Eew

Here’s a sentence I never dreamed I’d find myself writing: The Stigmatomma pluto is a species of ant in the subfamily Amblyoponinae, endemic to the unburned savannas of central Ivory Coast, which feeds solely on geophilomorph centipedes. Believe me, I’m as shocked as you are. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Geophilomorphs are sluggish burrowing centipedes. They are not those incredibly fast-moving hairy-looking things that you see them on a basement wall out the corner of your eye and you go “Eew!” and drop the flashlight and bump your head on a joist. I bet nobody eats those.

Prime suspect

Does it really take all kinds? At the top of the heap we got this creepy bald-headed guy who figured a way to get so obscenely rich peddling the products of Asian slave labor at prices low enough to put the final nails in small town Main Street that he could build his own space rocket, a conveyance so priapic in appearance I’m not sure we ought to let the kids see it, while meanwhile down here we got people who can’t afford their blood thinner prescriptions cracking open those black plastic rat traps for a lick of free warfarin.

Notes from under the underground

I hear there’s a new band that plays a nano-genre so narrow that their only single has no flip side and is so obscure you literally can’t find it anywhere. There is not one single human hip enough to be their fan. Anybody who tells you they are is lying. They don’t even have a name, and the members know neither one other nor that they are in the group. For all they know, their tour is coming to your town soon. For all you know, you’ll be attending. This is absolutely brilliant marketing; it’s all about creating a buzz.

Possibly on Planet X

Here’s a real good way to come up with a bad idea. First, decide what you want to be true. Then look for evidence that supports your belief. If nothing shows up, invent an invisible undetectable undisprovable factor that makes you right. This is nothing new; it’s how religion and politics work now and have always worked. But science is supposed to be different. Are there any cosmologists reading this? Because I think I know where all the dark matter might be. I think you should look again real hard wherever it is you keep the phlogiston and the aether.

but not kayaks

There are some things everybody, or pretty much everybody, agrees are cool. A ’65 Mustang or Thelonious Monk, for instance. Then there are things some people think are cool but others disagree, sometimes strongly, like Billy Joel or chukka boots. There are things like toaster ovens, little cigars with the white plastic mouth thingy, water skiing, Louis L’Amour books, that even the people who enjoy them have to admit are not actually cool. Then there are things so wildly uncool that they sort of lap themselves and achieve backdoor hipness. I’m thinking specifically of shoe trees, coleslaw, and pontoon boats.

"Untitled" is a title, right?

Imagine waking up and knowing exactly what you needed to achieve that day. I don’t mean like “I need to clean up this desk.” I mean your limbic system screaming like a bunny in a vise, insisting that you do what it wants or it will drive you into a babbling state of drooling lunacy. Opioids will do that for you. I’m not trying to encourage drug addiction. I’m not suggesting it’s a good thing. I’m just pointing out that, like war, it has the capacity to give life meaning and purpose. In that sense, it really does solve everything.

The Frontiers of Research

Fernando Colchero of the University of Southern Denmark (Havarti grits, y’all!) and Susan Alberts of Duke University in North Carolina are the leads on a new study that compares death statistics from around the world. What they found is that as life expectancy in a population increases, so does lifespan equality. So basically, when you improve nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare, more people get to live to the maximum possible age, which remains the invariant. I’m in favor of science. I want these nice folks to get tenure. But who didn’t know we were all going to get old and die?