Good for surf-punk though.

Never saw a live armadillo before. I’ve seen them dead, a lot, on the side of the road because it seems like getting struck by motor vehicles is what they basically do. Dead armadillos look a great deal like deflated footballs. American footballs, not soccer balls. Don’t get me started. Actually, I saw one another time in Florida. But I never appreciated till this morning how incredibly cool looking they are. Like leather opossums. What I saw was a nine-banded armadillo. It was definitely not a screaming hairy armadillo. (Screaming Hairy Armadillos is a terrible name for a wedding band.)

Pep Talk

Maybe part of the reason everybody is feeling so anxious and fearful and sad these days (by everybody I mean me) is that we (meaning me) were raised by humans who didn’t want us to completely lose heart early on and so gave us the impression that though there had been some rough stretches, after the Emancipation Proclamation, polio vaccine, and settling that whole Hitler thing we could pretty much look forward to smooth sailing from here on out. Not so. I wish I could remember who wrote this: Our whole job is to “stand in the rubble and dream.”

Sixty years in socks is enough

It’s been 100 years since J. B. S. Haldane published his essay “On Being the Right Size,” wherein he explains why a mouse can’t be the size of an elephant. It’s because when you make something twice as big you multiply its volume eight times while increasing the cross-section of each bone just four times. A mouse even the size of a cow would collapse into a gooey mess. The idea that Haldane illustrated this by literally dropping a horse down a 1,000 foot mineshaft is at best a misinterpretation of the man’s work and at worst a vile slander.

you keep pointing to overwhelming evidence like it's proof

They did autopsies on 376 dead former football players (I guess none of the live ones would consent to it) and found that 345 of them had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy which led some researchers to conclude that repeated vigorous blows to the head might be bad for your brain. Inevitably, pearl-clutching bleeding hearts are jumping to the conclusion that physical violence may possibly have some negative health consequences. But come on. Correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. Isn’t it just as likely that having a terrible brain disease like C.T.E. would lead a person to choose gridiron football as a career?

widening gyre

Absolute chaos. Just listen to this: “Within the world of taxonomy, the stable 'Classical System' of Michaelsen (1900) and Stephenson (1930) was gradually eroded by the controversy over how to classify earthworms, such that Fender and McKey-Fender (1990) went so far as to say, ‘The family-level classification of the megascolecid earthworms is in chaos.’” If this doesn’t shake you to your very core you’re made of some pretty stern stuff. Then this: “An unidentified Tasmanian earthworm shown growing a replacement head has been reported.” That’s just sloppy reporting. Get the earthworm’s name, dammit. We’re not here to publish unsubstantiated hearsay.

We need to talk.

First of all, try to calm down. Babbling and flailing like that, all you’re achieving is to make me nervous and I have my own concerns to worry about. Deep breaths. That’s it. Think things through. Try to look at the big picture and your place in it. It’s not like throwing your weight around will make a bit of difference. The boat has about a 52,000 ton edge on you and it’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. So. Now. If it pleases you to do so, this is as good a time as any to rearrange the deckchairs. 

Just to clarify,

I like monster movies if by that term you mean a big foam rubber biped stomping around causing HO-scale oil refineries to burst spectacularly into orange flame. I don’t like actual horror movies since real life is all I need to often feel afraid and disgusted. James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein is more atmospheric than scary. It’s famous for Colin Clive exclaiming “It’s alive!” and that cool part where three sequential flat cuts make the monster bigger and bigger. To a grownup, the only really horrific scene is the man walking through the village with the dead child in his arms.