Commenter Archive

A couple quick thoughts, from a decided non-expert who just tends to like "cute" movies:

1. I was apprehensive about the movie Paddington. I had loved the books as a child, and was afraid they'd not do justice to them, and insert a lot of bathroom humor. They actually didn't, and the movie feels faithful to the books while also being different to them.

2. There is a v. short Michael Bond (Paddington's creator) cameo in the first movie (I think he passed away before Paddington 2 began filming) and when I saw him and was like "Is that....?" I realized if it had his blessing, it's probably not a travesty. And no, it is not.

3. Most of all, what I like about movies like this - and even much, much lesser "kids'" movies (I watched part of "Sing!" yesterday afternoon) is that they do not buy into the idea of "relentless bleakness is sophisticated." Especially after the past couple years I've had (losing a parent, having several friends die in quick succession, and then the hell of 2020 we all lived through), I can't tolerate bleakness. The Paddington movies are cozy without being excessively twee and for me they hit the exact right spot for "I need comfort and a movie that gives a feeling of family." The fundamental need for a "happily ever after" is something a lot of people (definitely me) do not grow out of.

they are also visually interesting movies - as you noted with the tree on the wall. And the color palette is soothing; that matters to me.

It makes me happy that these are good; that for once something I loved in book form as a child got a good movie representation.

LF4: it does seem strange, and I wonder if there WERE some instances of "brushing scam" and similar mixed in with all the forgotten orders.

I remember the news story and how first people thought it was some kind of really nefarious doings (trying to poison US farming with engineered seeds) that eventually defaulted to "oh it's some kind of a scam to SEO-promote their business" and it seems really....anticlimactic....to learn that it was probably (mostly?) people who ordered a bunch of stuff randomly online and forgot about it because international shipping was so snarled up it took months?

I dunno. I get having "pandemic brain," I am still suffering from it (I have to keep extensive lists of what I need to do, never had to do that before), but the couple times I ordered something that didn't show up until weeks and weeks later, and I didn't remember exactly what it was (happened a few times with books, the package would show up and I'd be like "what was this now?"), as soon as I opened it I was like "oh yeah, i remember ordering that." It still happens with books I pre-order from Bookshop; in some cases it'll be six months before it comes out and I'll have forgotten I ordered it until it shows up.

I mean, maybe it wasn't a massive coordinated scam operation or anything, but.....it still seems odd that it was seeds, and that it was that many people (And that it was through Amazon? I would never think of ordering seeds from them. Burpee's or Gurney's, yes. But maybe there were bad enough shortages last year? I didn't mail order any seeds from Burpee's last year, in fact, I usually buy seeds locally from a store)

also wonder if there's some overlap with LF5 on this.

we had the proto-organic kind, the "real fruit juice pops." Lemon ones are pretty good, some of the berry ones are pretty good. Though we mostly made them *ourselves* from juice - my mom had a little set of molds, the plastic "holders," I remember, had cut out animal shapes in the handles.

they were, of course, cheaper than the store bought and I thought worse (though really they were probably *better* because the flavors were real). They were also about 1/3 the size of a standard Popsicle.

We never had ice cream trucks in my neighborhood as a kid. I think they were actually banned? Or maybe, the abduction panic of the late 70s/early 80s shut a lot of that down. At any rate, it's not something I have childhood experience with so I have no happy memories to conjure up when the truck comes out here, playing its tinny song (Still "Turkey in the Straw" here, though I know some groups have declared that song problematic and in need of replacement, literally my only association with it is "it's the ice cream truck song" or "it's something a very beginning music student learns to play")

I will say as an adult with money and the ability to say "yeah it's okay to have something sugary once in a while" I do sometimes go to one of the local "snowball" trailers here and get a shaved ice. I usually get Wonder Woman flavor, which is actually sort of a pina colada flavor (most of the flavors are named for the syrup colors used - this is a red and blue coconut and a golden syrup that's probably the pineapple). I'm not quite brave enough to try some of the more outre concoctions (they have a pickle juice one, and I don't know if it's literal pickle juice, or just called that)

If the second one is the guy's girlfriend or much younger wife, yeah, I could see it.

if it's his kid? Not at all.

