Look! I found their unholy spawn crawling out of their crude, barbaric nest!
These are probably all Larries (Larinioides), but they’re too young to tell for sure.
I know, you’re all getting tired of spiders, spiders, spiders on my web site, but you can look forward to a Minnesota winter when they’re all dead or hiding or hibernating, and I’ve got nothin’ but ice-rimed empty cobwebs to gaze upon, forlornly.
Oh. My. God. They published a piece praising Boris Johnson that, I swear, reads like something from The Onion or McSweeney’s.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
It goes on and on interminably, saying nothing. It even quotes some of his more infamous racist lines, like this one, about the Congo:
No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.
That’s satire, don’t you know. They’re never clear about exactly what they’re satirizing, but like a troop of monkeys, they’ve learned that all they have to do is parrot the word “satire” to excuse their grossest impulses.
Which now makes me wonder…is this entire article by Toby Young, with all its hyperbole and bizarre imagery, also intended to be satire? Is it mocking Boris or praising him effusively? It’s impossible to tell. When two buffoons start mugging at each other, does it mean something, or is it meaningless?
What of Quillette itself? An ugly, tasteless joke, like Johnson’s disparagement of the people of the Congo, or an attempt to be serious by a gang of clowns?
Trump thinks he’s going to win Minnesota.
In 2016 I almost won Minnesota. In 2020, because of America hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar, & the fact that Minnesota is having its best economic year ever, I will win the State! “We are going to be a nightmare to the President,” she say. No, AOC Plus 3 are a Nightmare for America!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2019
It could happen — Republicans are good at cheating, and there is an undercurrent of bigotry thriving here. But I think he’s going to lose votes compared to 2016, because his record is terrible and he’s even more openly bigoted than he was then.
Also, he doesn’t get to take credit for the Minnesota economy. The Democrats are responsible for that, while the Republicans have been holding us back.
Wise has an op-ed that spells out what they did to defeat David Duke in Louisiana. Don’t avoid the issue of racism, confront it head on.
In the early 1990s, I worked for the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, an organization founded for the purpose of defeating Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader, in his bids for the U.S. Senate and governor’s mansion. During those two campaigns, we learned that if you want to deflate a movement whose yeast is racism, you can’t do it with a raft of policy proposals, because racist movements don’t rise in the first place based on policy ideas. And if a racist’s political opponent avoids the subject of race, and tries instead to appeal to voters with proposals on health coverage and tax reform, that normalizes the racist, whether it’s Duke, Trump or someone else, by treating them like any other candidate, and treating the election at hand as if it’s merely a debate between two legitimate, contrasting public policy visions.
To win an election where the issue of race is front-and-center, antiracists must make it clear to voters that when they cast their ballots, they are making a moral choice about the kind of people they want to be, and the kind of nation in which they want to live.
This is going to be terrifying to craven wonks at the DNC, because Duke got more white votes in that election than in the previous one. But there was a surge in black turnout, and that turned the tide.
Policy is good, especially at sorting out preferences within the Democratic field. Once the noise settles down, though, I think the Democrats have to focus on Trump’s racism and misogyny and make it clear that this next election is about the fate of the country.
We went on a spider walk around the house last night. I thought it would be interesting to see what the spiders do after the sun sets — I’ve read that the species I’m most interested in is more active at night — so we put on our head lamps and prowled about the house and garden in the dark, to see what we could see.
It’s a different world. We saw a cicada, and lots of moths (they liked our headlights), and crickets, and mosquitos, and flies, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos. This was a perilous journey if you’re anemic or fear blood loss. We were there for the spiders, though.
Our house is already festooned with theridiidids, and we saw even more. Mary has been noticing an expansion of sheet webs down near the foundation, and had been wondering who was responsible, and they were out, these cute little grass spiders. They hang out in the space underneath our siding, and what we saw at night is that they’d half emerge. They stick out their head and legs from spaces in the wall, but keep their butts hidden away. They were very shy, and when we got close…thwip, they’d instantly dart back into their hidey holes.
Mary wanted to try out the photography thing, and discovered that it’s harder than it looks. You’ve got so little working space in front of the lens, and you’ve got to move the snout of the camera right up next to anything before you see more than a blur, and to focus, you physically move the camera forward and back until you get the little spider right in the plane of focus, and then you have to click the shutter, but on an unfamiliar camera you’ve forgotten where the shutter button is, so you look and find it, and then you have to find the spider again. Repeat until you have it momentarily in view, then click, click, click. She did a serviceable job on this little Parasteatoda, she just needs to practice a little more. Look at that, the hind leg is in perfectly sharp focus!
Photo by Mary Gjerness Myers
More practice and she’ll be as addicted as I am, and then the last voice of sensible restraint in our house will be browsing camera catalogs, and instead of food we’ll have all the lenses I could want, and a couple of new camera bodies, and overpriced image processing software, and…
This grass spider is giving me the evil eye. I think I’ll let her go before I get a spider curse put on me.
I’ll be in an online chat in about an hour. I have no idea what we’re going to talk about, except for perhaps one little thing.
Word on the street in these here parts is that you should ignore the warmth and the sunshine and wake up to the fact that the weather is going to change. Spiders are smarter than humans that way.
Seriously…so many egg sacs are appearing all over the place. I think the spiders are instinctively preparing for the catastrophe that is a Minnesota winter, and also responding to the bumper crop of mosquitos and other insects that are swarming everywhere right now.
The students and I have plans for this week.
My incredulity at the political idiocy in the UK is blunted by the awareness of the Trumpian catastrophe in the USA.
Maybe democracy is a failure after all.
If you’re still wondering why Republicans get characterized as MAGA-hat wearing buffoons who are harming the country, just look at how easy their bad ideas are to satirize. This is first class satire!
