of herself) made an offer: send her proof that you’d donated at least $10 to fight the Australian wildfires, and she’d send you a nude photo of herself. It took off! She has apparently motivated donations somewhere around $500,000. That’s a worthy use of her body, did harm to no one, and she wasn’t even handling any of the money, so there was no opportunity for it to be a scam.

But all is not well. What she was doing was classified as “sex work”, and that must be punished.

Donations poured in – but the internet fame had implications for Ward’s career as an Instagram model. Instagram disabled her account for violating its community guidelines, and copycat accounts are popping up to try and capitalise on the model’s viral success.

“My IG [Instagram] got deleted, my family disowned me, and the guy I like won’t talk to me all because of that tweet,” she posted on Sunday.

“But f**k it, save the koalas.”

The stigma around sex work has to end.

Drag him out of office in handcuffs NOW.

He’s not even aware that he’s tweeting out promises of war crimes.

The UN passed a resolution in 2017 prohibiting this sort of thing, you know. As explained by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova:

“The deliberate destruction of heritage is a war crime, it has become a tactic of war to tear societies over the long term, in a strategy of cultural cleansing. This is why defending cultural heritage is more than a cultural issue, it is a security imperative, inseparable from that of defending human lives,” Director-General Bokova told the Security Council, as she spoke in support of the resolution, with Executive Director of UNODC Youri Fedotov and Commander Fabrizio Parrulli of the Carabinieri Italiani.

“Weapons are not enough to defeat violent extremism. Building peace requires culture also; it requires education, prevention, and the transmission of heritage. This is the message of this historic resolution,” she added.

The resolution was prompted by a number of tragic acts of cultural vandalism, many of them by Islamic state fanatics. Now we’re planning to be just like them.

The resolution urges nations to increase efforts to preserve historic monuments and sites in conflict zones. The onset of the 21st century witnessed attacks against global heritage sites increase significantly, including the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and Timbuktu’s ancient shrines in Mali.

Previous efforts by the Council to safeguard cultural heritage focused on the illicit trafficking of looted cultural relics to fund terrorist activities in Iraq and Syria, where the “Islamic State” militant group destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites, including Roman ruins at Palmyra.

However, Friday’s resolution called for further international cooperation in investigations and prosecutions of individuals and groups committing attacks against cultural heritage sites, monuments and relics.

The resolution affirmed that “directing unlawful attacks against sites and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or historic monuments may constitute, under certain circumstances and pursuant to international law, a war crime and that perpetrators of such attacks must be brought to justice.”

You may recall that religious fanatics in the US, particularly the likes of the Hobby Lobby fundamentalists, were actively looting cultural artifacts from Iraq…also a crime. Now Trump is threatening to bomb major cultural sites in Iran, confirming our status as a rogue state run by barbarians.

Do I need to point out the dishonor of using the Iranian hostages from forty years ago as a justification for destroying art and history, or the hypocrisy of telling Iran to not threaten us by threatening Iran? Very well, I do. Trump is a dishonorable hypocrite and a lying barbarian. He has to go. Soon.

Bathroom buddy

Look who was keeping warm in a corner of our bathroom:

I’d really like to know where they hide most of the time. All winter long we see these isolated individuals suddenly popping up out of nowhere.

Found another one hanging out in the dining room with a mess of fibers. It’s very tiny, half the size of the one above.

Spiders had their breakfast

This morning, I cruised down to the local bait shop and bought a bunch of waxworms. “Good luck fishing,” said the proprietor, as I was going out the door. I didn’t feel like explaining that there would be no fish involved today.

I got to the lab and delicately tweezered one pale white waxworm into the center of each cobweb, where it would squirm unhappily. It had been lifted out of its comfortable environment and was hanging suspended from a couple of cables, which it did not like at all. Picture a whale trussed up and dangling from the ceiling of a meatlocker, straining to escape the trap, while little fanged predators look on.

The spiders usually paused for a few minutes. I imagine they were briefly stunned at the immensity of the bounty that has fallen from the skies, but they didn’t wait long — they swiftly scuttled out, their hindlimbs flickering as they quickly reinforced the webbing, occasionally moving in close for a long kiss.

When I left, I looked in the incubator…rank after rank of transparent cages, like little glass abbatoirs, each with a madly writhing worm struggling desperately to escape, each with a small long-legged creature clinging to their back, biting.

Warmed my heart, it did. They looked so happy and eager (the spiders, not the worms). It reminded me of my kids on Christmas morning.

What do these nine people have in common?

Let’s see…they’re all men.

They’re all white men.

They’re all smiling, and in suits.

Some additional information: they’re all from Pennsylvania.

They’re all politicians.

They’re all Republican politicians.

I wonder what they’re up to?

I don’t think anyone will be surprised if I tell you that all 9 signed an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade.

Obviously these are the best people to control women’s bodies.

Symbolism is not evidence

Those QAnon weirdos clearly think it is, though, which is probably a big part of their delusional worldview. Did you know that red shoes are significant and symbolic to the occult because they make leather red shoes out of babies’ skin? And that because Tom Hanks made a movie called The Man with One Red Shoe, Hanks must be a big time pedophile? Q says so! The movie also stars Carrie Fisher, Dabney Coleman, and Charles Durning, all major leaders in a child sex trafficking ring, apparently, or they wouldn’t have worked in such a flagrantly evil film.


Liz Crokin Predicts That Tom Hanks Will Soon Be Arrested for Involvement in Occult Pedophilia from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.

Look on this page and imagine all the dead babies, sacrificed for their occult powers!

By the way, QAnon has to be the most deranged of all the modern cults. Name one that is worse.

When you start a donnybrook is when you find out who your friends are

Actually, you should look around the bar before you throw that first punch, to make sure someone has your back. Theoretically, that is — not that I’ve ever been one to leap into bar fights.

In totally unrelated news, Iran, China, and Russia are teaming up in a joint military exercise.

Iran has kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, Iranian state TV has reported.

The four-day exercise comes at a time of heightened tensions since the United States withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May last year.

“The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity … and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated,” Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani said on state television.

Well, our European friends have pledged their undying loyalty to us, I’m sure.

The US reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran after quitting the nuclear deal last year, prompting Tehran to hit back with countermeasures by dropping nuclear commitments.

Remaining parties to the badly weakened agreement include the UK, France and Germany, as well as China and Russia.

I can take on all of youse, c’mon. Just let me down a couple more shots first, ‘k?