Crickets are bad, mmm-kay?

Disaster struck this weekend. I gave my fully-grown, big ol’ adult spiders crickets to eat. Now Vera is a monster: she just ropes ’em up, immobilizes them fully, and then bites them. So I was overconfident and gave crickets of the same size to Amanda and Xena.

The next day, Vera is a huge bloated sack of bug juice and her cricket is in fragments. Amanda and Xena are gone, and their crickets are sitting there smug and happy. Turns out crickets defend themselves by kicking predators, and poor Amanda and Xena were beaten to death and then eaten by the evil Gryllidae. This does not make me happy. I’ve got to find a safer food source. For now, I’m just giving the juveniles and the sole survivor lots of fruit flies. Death to all crickets!

In other spider news, I’ve been frustrated by the fact that none of them are producing eggs right now, and all the wild specimens have vanished from their usual haunts as winter descends upon us. Then, last night, I woke up in the wee hours with a sudden obvious thought.

Remember that movie, Silent Running?

There’s this scene where the space-going ecologist is concerned about how all the trees are losing their leaves, which are turning brown and falling off, and he hits the books trying to figure out what disease is killing his forests. And then he suddenly realizes, oh, autumn, seasons changing, all that, and I’m sitting in the audience thinking, you dope, of course, so he runs around setting up lights to create a growing season in the space domes. Yeah, I’m also a dope who didn’t think of that, and I should have, because I’ve got timers and lights for my fish rigged to put them on a 14/10 light/dark cycle. This is routine lab animal maintenance. D’oh!

So now I’m going into the lab this morning to put up lights and trick the spider colony into thinking it’s Spring, and time for love, by wiring up the incubator.

Family! This week!

Prepare for Thanksgiving week by listening to Public Radio! WHYY has an episode this week on families that includes me, which at least in the recorded bit was me arguing that human families are best looked at as social constructs, rather than predestined genetic assemblies. I’m not sure what parts the edited version retains, because I haven’t listened to it yet. I really can’t stand listening to myself. (Those YouTube videos I’ve been making are killing me, because I have to listen to me in order to edit them, which is one reason I’m late making another one. Editing my voice makes me cringe.)

Unfortunately, for Thanksgiving, two thirds of my children are too far away, and too busy with babies, to share a table with their feeble old parents. But on Wednesday I’m fetching my oldest boy and forcing him to comfort us in our dotage for a day. I’ll make a big ol’ Thanksgiving dinner, but he’s the kid who doesn’t eat. Skin and bones he is, I’ll have to nag him to put on a few ounces.

When this guy votes, he votes for Trump

Guaranteed.

Also, the Lord told him to write a book.

Happy International Men’s Day!

If you’re one of those people who whines at women’s events, when is men’s day?, you’re in luck. Today’s the day! Just remember that the meaning of the day is “focusing on men’s and boys’ health, improving gender relations, promoting gender equality, and highlighting male role models.” Those are all good and valuable goals.

So get to it!

I’ll get you started with suggestions for a few excellent role models who are manly men.

I’m sure you can think of others.

Humanity works hard to find ways to disappoint

Monday mornings are already bad, but can you handle even more horrible news? Orangutans are being captured in Borneo and sold into prostitution.

In an interview published in Taringa the veterinarian Karmele Llano denounced the finding in Borneo of a 12-year-old female orangutan named Pony, which had been completely shaved, washed and perfumed, and which had even been painted on her lips. The animal was chained to a bed, to allow it to be abused by customers of the brothel in a town in central Borneo (Indonesia) called Keremgpangi. According to Karmele Llano, they are mainly workers from the logging companies and palm oil plantations in the area.

The veterinarian recalls in her interview the difficult rescue of the animal: “When we tried to free her there was a revolt,They threatened us with knives and machetes. We had to resort to the state police, which sent about 30 agents to take Pony. “

Orangutans are also used in boxing matches.

So…humans are destroying their habitat, raping them, and forcing them to fight each other for our amusement. Wretched humanity, that we should bring such shame on our species.

She-Ra is pretty darned good

I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the new Netflix series, and I only did that because I was surprised at the vitriol it was getting from the usual suspects on YouTube. It’s feminisssst! The heroes breasts are too small! The Skwoos hate it. All that kind of nonsense from people who probably despised the original series. As I did.

I’m old, so it wasn’t part of my childhood, but it certainly was part of my children’s childhood. Both He-Man and She-Ra were badly animated cartoons designed specifically to sell toys, and they were wildly successful: we had all kinds of weird action figures cluttering up our house, like the memorable moss-covered guy who was heavily perfumed, the one with the head that rotated within its helmet, the skeleton man, and of course, the nearly naked bulgy-muscle guy with the big sword. I watched the shows with my kids, and they were perfectly predictable: there were the good guys who were good, and the bad guys who were bad, and the bad guys would be foiled at the end of the show, but not so irrevocably that they couldn’t restart from the same premise next week. I was unimpressed, but the kids were getting a lot of imaginative play out of it, so it was…fine. They grew out of it, too.

