Home Alive

 I made it home ahead of the storm, in case any of you were fretting!

From the Party

 There was cake!

Also I got a clock, which I guess is the modern equivalent of a gold watch.

Last Day of Teaching

It's my last day of teaching. There's also a party, to celebrate my escape. I find myself ambivalent. On the one hand, I have had enough of teaching and it is definitely time to leave. On the other hand, what am I if not a professor of English?

I guess we'll find out.

When I was in graduate school, and as a young professor, I used to say, "All I want out of life is day after day with nothing planned. Is that so much to ask?"

Oh, and there is a huuuuge storm heading through Arkansas. It looks like it will be over before I start my drive back up the mountain, but of course I am fretting. It would be deeply ironic if I died in a tornado on my last day of work.

XKCD Stings Today

 The original is here.

Disaster Relief

So remember that talking point before the election, when Trump's regime was claiming Biden diverted FEMA money* to send illegal immigrants money? Such outrage from the Right. Such exclaiming about brown people eating the dogs and cats while Biden was paying their rent.

We had tornados rip through Arkansas on Easter Sunday, and another set just before that. To her credit, Sarah Huckleberry Sanders applied for disaster relief.

Trump has denied it. You can't, after all, fund FEMA and give billionaires huge tax breaks at the same time.

As you can imagine, this has our local MAGA Republicans outraged. The hyena isn't supposed to eat THEIR faces. Tom Cotton, among others, has written a letter begging Trump to reconsider. Better polish up those boot-licking skills, Tom, you're gonna need them.

Easter Sunday tornado hit about a mile from my house

*Biden did no such thing, of course. The FEMA money went to the victims of the flood. As we should know by now, every accusation from today's conservatives is actually a confession. They accuse because that is what they are doing, or would do if they had the chance. See also: accusing trans people and drag queens of pedophilia and assaulting women.

What I Like about Living in Fayetteville So Far

 (1) The weather. We're only fifty miles north of where we used to live, but the weather is so much better. Clearer, crisper air, about five degrees cooler on the average, and one beautiful day after the next. Well, we did have that tiny tornado on Easter Sunday. But other than that!

(2) The library. So many books! Also, it's three stories tall and I need books on all three levels (first floor is where the holds are picked up, second is the fiction, third is the large print and non-fiction), so why join a gym when I can just go to the library. 

Downside: everyone in town loves the library as much as I do, as it not only has a ton of books but also programs for every age group -- story hour, cooking classes, yoga -- all day long. So sometimes it is not just hard but impossible to find parking at the library, despite the three-story parking garage and auxiliary parking out back. I mean, this is good, I love a city where people love the library; but it's a little frustrating when I have to leave without going in because I can't park.

(3) The Co-Op, or Ozark Natural Foods Co-op. Locally owned and supported by residents, the Co-Op provides "locally grown, responsibly sourced" food, some of it from local farmers and artisans. I could live on their chicken pies. The kid says I already do.

(4) The infrastructure. Fayetteville is inhabited by people who care about the community. It's a city being built for and run by the people (who are pretty much 90% progressive). So we have bike and walking trails and parks everywhere, recycling not just permitted by encouraged, green spaces (though not as many as there used to be), that library, and a planning board that thinks about the aesthetics of the town, not just giving tax breaks to billionaires. You don't know what most cities are like until you live in a city that makes sense.

There's also free public transit, funded by the university and the city, but only in certain areas.  If you don't happen to live in those areas, the free public transit isn't that useful. Nor does it really keep students from bringing their cars to school and then driving like toddlers around the city, sadly. (We do have a lot of rich kids from Texas whose daddies have bought them GIANT trucks and SUVs to tool around town in, and like many 18 year olds they have no sense of self-preservation.)

(5) The variety of restaurants. In Fort Smith, we had one good restaurant -- Las Americas -- and a couple of burger joints that were okay. The Chinese food sucked, the pizza sucked, the general American food restaurants were mediocre. Here, these are so many good restaurants that we are hard pressed to choose what we want. And there are other good ones we haven't even tried. Excellent pizza, outstanding Chinese food, diners, breakfast places. Amazing.

(6) The university. I'll admit I've only skirted the edge of this resource. Come fall, I plan to be studying Greek and Latin there. And there's a theater, a huge library, museums, an immense gym -- all of this will be accessible to me once I'm a student. Cannot wait.

