Vera is a beast

Today was cricket-feeding day. I am still learning things, and one of the things I have learned is that I hate crickets, those jumpy, twitchy, annoying little beasts. I have to struggle to confine and catch the things, but I chortle evilly when I finally slide them down into a vial. They’re two or 3 times larger than my spiders, but it’s no contest. They’re doooooomed. Bwahahahaha!

Also, spiders have personalities. Amanda is shy; she gets a cricket, she ignores it, and me, and just hangs out in her corner placidly until I leave the room.The cricket will be dismantled fragments the next day, but a lady does not make a spectacle of her murders.

Xena is timid. She notices the cricket for sure, but she runs away — where it is, she is not, and she scurries about rather frantically to avoid it. She lays down lots of webbing, though, and I think she waits until it snares itself thoroughly before going in for the kill.

Vera is a beast. Put anything in there, she does not delay sinking her fangs into it. I’d just put the cricket in her vial when she charged up, lassoed its hind limbs, and was making quick bites into the leg joints. She reminds me of Gwyneth, a real killer. Especially that bit about first knee-capping her prey before getting into the serious business of liquefying its guts.

Vera also escaped, briefly, and marched up onto my hand and stood there, gently tapping on my knuckle like she was getting impatient. Once the cricket was in her vial, though, she quickly rappelled down and made short work of it.

I’ve got to get them some mates, but I’m worried that the juvenile males are just too small — I may try tomorrow, though, when the females are fat and sated with cricket juice and might be willing to tolerate a conjugal visit. I’ve got a son of Gwyneth I’d like to pair up with Vera — what beautifully voracious slayers their progeny might make!

(I might be getting a little too close with my arachnid brood, I willingly confess.)

Maybe if they gave us profs big raises, we’d become more conservative

You know how Turning Point USA has a McCarthyite list of academics they don’t like, and also publishes the salaries of those faculty? I guess it’s to make citizens outraged at how much money they’re paying to support radicals in the ivory tower. Just to put it all in perspective, though:

Those football coaches are probably more conservative than the professors, though, so that makes it all OK.

I thought about it some more. It’s not going to work. There are 1½ million professors in the US. If some filthy rich multibillionaire decided to try and influence us all by sinking a billion dollars into bribing us that would only be $666 each, in a one-time investment in one year.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Far cheaper to buy a few influencers, give them a prop fake university — a Prager U or some right wing think tank — and get them to spend all their time promoting pseudo-intellectualism to the rubes. In case you were wondering what the Intellectual Dark Web is actually all about.

ASMR for engine nerds

There are underwater microphones installed around San Juan Island, and they are streaming live continuously to the internet. It’s called OrcaSound, and it’s supposed to be about hearing whale songs, but I’ve been listening for the last hour and all I hear are boat engines. It’s soothing, actually: a kind of continuous rumble, with a rhythmic throb. One boat just went by that has a weird syncopated rattle, and it slowly rises as it gets closer and fades as it passes by. And just now a second engine has joined the chorus — it sounds like sawing wood. If you like percussion and a good background drone, check it out.

I’d probably be startled out of my zen state if a whale started singing.

Also, one has to wonder whether the orcas are fans of all the noise pollution in their neighborhood since the apes started flopping around in their ocean.

Uh-oh. It’s getting intense right now. Gotta zone out.

Spider poop

As promised threatened, I took some photos of spider poop this morning. It’s surprisingly colorful! But then, these are from the spiderling vials, so maybe it’s like baby poop, which also tends to have surprising colors.

The big circular feature is an artifact at the bottom of the plastic vial.

This is my masterpiece: I call it “Still life with spider poop, molted cuticle, and little blue bits of dried fly medium”. I’m thinking of printing it out on a 10 foot wide sheet and selling it to MOMA.