A reboot was not particularly interesting to me. But then I heard that the showrunner was Noelle Stevenson, and I love her work. Have you read Nimona? Fantastic stuff: she really tears up the stereotypes. It’s about a girl with magic powers who is sort of working as an underling to your standard sorceror with plans for world conquest, but all sides, the “good” guys and the “bad” guys, have depth and humor, and they actually have reasons for what they’re doing, and they’re not simply evil for evil’s sake. Stevenson is a writer who likes breaking lazy tropes and making you think about all her characters as people. And by people, I don’t mean they’re all the same — her characters are all diverse. Check out Lumberjanes to see what I mean.

So I watched it. Unlike the originals, the story lines are much more complex, but not so complex kids couldn’t follow them. Their resolution involves more than pulling out a magic sword and whomping the bad guys so that they slink back to their lair. And the characters are also more interesting — She-Ra starts out as Adora, who is a soldier in the bad guy army, whose best friend is a cat girl named Catra (the names tend to be comically on the nose; one of the good guys who is an archer is named “Bow”), who discovers that the other side isn’t a hive of villainy, as she was taught, and joins the forces of light (and finds a magic sword, of course). There’s this wonderful tension as she has grown apart from her bestest friend ever, and Catra is resentful and angry, and some of the best moments in the story are when Adora and Catra are in collision, yet still feeling affection for each other.

I was thinking the whole time that if He-Man’s virtue was in inspiring imaginative play, this show would have encouraged even richer play. I’ve got to call up the kids and say sorry, we’re rewinding everything by about 25-30 years, we’re going to reboot your childhoods. Although, actually, they did all turn out to be pretty good Essjooos anyway, so maybe it’s unnecessary. Also, we’ve got grandkids to inculcate tolerance and diversity and progressive values into already.

You don’t have to watch it. It is a kids’ show, aimed right at a very young audience, but it’s got a good, more complex dynamic that might appeal to older people, too. I only watched one episode to see what all the hullaballoo was about, but it was good enough that I watched a few more. And now I laugh at those strange, obsessed people moaning about the lost mammaries of She-Ra, and how a girl without big breasts is really a man and a lesbian, calling the cartoon you can see at the top of this page “ugly” and “gross”. It’s another lazy buttfucking of history by leftists, claims sad creepy beard-man who deplores the fact that girls and boys will have nothing to look forward to if we don’t set up busty blond women as an aspirational goal for all.

This is what it takes to wake people up to the fact that Bill Maher is a jerk?

He finally crossed a line: Maher finally sneered at something white men like, and the outrage has started to bubble to the surface. How dare he criticize Stan Lee and comic books?

That he’s an anti-vaxxer, that his whole smug schtick is to salt his panels with a couple of assholes and fan the flames…nah, that doesn’t matter. He can keep on inviting Jack Kingston, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and all the other people he loves because they’re famous, all fine. That he’s a not very funny talk show host who was never in the running for any of the big broadcast late night shows, even with their relatively low standards of humor, tells you he’s kind of a flop who ought, at best, to be running an unexceptional podcast with a declining audience, instead of getting his blah words highlighted on Raw Story as if they’re news every goddamn weekend.

I thought it was good that he fought back, briefly, against the bizarre popular notion that terrorists are cowards who hate freedom, but those glory days are done. Retire, Maher.

The backlash against debate is in full throttle

Good. Here’s another article exposing the facile shallowness of the “debate me” crowd.

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language — of all the endless combinations of words in all of history — “debate me” is the most badass.

Or that’s what a cohort of online dudes appear to believe. The way a drunk roughneck might square up to you for a fight in a seedy roadhouse, the “debate me” dude pops into your Twitter mentions to demand a formal argument. Ignoring that people debate shit on the internet as automatically as one might breathe or blink, he is oddly constrained by the notion that disagreement has rules, or at least a chivalrous code of honor befitting a pistol duel in the countryside. Simply tussling over this or that question is beneath him. Debate, meanwhile, is a gentleman’s contract, holy ground, a noble anachronism.

I also appreciate the categorization of two kinds of debates: the ones where it’s solely an appeal to emotion (ironically, most of the online objective reality gang’s outcomes rely entirely on emotion — see Ben Shapiro for on-point examples), and the ones that rely on formal technicalities.

Besides, it’s not as if the lad insistent on a volley of conflicting ideas is willing to be convinced by his rival. He wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t assured a victory, and so the provocation signals the egoist’s pride — as well as the almost charmingly naive certainty that competing ideologies can be vanquished by scoring enough points in a virtual joust. Of the two main models for American debate — political and extracurricular — he favors the airless academicism of the high school debate club, where he first learned some of his favorite fallacies: straw man, ad hominem, the appeal to authority. Whereas a presidential debate is decided on the intangibles, with voters swayed by gut reaction, the after-school debates play out in the technicalities, with naturally quarrelsome young men learning to fetishize what they consider their powers of logic and deduction. If they do well, they may conclude that others lack such faculties. Indeed, the “debate me” dude often behaves as if he’s the last “rational” person on Earth.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with debate: it turns discussion into a contest that requires some method of tallying up “points” to determine who “wins”, and the methods never rest on substance. Shouldn’t there be the equivalent of a TKO when someone lies or misinterprets a source, or doesn’t provide verifiable evidence, or just yells a conclusion? There are an awful lot of creationists and Republicans who’d be lying flat on the mat immediately after the opening bell, so no, those will never be criteria for success.