(7) Bookstores. All Fort Smith had was Bibles a Million. Here, there's the Dickson Street Bookstore, as well as a Barnes and Noble, and several smaller secondhand shops. With the library, though I have less need of bookstores. And my purchases from Thrift Books have plummeted.

(8) Jeni's Ice cream. I can get it via Whole Foods but also through my local Harps. The kid accuses me of being obsessed, and I do admit I tend to horde pints of it. My favorites at the moment are the Cold Brew and Coconut Milk; Milk Chocolate; Darkest chocolate; Brown Butter Brickle; and Boston Cream pie. However, Jeni's is coming out with new flavors, which I await in anticipation.

(9) Bird song. There are so many more birds here. I love their singing, especially in the morning, though they sing all day. A hawk hunts the green space behind the house. Watching him hunt is beautiful. There's a rooster living next door, whose crowing charms me. There are more insects here too, which is why there are more birds, I suspect. Fort Smith residents tended to drench their yards with Round-Up, which killed off the insects, and maybe the birds that ate them. Though maybe the birds just left for better fields -- I did used to see birds in the park down by the river there.

(10) The children. There are children here, and they play outside. I could go weeks without seeing a child outside in the Fort. The kids here walk home from school, which is possible because most of the neighborhoods here have sidewalks. An ice cream truck trawls my neighborhood every day around 4:00. An ice cream truck! Do you know how long it's been since I saw one of those?

(11) Dogs. Partly this is because I live by the dog park, but I'm seeing so many dogs. All on leashes, I might add, again opposed to the Fort, where people let their dogs run wild. Also, hardly any of them are pit bulls. 

(12) My new house. It's on this quiet street not too far from a dog park. I have a deck. I have that marvelous view off the deck, of the green space behind the house. This neighborhood is also so quiet at night. It's wonderful. 

Junti Contemplates the Green Space

The Trade Off

 From over at Alas, A Blog:

I stay off of Twitter these days, because it's 90% ads and 8% hate and silly misinformation, with only 2% posts anyone sane would care to read, but from what I can tell, this is absolutely accurate. Most people are bewildered or angry about the tariffs and the tax cuts for Elon, but so long as Trump lets them hate trans people and immigrants, it's fine.

Why Trump Supporters Still Support Him

The fact is, they think they're immune from the actions taken by the Trump regime. They think the hyenas aren't going to eat their faces.

Think about what that means. 

It means they're fine if these things happen to us. If my kid is arrested or assaulted for doing something like pissing in the wrong bathroom, that is fine with them. If my kid's professor or friend or neighbor is deported because they're Hispanic or Muslim, that's fine with them. If you or your spouse or your friend gets fired for being "woke," that's fine too. 

That's what they want to happen. 

If your neighbor or you, for that matter, if you're arrested because you supported the wrong person in the latest election, or if your business collapses because people can't afford to buy things, that's great! If your disabled child can't get the help they need because Trump's regime cut funding to your public school, as far as they're concerned, that's wonderful. If your kid dies because you can't afford the health care they need, hey, shouldn't have been born poor or "weak," should they?

When it happens to them, you might ask, will they be sorry? Well, they'll be sorry for themselves. But they're still going to say fuck you, because you had it coming. 

Dr Skull's Health Improves and I get a Tasty Dinner

 The pain clinic put Dr. Skull on steroids, which has improved his pain level so much that he was able to cook dinner for me for the first time in months. Chicken Marsala, mushrooms, asparagus, bread, and Death Water. This is the high life, y'all.

What Am I Even DOING with My Time

(1) My kid and his husband are moving into a townhouse. Their current place is 441 square feet, and their kitchen has no drawers. The new place has no washer/dryer, but there's a laundromat literally half a block away. Anyway, I'm only ancillary to this move, but it's still been occupying some of my time.

(2) Home Repair. We've been putting in a walk-in shower, because Dr. Skull has trouble using tub-showers anymore. His back injury precludes stepping in and out of tubs. I've been helping him in and out, but that's a short term stop gap. The walk-in shower is nice, and we hired a contractor to handle all the various plumbers and so on, but MAN it's a lot of work on my end even so.