Probably gonna be recuperating from today's work - one of the quirks of my city is that Bulky Waste/Yard Waste pickup is only once a month, it's on a Saturday (first Saturday if it's not a holiday weekend, second Saturday otherwise) and you have to call in advance to tell them you are putting stuff out. Oh, and you can't put stuff to the curb more than 24 hours before they pick it up.

So today was cut all the shrubbery day (and also gather up the stuff I had trimmed before and stacked on a tarp in a corner of the backyard). Also put down a couple broken lamps and the old vacuum that the motor had burned out on. Sometimes people come through early and "pick" that kind of stuff - if it's someone who can fix it, more power to them; if it's someone selling it "as is" at one of the eternal "yard sales" in town (where it's also rumored that if something's stolen out of your yard - it's happened to me - that's where it winds up), then buyer beware.

So it was maybe about five hours working, total, plus maybe a bit more gathering up the stuff I had already cut and hauling it to the curb? I will probably be sore tomorrow.

I also found some poison ivy. I tried to avoid touching it and cut it while wearing gloves but sometimes it's hard to avoid exposure in cases like that. I just hope I didn't forget and use my hand to wipe sweat off my brow before I had washed it...

Next week has some....effortful things (the biggest one being: I've been asked to read Scripture and "say some words" at the interment of ashes of someone I knew who died back in 2019. The people higher on the "food chain" in church who would have known her are THEMSELVES now deceased.....so it falls to me. I am not exactly looking forward to it, but I felt also like I could not graciously say no)

ThTh2: I am trying to negotiate with myself the whole "should I mask in class this fall"? thing. Our mask mandate has been lifted, and selfishly, I'd love to be able to teach without a mask (especially on our super humid days, especially in the rooms where the AC has the tendency to go out). But I also know that even though I'm vaxxed, I could be one of the "lucky" (as you put it) 10%, and I'd feel terrible to learn that I had an immunocompromised student I made sick.

Then again: I have faith in the vaccine protecting me, and also - I don't GO anywhere. I don't hang out in crowded clubs, if I go to a store these days it's at a slow time and I wear a mask in the store. So I don't know.

this is all a giant What We Owe To Each Other problem, I guess, and my bar for What I Owe seems to be higher than that of a lot of my fellow citizens.

I suppose also my continuing to mask might help morally support those who feel they have to in class? I can't quite imagine any of our students being big enough jerks to harass a mask-wearer, but it's a bit world and I've learned this past year there are more a(pple)holes in it than I had thought possible before.

As for improving ventilation, which I would love to see? There's no money for that. There's never any money for anything like that.

(Frankly, I wish that I had someone much wiser than I am tell me either to mask or not. I have had to make too many hard decisions this past year and I am burned out on these kind of "there is no clear best choice" choices)

Baking blueberry muffins for indepedence day breakfast at church. Also probably resting up; I suspect the usual suspects in my neighborhood will be setting off the big booms as soon as the rain goes away. I try not to be too much of a grinch about this but I dislike loud noises and don't have anywhere (like a basement, for example) that I can get away from them.

Did "big grocery shopping" (aka driving into Texas instead of doing what I can locally) yesterday. Went to the Target, had a flashback to February 2020, when I stopped mid-aisle and thought "I am hearing about this new virus in Asia, and Australians apparently having a hard time getting TP" and bought a 24-pack.

I bought a 12-pack yesterday. Case counts are going up regionally and while they keep reassuring us that at least 90% of those case counts are unvaccinated folks, still.....I have a weird "stampede's a-comin'" feeling (I also counted up how many canned goods I had yesterday; I have enough currently). I hope I'm wrong but the past year taught me that paranoia doesn't necessarily mean they're not out to get you.

it's also just super humid here and my allergies (well, I HOPE they are allergies) have kicked back in. Lots of sneezing and sinus pain and even a little vertigo related to the sinus issues. f

And the internal-to-Zoom "virtual whiteboard" is hot garbage. I had to use it during the enforced teach-from-home time for one of my classes and people complained they could not read my writing because the white board is so small.

