MAKE HER QUEEN!

A priest in Brazil declared that fat women don’t get to go to heaven, so this woman made the best possible response.

He looks so surprised. I’ve been watching this on repeat for the last ten minutes. Gosto muito dela.

Spider eggs!

Beautiful.

We’re currently cultivating 3 spider egg cases in the lab, with several more imminent, we think. This morning, I separated them from their mommies so I could put them in a temperature controlled incubator. I was delicate about it — not actually touching the sac itself, but tugging on the strands of silk holding them onto the web, and transferring them to clean vials. This one was a miracle, because without even trying I had accidentally and neatly removed the silken wrappings of the case. I don’t know if this is good or bad, since it might affect their development, but I guess we’ll find out.

These eggs were laid two days ago. Now we just watch them to see what happens next.

Also, don’t tell anyone else, but despite our care in maintaining all spiders in vials with a foam plug, or a larger container with closed lids, somehow babies are escaping, and we keep finding bits of the lab covered in webbing. Today it was the door to the incubator and the timed light. We caught the culprit for that — it was a tiny theridiidid spiderling who had built an elaborate web. We fed him as a reward.

I’m still hoping to walk in one day and find the entire lab cocooned in spider silk. My colleagues are probably not as eager as I am.

Asked. Answered.

I think his own words definitively answer that question.

This is not the first time Trump has gone on a racist tirade. Anderson Cooper, and other non-Fox-News announcers are reasonably intelligent people who ought to be capable of recognizing this crap, I don’t know why they pretend it’s some strangely peculiar assertion.

If you don’t like punching Nazis, you’re going to hate this

What do you think of a man who threw flares at ICE vehicles and buildings?

An armed man was fatally shot Saturday after throwing what authorities called “incendiary devices” at an immigration detention center in Washington state and trying to set a commercial-size propane tank on fire, according to Tacoma police.

About 4 a.m., 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen threw “lit objects” at buildings and at cars in a parking lot, police said, causing a vehicle to go up in flames. Court records show the man was arrested last year at a protest at the privately owned detention center, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the man an “anti-immigration enforcement protester.”

There’s an argument to be made that he was committing acts of violence and that he was a terrorist. I’d disagree; a terrorist is trying to intimidate civilians with fear, while Willem Van Spronsen was targeting the tools of institutional oppression to stop terror. Violent, yes; terrorism, no. Read further in the article, and buried in bland language is the purpose of his act.

The attack came as thousands protested at ICE facilities nationwide ahead of the agency’s planned mass arrests of undocumented immigrants on Sunday. The Trump administration has said it will target about 2,000 families for deportation, focusing on as many as 10 cities. Seattle is not among the cities reportedly being targeted.

The Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats is owned and operated for ICE by a private company called the GEO Group, according to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which puts the facility’s capacity at 1,575 — one of the biggest immigration detention centers in the country, the group says. As ICE faces calls to improve conditions for migrants in its custody, some have called on the government to stop using privately run detention centers.

There is the truly criminal act, the state terrorism we stand by and watch: private companies paid by the government to imprison innocents for being born in the ‘wrong’ place.

He wrote a farewell letter. He knew he was going to die.

He wrote,

there’s wrong and there’s right.
it’s time to take action against the forces of evil.

evil says one life is worth less than another.
evil says the flow of commerce is our purpose here.
evil says concentration camps for folks deemed lesser are necessary.
the handmaid of evil says the concentration camps should be more humane.
beware the centrist.

He was right. Will Van Spronsen is a human being who acted against evil.

ICE imprisons, tortures and deports hundreds of thousands of people and the brutality and scale of their harm is only escalating. We need every form of resistance, solidarity and passion to fight against ICE and the borders that they defend. Will gave his life fighting ICE we may never know what specifically was going through his head in the last hours of his life but we know that the NWDC [Northwest Detention Center] must be destroyed and the prisoners must be freed. We do not need heroes, only friends and comrades. Will was simply a human being, and we wish that he was still with us. It’s doubtless that the cops and the media will attempt to paint him as some sort of monster, but in reality he was a comrade who fought for many years for what he believed in and this morning he was killed doing what he loved; fighting for a better world.

I am totally out of sync with my community

I went to this movie last night.

I’ve never heard such vocal unanimity from the Morris people as we left after it was over.

“Worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said one attendee.

“I would have walked out halfway through if you weren’t watching it,” said another.

“What the hell did I just see,” someone chimed in.

I loved it!

It’s all deadpan humor and cynicism, mocking the genre and subverting expectations, with a plot that meanders meaninglessly, occasionally puncturing the fourth wall and letting the actors go full-on weird. The only resolution for anyone is ultimately being eaten. It’s a bitter commentary on capitalism, America, human shortsightedness, environmentalism, and the inevitable futility of battling stupidity. It’s my kind of movie.

But then, I’m a Jarmusch fan, which puts me in a minority already — Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Dead Man are two of my favorite films.

P.S. See? I don’t hate every movie I see at the theater.

P.P.S. I knew the Scots are all aliens.

Why, hello Mrs P. tep!

Today I’ve been prowling around, acting suspicious around my house, still trying to work out this macrophotography thing. I just now found a lovely Parasteatoda doing her business in a nook on the side of my house, so I had to snap a picture. My house has rather orange siding, which accounts for the warm tones of the background.

I caught her in the act of wrapping up her prey. The flies are everywhere today…eat more, ma’am. Many more.

Then I noticed in a little cranny another treasure — she has an egg sac nearby. Sorry to say, I’m going to steal it. More embryos for the development lab!

“We are all feminists now”?

According to Steven Pinker, at least. I guess he’s never looked at Reddit or YouTube or any online community that fails to expunge the riff-raff, where feminism is equated with cancer. Kate Manne really dismantles his claims and his oblivious arrogance here. He has some weird ideas about rape.

Pinker is also getting chewed out for his contribution to Epstein’s defense.

In other disturbing news, Harvard faculty kept right on meeting with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for raping children. Not only did Acosta give him a generous outcome, the faculty at our most prestigious university continued to treat him as a generous patron.

Gardens are savage, brutal places

Mary is almost as into the spider thing as I am, but while I’m specializing in dirty dark cobwebby garages, she’s cultivating a garden and letting me know when she spots the arachnid denizens of bright sunny spaces. So she tells me she’s spotted a pair of spiders on the pea plants, and she thought they might be mating. I toddled out with my camera to see what the fuss was about, and here’s the wee little yellow critter ambling about on a leaf. I’m going to say it’s a tetragnathid.

It kept going back to the other spider, but I couldn’t get a good look at its partner. I tried to get it a good angle.

Then, when I finally do get a good shot at what it has down there…oops. Definitely not mating. It’s killing and eating the other spider, which I still can’t identify, in part because it’s trussed up and getting gnawed on.

Should I be worried that my wife can’t tell the difference between making love and being murderized?