(3) Medicare. I've almost got everything worked out, but again, a lot of work on my end.

(4) Reading for and writing reviews. This is fun work, but it's still work.

(5) GRADING PAPERS. This is the last set of comp papers I will ever have to grade. That is all that is keeping me going at the moment.

(6) Various medical and dental appointments. Most of these are for Dr. Skull, and one of the doctors is located in Fort Smith, which means a lot of driving.

(7) The current political situation. Contacting my reps daily. I'm pretty sure it's doing no good at all -- they keep sending me responses telling me I'm wrong and to stop worrying my pretty little head. But I persevere. I was glad to see the Supreme Court standing up to Trump. And of course I continue to donate to the ACLU, which is doing stellar work.

Ugh

I just realized that if I retire I have to clean my office out.

Three More Weeks

Three more weeks until the end of the semester. Well, four, if we're counting exam week.

Can I make it?

It's hard to say. I'm grading the major papers for my Comp I classes and HONESTLY.

Happy Pesach!

Tonight is the first night of Passover. I'm doing much of the cooking this year, since Dr. Skull is not able to stand or to grip things well. He did make the broth for the matzo ball soup, and he is supervising me on several other dishes. What are we having?

• Matzo ball soup
• Roasted chicken
• Potato kugel (made with actual schmaltz)
• Grilled asparagus
• KFP matzos
• Several desserts of affliction, including candy fruit slices, macaroons, and KFP chocolate cake
• KFP wine (not Manischewitz, actual wine, which is available here in our new city)

The kids and Uncle Charger are coming to the Seder. I'll share pix if I remember to take any.

Chag sameach! Gut Yontif! Don't forget to throw out your yeasted things*!

*We did not throw out our yeasted things.

That's Professor Emeritus to You

The university board of trustees has granted me Emeritus status. The main benefit to me at the moment is I get to keep my university email. Yay!

STOP THE CHILD ABUSE

 A cartoon:

(Transcript: First panel: A woman wearing a teeshirt that says "Adult Human Female" is practically sobbing with outrage. She says, "We need to act to ban trans care and make sure children develop naturally and healthily!" Next panel: a woman gobbling a burger and fries asks, "So you're going to do something about ultra-processed foods and additives? Against rampant child malnutrition?" Third panel: Same woman in a hockey suit asks, "Will you ban ballet classes, since they alter children's muscles and limbs forever? Or contact sorts like hockey or football, for giving them lifelong head traumas and concussions?" Four Panel: Same woman, looking disgusted: "Or is hunting down a handful of trans kids who just want to live their life as themselves and participate in society more urgent than all this?")

I've noticed transphobes who bleat about "natural development" and "mutilating children" could not care less about the damage being done by sports programs around the nation, or yes, ballet, for that matter; or about the damage being done by social expectations for little girls to be skinny and cute above all; or such "mutilations" as nose jobs, breast enlargement surgery or breast reduction surgery for boys with gynocomastia. That's all fine.

I've also noticed they don't worry about "natural" development when they're putting braces on their kids teeth, buying them eyeglasses or contacts, and dying their own hair. All that is fine too. It's only the nasty transes we have to police.

Note: I would have never let my kid play hockey or football, and probably would have hesitated about ballet, for the reasons stated above. But I'm all for braces, eyeglasses, and whatever anyone wants to do with their own hair. My point here, though, is entirely other. They don't really care about trans kids. They care about being allowed to be bigots. Trans kids, and trans people, are a safe target right now. Ten years ago, they would have been attacking gay people. Thirty years ago, feminists. Fifty years ago, black people. It's all the same playbook, just different targets.

MURDERBOT TRAILER!!

It airs on May 16. I cannot wait.

May 2025 ON BOOKS

My Asimov's column, "On Books," for May 2025 is now live on the site.

It'll only be available for a few weeks, so get it while it's hot.

In this column, I review these books:

Kaliane Bradley,
The Ministry of Time

John Wiswell,
Someone to Build a Nest In

Jon Evans,
Exadelic

Beth Revis,
Full Speed to a Crash Landing

Beth Revis,
How to Steal a Galaxy

Madeline Ashby,
Glass Houses

Cebo Campbell,
Sky Full of Elephants

Kingfisher,
A Sorceress Comes to Call

Michael Bérubé,
The Ex-Human 

The Bradley book has just been nominated for a Hugo. Well-deserved!