If I had to teach from home for an extended time, as I said, the first choice would be a separate shed where I could put up a white board, second choice would be to get a big one on a stand and just.....sacrifice more or my living room :(

and that's not even getting into the issue of "how the hell do you teach a field organism-identification lab virtually?"

I also wonder if places going fully WFH are going to do some kind of cost-sharing plan, doling out some of what they save in rent and electricity and things like T1 lines, stuff that may have been offloaded onto the person working from home - at any rate, people WFH are going to probably see their electrical bills go up a little.

I would want my workplace to pay me some kind of 'rent" either in money or reduced duties if I had to turn over a corner of my living room to be a "home office" forever. I know one can THEORETICALLY write off an office space on one's taxes but my dad tried it a couple years when he was doing geological consulting (mostly work on water wells) and he got audited every time and at least once the deduction was denied.

I dunno. I do not want to WFH (I am a college professor). As I said elsewhere, part of it is it's harder for me to teach effectively in that setting (no real whiteboard, I am using a small corner of my living room in my small house). Part of it is the feeling of "my workplace has now invaded my home, so I am working 24/7 now."

Even being on campus, but with the students remote, isn't that good - when I can't see people's faces and I can only sort-of hear them speaking to me through their phones, communication is stilted and bad.

I get that some people love WFH but I assume either they had toxic colleagues and/or they have a really large house where they can devote an entire room to being a workspace - I can't do that, so instead I have to give over part of my already-too-small-house to being a workstation of sorts. If I had to do this forever I'd either quit, or have a climate-controlled and electrified outbuilding built to use as a home office, just to get the psychological work/home separation back.

But there are education pundits talking about how we should "virtualize" almost all learning and I am really not here for that.

Two anecdotal things for me:

- Going back out to the local Lowe's, the only real large home-supplies concern in town: their selection has become incredibly restricted. Not just down to one brand of things in some cases, down to one variety of one brand. And there are still shortages of odd things in the grocery store and other places.

- Taking a train trip to visit my mom for the first time in 15 months, meals are now "flex meals" - basically Lean Cuisine brought to your compartment (and I understand it's even rougher for coach passengers). Supposedly some runs are getting full meal service back but apparently not the one I routinely take.

A number of small businesses in my region have closed, I think a few restaurants have realized they can do carry-out only with less staff and so they're sticking with that as long as they possibly can.

I said, back mid-pandemic, that "when it's finally really safe, I am going somewhere, somewhere with either nice hiking or nice shopping, and I am staying in a Fancy Hotel that has room service, and enjoy my Fancy Hotel and get room service in my room every night for dinner" but now that....may not happen? Like, ever?

I guess the "back" means "back to the usual grind," not "back with the nice things that were in the before-times." Then again, given how people in my region have acted during all this,, I sincerely doubt I will be eating a meal INSIDE a restaurant any time soon or going to a movie in a theater any time soon.

I've always had a soft spot for Weird Al, even going back to the days of "My Bologna." I remember when it was deeply uncool to like his music. I remember the people who were saying he'd be a flash in the pan....and he's outlasted some of the bands he parodied. I wonder if the intentionally self-deprecating tour titles he chooses are partly key to his longevity: he doesn't take himself too seriously and genuinely enjoys what he's doing.

The other secret is it takes REAL SMARTS to be able to parody as well, and as consistently, as he has. Man's brilliant.

ISTG I have lost 15 people I cared about in the past 3 years. I'm afraid that soon I won't have anyone LEFT.

Also I feel sad to think that maybe when *I* die, there won't be anyone left to mourn me. That shouldn't matter, but it does.

Yeah, we experienced a form of that, too - huge storms Monday (I hadn't planned fieldwork anyway - had a dental checkup that ate much of the morning) and it was COLD Monday afternoon. Was still cool out Tuesday morning so I went out and did as much of the remaining fieldwork as I possibly could that day (I finished it yesterday but yesterday's work nearly finished me).

One thing I remember from being a kid in the Great Lakes region was that periodically we could get cool fronts in the summer, and at any rate, most nights cooled down into the 50s or 60s, and it was just nice. The world felt made-new overnight, and you had a few hours in the morning if you had strenuous work to do outside. Here, it doesn't cool down overnight most nights in the summer - usually it's still 80F or sometimes even above when I walk out the door and I admit my desire to DO things takes a serious hit when I feel that stale muggy air.

