I was checking on the Argiope female in my backyard, and discovered that she has a little friend, in a web about 10cm away.
It’s true that the female of the species dwarfs the little males, but look at the gigantic, pendulous palps hanging off the boy. He’s all male.
My internet has been down most of the day, so I’ve taken advantage of the silence to do a bunch of class prep. Nothing exciting, no problems, I’ve just been temporarily inaccessible.
This morning I got my entire first week of lectures tidied up and uploaded, along with my syllabus (actually got that done last week), and am ready to begin my semester.
Almost. Tomorrow I’ll get my first week of lab organized.
I told you about how James O’Keefe had tried to prank Minnesota elections. This state had a major fraud scandal where a few people had scammed childcare funds for millions of dollars, and the government has been hammering through those cases and slamming the con-artists into prison, while MAGA has been shrieking for justice because some of the perpetrators were Somali (never mind that the organizer was a white American-born woman). We are going to have to be strict in the prosecution of these white-collar criminals.
I guess we’re just going to have to drop the hammer on James O’Keefe.
The man in the video who falsely identified himself as William Pomeranz, whose real name is James O’Keefe, may have put himself in legal jeopardy.
“It’s illegal in the state of Minnesota to impersonate another voter, and this is apparently what O’Keefe did,” David Schultz, a constitutional law professor at Hamline University, said.
Schultz, Pomeranz and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon say the video shows the system worked.
“As I read the law, you can’t impersonate another registered voter, and that’s exactly what they appear to have filmed themselves doing,” Simon said.
Impersonating a Minnesota voter at a polling place is a felony punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.
I wouldn’t object to seeing O’Keefe locked away for 7 years. We have to do it to avoid being seen as soft on crime.
There I was nodding along with all the stuff social media is telling me, when I was brought up short by an innocuous comment.
20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest.
Ha ha, yeah, people are so different now…hang on, wait a minute. None of that is true. I suspect that the person did NOT do a careful analysis of statistical trends. I remember 20 years ago — heck, I remember 40 years ago — and I don’t remember people avoiding technology.
Did you know the microwave oven was invented in 1946, and the first commercial consumer model was introduced in 1967? Now they’re ubiquitous. Who doesn’t have one in their home nowadays? They were readily adopted over the course of years.
I was first using the internet in the 1990s, when it was largely a university privilege, and then came AOL and the internet just exploded in the 2000s. Now everybody has to have WiFi so they can get Netflix.
In the 2010s, citizens were adopting hybrid cars, and now fully electric cars. Are “techies” rushing to buy piston-engine cars with carburetors now?
I believe there is a rejection of badly implemented technology — the enshittification of tech, for instance. But I think people are always ready to adopt tools that are cheaper, easier to use, novel and interesting.
One of the drawbacks to volunteering at the local theater is that you have to sit through way too many showings of movies you don’t like. I’ve suffered through four showings of Spider-Man: Spiderless New Day so far. I don’t actually sit through the movie, but instead wait in the concessions area, listening to the absurdly loud booming noises.
This may be advantageous as the school year starts — I’ll be able to bring my laptop and gets some work done while simultaneously supporting the theater.
Anyway, now I get to dwell on why I don’t like a Spider-Man movie, and Tom the Dancing Bug captures my feelings.
Where Marvel took a wrong turn was the success of those colossal match-ups where they scrape up every superhero from their long and storied history to fight the big bad guy. So you’ve got the guy who was bit by a radioactive spider, and the guy who turned green (originally gray, I know this because I’m old) from gamma ray exposure, a guy who built a suit of armor, a woman trained as an assassin, a literal god from a pagan pantheon, a sorceror supreme, a guy who can get really big or really small, a guy with a bow and arrow, etc. Individually, I could suspend disbelief to get through a story, but together…total indigestible chaos, that requires an excessive amount of exposition to get us to the point where the central plot even makes any progress. Apparently, the lesson Marvel has learned is that all their movies will be mash-ups of disparate superheroes with unrelated superpowers, and I hate it.
You don’t need that to make a long elaborate science-fiction story. A great counter-example: The Expanse, a multi-episode space opera. There is one key postulate, the contrivance of the unfortunately named Epstein Drive, which allowed a technological society to expand cheaply and rapidly enough to set the stage on which the human drama plays out (I think the bits where they introduce aliens and magical interstellar travel weakens the overall story, because it’s throwing in way too many gimmicks).
The better movie would be one where a relatable human story is told, with one magical being, no more, introduced to complicate events in interesting and novel ways. They aren’t ever going to do that any more. Stories aren’t as important as CGI slam-bam with lots of noise.
I finally got around to rebutting Calvin Smith’s lies. But I have to confess that I was flattered by his lengthy description of me.
Unfortunately, now I have to go to the hospital, where a dermatologist is going to slice out a divot of my flesh in the name of cancer prevention. Wheeee. I’ll probably survive this procedure, but I’m going to be dealing with some discomfort and a bloody bandage for a while.
Maybe the monarchs are coming back — we spotted a roosting mass of them across the street. Can you count them all?
Also, on a branch just above them, there was a Cooper’s Hawk standing guard.
Earlier this morning, Mary spotted a dark chrysalis near our back door.
This is what it looks like now.
In a few hours, it’ll flutter off to join the wild population here in Morris.
If you thought James O’Keefe was washed up and would vanish in the sewage outlet of history after his exposure and disgrace, guess again. He attempted to meddle in the Minnesota primary by dressing up as a “muslim”, putting on a poor “muslim” accent, and attempting to vote illegally, to show that Minnesota election laws were leaky and would allow for significant election fraud.
Veritas founder James O’Keefe, along with reporter Cam Higby, impersonated Muslims and went to multiple Twin Cities polling places during the Aug. 11 primary.
“During Minnesota’s Primary on August 11, 2026, members of a widely discredited Florida-based political group visited several polling places in Minneapolis impersonating Minnesota voters,” Simon said in a news release.
“Dressed in what they called ‘Muslim’ costumes, and imitating foreign accents, they falsely claimed to be registered Minnesota voters. The group used concealed cameras to record their interactions with poll workers, releasing a heavily edited video of their encounters. Their apparent goal was to cast doubt on one or more Minnesota election laws that have been in force for over fifty years. Instead, they revealed their ignorance of how those laws actually work – while putting themselves in legal jeopardy.”
According to Higby, their goal was to see if they’d be allowed to vote without showing identification, and whether they’d be allowed to vouch for people who aren’t registered to vote.
He failed, but he still went ahead and spliced together a very bad video that purported to show Muslim election fraud. O’Keefe has a kink for putting on cheap costumes and posing in racist one-act plays. Isn’t it past time to throw out this piece of trash?