Trump's Tariffs Explained

 Or, why your retirement fund is tanking:

My Media Sources

We don't have a television*, so I get zero amount of my news information from television. 

I used to subscribe to the Washington Post and to The New York Times, but dropped my subscriptions due to their editorial decisions.

Now I subscribe to these sources:

The Boston Globe (good, but a little too local in its focus)

The Atlantic (very good, with an in-depth reporting style I thought was gone forever)

The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (a local paper, which leans very much to the right, but at least seems sane, except for the letters to the editor section and an occasional editorial)

I also read a local free paper, The Fayetteville Flyer, which covers local events like council meetings and festivals and buildings applications. And I get some of my news through BlueSky -- not that they do reporting, but usually the news hits there first and then I can look to see what the AP site says, or the Globe. And I pick up some news from various blogs, and then do the same search.

Occasionally I will watch a segment from a television news station on YouTube, but these are so annoyingly vapid that I usually click away after a few minutes. 

If you can only have one news source, I recommend The Atlantic. Well worth the subscription fee.

*I'm not a television snob, honest. We watch TV shows -- we're watching the Pitt right now -- but we stream them. I grew up in a house where the TV was on all the time, and usually three televisions, all on at the same time, all turned up loud. When I moved into my own place and first experienced life without the racket of television, I was in paradise. So first we kept the TV in a little room of its own, and then we kept it in the closet and only brought it out to watch movies, and now we don't have one at all. It's wonderful.

"What is Trump Doing with these Tariffs?"

My kid asked me what Trump was up to with these tariffs.

"Crashing the economy," I said, "but I can't see why."

The simple answer is because he's an idiot, which is undeniably true. But I can't help thinking there's something even simpler behind it, like he thinks he's found a way to make himself (and Elon) richer by doing so. Since I'm not a billionaire, I don't know how that would work.

Also I'm sick*, so I'm not thinking on all cylinders. Here's what Camestros and their comment section have to say.

*I picked up a virus somewhere, which I hope isn't COVID. A cough, a sore throat, gastrointestinal issues, a fever. Plus general aches and blahness.

New Cost-Cutting Measures

ETA Update: There was so much outrage among local citizens that the Sebastian County police had to reissue this with APRIL FOOLS across it in red. Apparently the Venn diagram of people who hate electric cars, people who hate Leon Skum, and people who hate cops has a pretty big intersection point.

Wonderful idea!

From the Sebastian County Sheriff's office: 

We are proud to announce the purchase of 12 new Cyber trucks to add to our patrol fleet. At a purchase price of only $102k each these will more than pay for themselves in fuel cost savings. Due to a lack of charging stations in Sebastian County, we are giving you, the community, the opportunity to partner with us. If you live south of Greenwood and have an approved charging system, and would allow our units to stop by for a charge, we consider you a valued gold star community partner. These units will hit the county roads today, April 1st.

(Alt text: image shows a Cybertruck with a Sebastian County Sheriff logo on its site)

Happy Trans Day of Visibility!

Those of you who, like me, love someone who is trans know how scary our country is for trans people right now. The instinct is to hide, and no one will blame anyone who does.

But standing up and being trans in public tells every frightened trans person that trans people are out there, and there are many of them. (As many of them as there are redheads in the world, according to some estimates.) 

Trans people are people. They have human rights. Those who tell you to hate them, those who tell vile lies about them, are as evil as the racists in 1950, who told the same lies about brown people as transphobes do now, and for the same reason: to give a fascist population someone to hate.

When I was a kid, they taught us in school that America was the one place on earth where everyone could be equal. Well, that wasn't true then, and it's not true now. But it's what the country means, it's the spine of our democracy -- everyone is equal under the law -- and I'm not settling for anything else.

This goes out to my kid and his husband, and all their wonderful friends.

First Home Repair

One of the things I liked about renting was that when things broke I could just call the landlord. Depending on the landlord (I've had both good and terrible landlords) they'd come fix it. Ta-da!

Yesterday the thingie in the toilet which makes the toilet flush broke in half. Thanks to the help of YouTube, I figured out not only that this was called a toilet chain, but also how to replace it. I got a new toilet chain today and fixed it in about two minutes.