I want to do something "fun" today, partly in celebration of finishing my fieldwork, partly just because I need the distraction, but I cannot think of anything. Too hot out to hike, the place I might most likely drive to do stuff, there's horrific construction between here and there, and I kind of live in a gravity well where there are very few things to do within a half hour drive of where I live.

Tomorrow I have to serve at a funeral for a person that i still can't believe has died, and what's more, for the lunch I am serving at, I've been asked to make one of her "famous" dishes from her recipe and I know it won't be as good as hers....

this is the kind of thing Ockham's Razor was made for. 'Course most of the people posting manifestoey stuff online have never heard of it.

Dude killed himself because he couldn't face the humiliation of extradition and (I presume) federal prison. It would take a LOT, a LOT a LOT, to convince me otherwise.

the obesity thing: some have posited that some percentage of the "poor health outcomes" in heavier (if not "morbidly obese") people is that they tend to avoid doctors and while anecdote =/= data, that seems to ring true to me - I went from 1999 to 2012 (when I was refused from giving blood twice because my blood pressure was too high) without seeing a doctor or having a regular doctor, because I went in for a flu shot to a local physician and she wanted to write me a prescription for weight loss medications. (I am heavy, but not obese, and I work out and strive to eat healthfully).

I was fortunate more recently to find a doctor who (mostly) doesn't make a deal about my weight. (She did mention the 10 or so pounds I gained - which I have since lost - during the pandemic). But yeah, she has regularly commented my blood numbers are better than hers, and that's the measure of health she prefers to go by. Also the fact that I do the equivalent of a 5K jog (just in a less-high-impact way) most days of the week.

By the most restrictive charts, I should weigh about 140; I was 140 lbs last when Reagan was in office.

As a college prof who (some semesters) has a weekday afternoon totally open (no classes or office hours), I often designate that as my errand-day instead of Saturdays because places here are totally slammed on Saturdays and often the people working counters are grumpy (well, I suppose you would be, too, if you were slammed).

I don't teach summers so I can go do grocery shopping on a Thursday if I want, or go file paperwork somewhere on a Monday afternoon. It's much nicer and I feel like working people should get a (staggered, so not everyone has the same day) weekday AT LEAST half off for this purpose

Slowly circling around deep cleaning my house after almost a year of doing the bare minimum cleaning (because I was probably depressed during the pandemic, and just lacked the executive function to, and also, who was going to come to my house to see how bad it was?).

got the kitchen and part of the living room done, but in the dining room got derailed reorganizing my approximately 100 cookbooks, which live on a bank of bookshelves in the dining room.I have to make space for the German and traditional-Mexican cookbook I ganked from my mother's when she said "I'm just gonna donate these books, any you want?"

tomorrow is another workday at church, but that's just the morning. Also if I can get myself out of bed early enough I should mow the lawn before that

My colleagues aren't as much my friends as I once thought they were (I reached out to a couple when I was in an absolute pit of isolation mid-pandemic, and never heard back) but still, I very much prefer in-office working to remote working. I can only assume the remote workers have a bigger house than I do and didn't have to repurpose a corner of their living room.

I also did not like how work *psychologically* invaded my home. I don't think my poor sleep during 2020 was JUST worrying about the pandemic; I think part of it was the feeling that my house was also now my workplace and there was NO ESCAPE.

as soon as I could go back to the office/lab, I did, and it made a big difference. For me home is for being at home, work is for working, and the two streams should not be crossed.

I'm hoping once we get back more fully in-person, maybe the work-friendships will rekindle but there are a couple people I was friendly with who went 100% online for this whole academic year and I missed them. I assume they didn't miss me, though :(

fistbump of solidarity for NordikTrak owners though.

I am fat, and I hate the "ha ha that terrible person is fat and fat people are terrible" takes. I think there's ample bad behavior under someone's control to criticize them for. (I once "called" a colleague on making fat jokes in my presence, and he fundamentally responded "oh but you're one of the GOOD ones" and I don't even know what he meant by that. Because I work out? Because I worry about being fat? I don't know).