Academe is a MAJOR THREAT TO AMERICA

But don’t you worry: Turning Point USA is on it. They made a list. Strangely, most of them seem to be women and minorities, but hey, I made the cut. There is a grand total of SIX (6) dangerous professors in the entire state, which is kind of a tiny group to be responsible for overthrowing the state and destroying capitalism, and we’re rather scattered all over the place — I haven’t met any of my revolutionary cadre.

We should get together and do lunch, Jim Bear Jacobs, Marlon James, Shannon Gibney, Wayne Bendickson, and Barbara Gorski. We could also invite Jack Russell Weinstein, the sole enemy of the state in North Dakota (there is no representative in South Dakota. They’re all running dog lackeys there). It might be difficult since some of us are hundreds of miles away.

This is no way to run a revolution.

Pangburn going down in flames

Pangburn Philosophy, you know, that guy who has been putting on talks all over the place featuring alt-right heroes, was going to have an event in New York this weekend called A Day of Reflection. It’s been hemorrhaging speakers for quite some time — Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz backed out of it a while back, they couldn’t meet Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s demands, and then Bari Weiss cancelled. They were reduced to booking actual progressive speakers, like Rebecca Watson and Cara Santa Maria.

Well, now that’s all done.

Apparently, the problem was gross mismanagement: speakers weren’t getting paid, people who bought tickets ($300 for the NYC event!) to events that were cancelled weren’t getting reimbursed, and with that news, you’d have to be nuts to buy a ticket to any Pangburn event, given its odds of getting dropped or its speaker roster changing radically, leaving you holding the bag.

Bye bye, Travis Pangburn. I don’t think we’ll be hearing much of you polluting the skeptic/atheist movement anymore.

Just for the sake of recording this, here is their original announcement for the event:

Notice the featured speakers: Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, Maajid Nawaz, Glenn Loury, and it was to be held at the Lincoln Center.

Here’s the web page a few minutes ago: they lost all but Loury.

If you look tomorrow, it’ll probably be a blank page, or an error message.

Spider Update: Cleaning day (no photos)

I’ve concluded that I’ve been a terrible spider daddy. What else can you say when your young spiderlings have a 90% mortality rate? I expect ICE to pound on my door any day now and give me an offer of employment at one of their detention centers.

In my defense, I am learning. My big mistake was hoping that I could keep a freshly-hatched clutch of spiderlings together for a fairly long period of time, to minimize the maintenance chores. Nope. Doesn’t work. I even did some quick experiments where I’d put small groups of 3 in vials of different volumes, so different population densities, and it didn’t help. After a while, there would be only one.

I don’t know whether it was simply that one would hog all the food, starving the others, or whether it was outright siblicide, but lesson learned: the babies get separated, day one. I just have to get a new egg sac first. Unfortunately, all I’ve got now are 3 full grown adults, and they’re all females (it’s their own damn fault, too, since they ate their husbands).

Today was cleaning day and sorting out all the juveniles. At this point, I have a grand total of…11 young’uns. They all look healthy and I don’t expect serious mortality issues from this point on. About a quarter of them are male (you will say, “what’s 25% of 11?”, and I will reply that one of them is ambiguously sexed at this point, with palps that aren’t quite fully developed), but I can’t use them to breed with the adult females, yet. It’s not a worry about incest, but just that they’re roughly 1/4 to 1/2 the size of the adult behemoths, and they’re too preciously few to risk turning them into snacks.

Speaking of incest, 82% of the juveniles are children of the dearly departed Gwyneth, so there goes genetic diversity already. That may not be a bad thing, given that Gwyneth was an uber-fertile monster queen, and a little inbreeding to reduce genetic diversity is useful in a lab model. I’m also planning to do some collecting trips this Spring, to get individuals who didn’t all come from one house on one corner of one block in Morris, Minnesota.

Anyway, right now they’re all tucked into fresh new clean vials, given a little spritz of water vapor, and a couple of hapless fruit flies each. They just need to grow now. Also, I have a sink full of dirty vials to wash out tomorrow. Spider poop, yuck.

Hey, maybe tomorrow I should take some pictures of spider poop — I suspect most of you haven’t seen it.