Go me!

I highly recommend YouTube, btw, when you don't know how to do something. Someone will have made a video about how to do it, probably several someones. It's great.

Applying for Social Security and Medicare

I am doing it, God help me.

The Medicare bit is the most complicated so far. There's Part A and Part B and then like D through infinity, and you will need professional help (I have acquired it) to understand which part/s you need to apply for. 

Am I worried about what Trump and DOGE are going to do to the Social Security system I have been paying into since I was 15 years old and got my first "real" job? Yes, I am.

Eroding Rights, Collapsing Rights

We've probably all seen the video of the Tufts graduate student being arrested by ICE. 

She is a Fulbright scholar. She has never committed a crime. She has a valid visa. She is in a graduate program. She has not been charged with anything. She was simply seized and shipped out of state. No one is sure where she is now, and ICE will not let her lawyer talk to her.

As Matt Mikalatos says:

I've heard some people saying lately that there's no reason to be concerned, because immigrants don't have the same rights as citizens, and honestly I find this more stomach-churning than some of the directly racist or xenophobic things I've seen people say. Why on earth are people defending the government that's harming people instead of the vulnerable people being harmed?

I will promise you this: when a government starts violating rights of the vulnerable, it doesn't stop with a single population of people.

And as a Yale professor who has just accepted a job in Canada puts it:

“But how could you speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen?” he questioned. “And if you can’t speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen, when will they come for the American citizens? It’s inevitable.”

Call your reps. Make some noise. Clown show fascists are still fascists.

 

Stolen From Tumbr

 A fable for our times:

Trump Regime Stripping Away Rights

If they can do it to immigrants, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to tourists, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to people who have green cards, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to students, they can do it to you.

None of us are safe. All the Trump regime will need to do is redefine whatever category they please into "non-citizen," or "criminal," and that will be that. 

We're building new prisons in Arkansas, while cutting funds for schools and libraries. If you can't see why that's dangerous, you've been drinking too much Kool-Aid.

ETA:

Haircuts and Nicknames

 In Arkansas, one of our Republicans wants to create civil liability for anyone who "assists" transgender minors. That includes parents, and apparently anyone else on the planet, and it includes things like calling a kid by a name which doesn't "fit" their "biological gender," or allowing them to wear clothing that doesn't align with that gender:

"...any act by which a minor adopts or espouses a gender identity that differs from the minor’s biological sex as determined by the sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles of the minor, including without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.”

(Emphasis mine)

Comments are asking if this means a parent allowing a kid to have a hairstyle (long hair, short hair) which doesn't "fit" their assigned gender will be prosecuted; or if buying jeans for your daughter creates civil liability.

But no. Of course it doesn't. No cis child will be prosecuted for wearing jeans, or having a ponytail. As with most laws, this one will be prosecuted selectively. It's a law that can be weaponized against trans people.

Laws about what clothing people were allowed to wear used to be common in the U.S. Women who wore jeans, men who wore blouses, these people could be arrested and prosecuted. Long hair on men was a crime. Men with eyeshadow or earrings could be prosecuted. These laws were not enforced against "good" people. Like the War on Drugs, they were a way to prosecute the "wrong" sort of people. That's how these laws will be used as well.

Arkansas governor and Trump wannabe Sarah Huckleberry Sanders and her supporters keep blatting about how parents should be in charge of their children, but that's not what they mean. It's not what any of them mean. They mean they want to put "good" parents in charge of their children. And their definition of "good" is parents who agree with them -- Evangelical Christian parents, Trump-supporting parents, bigoted parents. 

Parents like me, and other parents who don't see children as their possessions, as their weapons in a culture war -- we should be prosecuted. We should be jailed. We should definitely not be allowed to make decisions about our children's healthcare, or their education, or their lives. 

As with women's bodies, decisions like these should be left to the government. 

Spring Break Hoves Into View

And then after Spring Break it's only April until I retire -- five weeks and out.

My department is insisting on holding a retirement party for me. Don't they know how much I hate parties? Dr. Skull asked what I wanted to do for my birthday (last week) and I said, "Absolutely nothing. Let's do absolutely nothing."

So that's what we did.