But yeah, my general feeling is that for "bad" people there is sufficient in their attitudes or behavior you can criticize without fundamentally going "ha ha, you're ugly and your mama dresses you funny"

Also green screens don't always work that great; after a year of AAUW meetings over Zoom I saw enough people disappear weirdly into whatever background they chose that I'd rather just see someone's messy living room or whatever without the uncanny valley effect of someone temporarily losing an arm to the ocean at Cabo.

Went out yesterday and did my first "heavy" fieldwork (lots of walking over uneven ground, lots of stooping to observe the plants and collect data). I'm a little sore this morning but not as sore as I expected to be. (I work out, but it's indoors, and walking over uneven ground where you can't really *see* where you're stepping because of tall vegetation leads to some jolts to the hips and knees).

it's good to be back doing it but I don't love Oklahoma summers; it was already 90 when I was leaving the site around 10 am.

I gotta go mow the lawn this morning, then am running down to a N. Texas quilt shop because I have a top I took in a couple months ago for quilting that's ready to pick up. Might also run over to the Brookshire's for better grocery shopping than can be had locally.

Tomorrow is online Knit Club, but before that - a cleaning and yardwork workday at church, I guess. Not sure what I'll volunteer to do; I don't think climbing the big tall ladder to replace lightbulbs in the sanctuary is something I want to be doing. I'm hoping there's something that needs cleaning; I can do that.

in re your footnote #2: what if there's some kind of larger scale cyclic pattern in male fertility? Like, peaks and valleys every 40 years or so? Other mammals show cyclic population fluctuations (which are also poorly understood, AFAIK - at one time people were claiming the 11 year arctic hare cycle seemed to synch up with the sunspot cycle, and I am super suspicious of anything proposed as 'causative" that has no clear direct action on the thing it's supposed to be causing).

I wonder if anyone has gone back and looked at per capita birthrates over time to see if there are any cyclic patterns. There'd be a lot of confounding factors though....

I think also for a lot of us, it's gonna just take a while, psychologically. Like, my university dropped its mask mandate at the end of spring semester (at least for the vaccinated) and there's almost no one here (only two in-person summer classes going) and yet I feel practically criminal walking down the hall to the loo without a mask on.

And I live in a mask-averse part of the country! I was in Illinois recently, they had just dropped any mask mandates for the fully vaccinated, and still people in the grocery store (who were clearly of an age to have been vaccinated, and I doubt all of them had autoimmune diseases or similar) were masked to a higher degree than where I live (OK) at the height of the pandemic before vaccines.

I think I spent so much time (about a year - until I was fully vaccinated) feeling like the ONLY way I could protect myself was MYSELF - masking and not going out - that "re-entry" is hard for me now.

I still haven't gone into a store unmasked. I did get a haircut without one but it was a small shop and all the hairdressers had been vaccinated.

I don't even know what our percentage in Oklahoma is.

I dunno. The fact that a workplace might recognize that people aren't interchangeable cogs that are all the same is probably a good thing. Like, I am fine with publicly speaking on something I've had a chance to prepare a talk over, but I cannot schmooze at a get-together to save my life. In some industries that might be career-ending. And more importantly to me (at least): schmoozing and that kind of thinly-disguised kissing-up to those with power is something I find deeply uncomfortable, just like I find "selling myself" deeply uncomfortable. Some bosses would argue "grow up and get over it, you have to do this, either do it or quit"

there was a story out in the 1970s called "The Animals' School" that was aimed at the idea that everyone has strengths and weaknesses and forcing everyone to try to become strong in a small subset of areas may weaken them in their true strengths and also means they'll never really be good at that area (example in the story: forcing ducks to learn to climb a tree - not saying "get up into the tree how you can" and allowing them to fly, but forcing them to climb, which tore up their feet, and led them to becoming worse swimmers...)

So while over use of personality testing is bad, treating it like received wisdom is bad, it's also bad to go the other way, I guess. Fortunately some workplaces allow people to develop their strengths and don't force everyone into a uniform mold

Maybe K-12? I really loathed it. If I can't be around my students in person it feels like "what's even the point?" I felt like very little actual learning happened. (I teach mostly lab sciences)