I plan to spend Spring Break putting my books into alphabetical order and writing reviews for Interzone. Also drinking a lot of coffee. It's the perfect holiday.

Books, not yet in alphabetical order

The Kid's First Academic Conference

He's doing a poster presentation on "The Efficacy of Scientific Illustration in Portraying Large Herbivore Impact":

The Kid at the AABA

Violation of the First Amendment

The right to protest against the actions of our government is one of our fundamental rights. It's right there in the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If Trump's regime can redefine that protest as "terrorism," and redefine a person with a green card as an "illegal immigrant," none of us are safe. 

This is one of the foundations of the country. Trump is violating it -- and his base have no problems with that violation. 

When they themselves are arrested, and when they find themselves scheduled for deportation, well, they'll be outraged. (If it happens to them or to their tribe, it's a crime. If it happens to liberals or brown people, it's hilarious.) It'll be too late at that point, of course.

Call your representatives now.

Ten Days Until Spring Break

 ...but who's counting?

(Asking for a friend.)

Via Pharyngula

 Anti-Semitism in the Oval Office, or that really bizarre behavior toward Zelenskyy explained:

The elements that emerged in conversation with Jerzy over the years -- the mockery of Jewish appearances, the need for Jewish submissiveness, the claims about dishonesty, greed, cowardice, and corrupt conspiracies -- figure in the scholarly literature on the subject.

        (snip) 

Zelens'kyi was elected on a peace platform in 2019, but Putin did not want to talk to him, in part because he did not think that Zelens'kyi showed him enough deference.  

        (Snip)

It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens'kyi's bravery in remaining in Kyiv. The Americans portrayed themselves as the real heroes because they provided some of the weapons.  

Go read it all, as the kids today say.

To forestall the MAGAs: We've been told that Trump can't be anti-Semitic, because he has Jews in his own family. But that's like saying he can't be a misogynist because he married a woman. Pretty much all bigots are okay with "their" member of whatever group they hate. I've had transphobes explain to me that they know trans people, so they can't be anti-trans. 

Also, honestly, it's probably also to do with Zelenskyy having more backbone and being a better president than Trump. Trump, like most weak men, can't stand strength in those around him.

Original post at Pharyngula

See also this.

Oh No

Kevin Drum has died.

He was a voice of sanity on the interwebs, and had been for decades. One of the first real bloggers. 

Activism Tab from N&M

Nicole and Maggie write about activism today.

Your one-stop shopping for things to do to resist our current regime.

Via PZ Myers, today is Stand Up For Science day.

Five Things I Like about Living Here So Far

(1) It's colder than Fort Smith and we get more snow. Not much colder and not much more snow, but it's still a win. Also, there are snow plows here, so that's nice.

(2) The Ozark Natural Foods Co-Op is less than a five minute drive away, so I can go there anytime I want and get great food and great ingredients to make great food.

(3) SO MANY parks, walking, and biking trails.

(4) The four-story library

Children's Room at the library

(5) My power company is a Co-op, and my water company, city-owned, does everything it can it encourage recycling -- including charging people who recycle lower fees to pick up their trash, and funding giant recycling centers.

Bonus: Jeni's ice cream is available at Harps. Like, just right there in the freezers. Amazing!

Five Books I've Read This Week

Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse

A collection of short stories by one of my favorite writers. I'm pretty sure I read this one before, but I didn't remember some of the stories, so maybe not. McHugh is the author of one of my favorite novels, China Mountain Zhang, about (among other things) a construction worker living in an AU version of America where we had a second American revolution and where China is the dominant world power. This collection is a bunch of unrelated but excellent SF stories.

Audrey Schulman, The Dolphin House

Science fiction only in that it's fiction about scientists. In the early 1960s, a partially deaf waitress gets a job working with a pack of scientists studying how dolphins communicate. Engaging and extremely readable but also pretty upsetting due to animal mistreatment in the name of science. This is the Schulman who wrote Theory of Bastards, which I read last week and really loved. It's also about scientists and animals, bonobos in that case, and also has a partially disabled main character. Not as much animal abuse, though, and more science fiction.

Ruth Chan, Uprooted: A Memoir about What Happens When Your Family Moves Back

A graphic novel about Ruth's experiences when her family moves to Hong Kong after her father gets a job in China. There's also a flashback subplot about how and why the family moved to Canada. Nice detail about the life of a young teenager in Hong Kong, as well as the differences between life, food, and schools in Canada and life, food, and schools in Hong Kong. A quick and interesting read.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

I actually only read about half of this one. Pretty much everyone in the SF world loves this book, and also it won the Booker Prize, but honestly it bored me so much I couldn't go on. Maybe it got better in the second half? It's about some astronauts as they orbit Earth and what they're thinking about and seeing. None of their thoughts or anything they see interested me much, but other people clearly thought otherwise. Nothing really happens except those thoughts and the astronauts looking down at Earth. The language Harvey used got a lot of praise in other reviews I read, but that also didn't seem especially good to me. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.

John Barnes, Finity

This one is actually a re-read. It's about an alternate Earth where the Nazis won WWII, or actually about a bazillion AU Earths where various things happened differently. It's also about math, sort of, and about being online. It's not a very good book, and the ending is particularly flat, but I always enjoy reading it anyway. If you're into AU novels, and want a non-taxing read, this is your book.

How the Sausage is Made

 And why:

(Image shows Trump, GOP elephant, and Elon killing a bunch of programs (WIC, Medicaid and Medicare, SNAP) in order to stuff them into a sausage grinder which extrudes huge tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.)

See also this.

Republicans love smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. They're laying off thousands of workers chaotically even though salary costs are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Elon Musk is pretending to save far more money than he really is. Now Senate Republicans are trying to hide the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts using a new wheeze called the "current policy baseline."

Five Reasons to Dump Trump

Or at least stop supporting the current regime. I don't think impeaching him will have any effect, since the GOP (including my representatives) are too cowed by Trump to take any sort of action against him.

(1) Tax breaks for billionaires, while increasing tax burden on the lowest quintillions

(2) Destroying scientific research in this country, because his base hates experts and would rather have their children die from preventable diseases than trust science.

(3) Gutting civil rights protections, for no other purpose than to feed the bigotry of his base

(4) Defunding Medicaid and WIC, two of the most successful programs in our current American landscape, under the pretense that this would "cut waste" and save money.

(5) Ukraine and Zelensky. We all knew how petty, inept, and faithless Trump is, but the barefaced contempt shown, out of pure spite, for a leader, a supposed ally, fighting for his country, told the entire world how little Trump, and the US in general at this point, are to be trusted.

I could go on -- the destroying of our national parks, and the EPA, and consumer protections against giant corporations, and giving unprecedented power to Elon Musk, a man as inept as Trump himself, and as dishonest as Vance -- but five's the limit, that's the rule. 

Call your representatives, for what little good that is doing those of us who live in Red States. (I keep getting told by my congressmen and senators that everything Trump is doing is good and necessary, actually. See my opening paragraph.)

See also this:

The Five Meals I Can Cook

(1) Pasta with cream sauce. I like either linguine or frozen ravioli. Does this actually count as cooking? I do reduce the cream sauce.

(2) Baked cod in a lemon and butter sauce, with asparagus on the side. Or some other sort of white fish with the sauce -- whatever the store has available fresh. Frozen fish just isn't as good.

(3) Tuna casserole. This is the one with the potato chips on top, which I like a lot, but am sick of eating at the moment.

(4) Beans and rice, except Dr. Skull won't eat beans and rice. He says beans are poison, which is something he got off one of his YouTube food cult videos.

(5) Chicken pie, except you need to roast a chicken first and we can't get whole chickens at the moment, due to the avian flu situation.

I can also cook frozen pizza or tuna fish sandwiches or crackers and peanut butter. Mmm, dinner.

Five Things I did before Noon Today

(1) Got out of bed. Because honestly, that's award-worthy in itself these days.

(2) Put the medicine in the cat's eyes. She's got some kind of ideopathic eye condition, which the new vet is managing to cure (the one in Fort Smith never could), but it requires eye drops twice a day and boy does she hate it.

(3) Made coffee and drank a lot

(4) Graded / reviewed 16 assignments submitted by my students, some of which required extensive commentary.

(5) Drove Dr. Skull down to Fort Smith to see his pain doctor there since we can't get in with the pain doctor up here until June 25. We spent two and a half hours at the clinic, two hours of that in the waiting room. We did get him an earlier appointment with the person who does the corticosteriod shots, so that's something.

I did 3 and 4 at the same time, and also a load of laundry while I was doing 3 and 4. So once again this is six things I did.

While we were in the Fort, we ate at Las Americas, which was excellent as always. So I don't have to cook tonight at least.

I had pupusas 

Five Things I did Today

(1) Overslept through my dental appointment. Rescheduled for next Wednesday, at noon. 

(2) Graded 19 assignments from my students, most of which required comments and requests for revisions

(3) Broke down lots and lots of boxes and made a recycling run. (I am still working through recycling all the boxes from the move, though I am almost done.)

(4) Took a walk in Wilson Park, which is where I used to do most of my walking when I was a graduate students. It's much more developed now, with a huge playground for kids, tennis courts, and an elaborate system of walking trails. Also a pool and a baseball field, but those were there when I was in graduate school. Dr. Skull made his famous home run on the baseball field.

(5) Wrote about 500 words on my new novel

Later I'm going to take the kid to buy groceries, so really I'm doing six things today. This is a big improvement over when I was in graduate school, when I would explain to Dr. Skull that I could do one thing a week that did not have to do with graduate school. Though I was taking daily walks back then, but that was just as a break from studying, frankly.

The waterfall at Wilson Park: 

That was there when I was in graduate school, but there's a much fancier bridge above it now. (That pocking noise in the background is from the nearby tennis courts.)

Five Things I Did This Week

(1) Graded about 200 submissions from students, most of them short, but all of them requiring feedback from me. (55 students times an average of four assignments per student, but several of them didn't turn anything in, so. This is increasingly common, by the way: students sign up for a class, but then just don't do any work. When I pursue them via email, they explain that they have other classes and full-time jobs and three kids, but they're planning on doing the work for my class very soon.)

(2) Made a chicken pie

(3) Wrote 3500 words on my new novel

(4) Took three walks, one of them when it was 12 degrees outside, and one of which was on the local trail system, Razorback Greenway. It's pretty cool.

(5) Read a bunch of books and wrote two reviews

What did you do this week?

Updates

This is the longest year ever. How is it still only February?

I continue to email my reps daily, and am considering calling them on the weekends or after hours, so I can leave a message without actually having to speak to anyone. 

I'm trying to get enough exercise. It's hard since we don't have a gym here yet, so walking around is all I can really do. Every time I go to the library, though, I get a real workout, since it's four storeys high and I have things I have to do on every single floor. So lots of climbing stairs.

Eating has become an issue. Dr. Skull's pain level is such that he can no longer cook, though sometimes he is well enough to stand beside me and tell me what to do next. This summer the kid can come cook for us, but he is far too busy with grad school at the moment. I have discovered that I really hate cooking, and since I can only cook about five things reliably, and I'm sick of all of them, it's a dilemma. Do I revert to frozen pizzas? Start living on peanut butter? 

There's a Reddit Fayetteville, and I have learned that if I can't figure something out, all I have to do is ask Reddit, and I'll have like sixty answers 20 minutes later. It's great.

I have to file for Social Security soon, and for Medicare. I have no idea how to go about this, so I'm a little nervous. Any tips?

The MAGA Mindset

Having (wincingly, and so you don't have to) had a glance at several MAGA blogs, sites, and pages, here is what I have learned about MAGA:

(1) If Trump/Elon is hurting them or something they care about, it's a huge offense and horrible and should stop immediately.

(2) If Trump/Elon is hurting other people/things they don't care about, it's wonderful and exactly what should be happening. Hurt those people more! Destroy more of those things!

This is the philosophy of a toddler, and not a very well socialized one. That's our country now.

Walking in the Snow

It got above 12 degrees, so I went for a walk in the snow.

Despite the socialist snowplow that plowed our streets, there was still a lot of ice on the road. People were driving anyway, and one truck was pulling a guy behind them on a plastic sled, which, wow. I guess that's the sort of thing humans get up to because we have no natural predators.

There were fewer people sledding on the golf course, probably because of the vicious cold. But the sun was out, making everything very pretty.

Here's a pine tree in the snow:

And here is Jasper, very pleased that she is not some idiot who insists on going out for a walk on a snowy, icy, frigid day: