"We’ve often disregarded the feelings of those we don’t relate to. Sometimes this has been other humans..."

"... but humans aren’t the only ones who think and feel. There are animals that cherish their offspring, feel lonely if their life partner dies, and jump for joy. If you burn an insect with a cigarette, it feels pain. If insects were automatons, ants wouldn’t be able to build fungus farms or form boats; bees wouldn’t be able to communicate complicated directions to hive mates; and cockroaches wouldn’t have learned not to eat certain baits that kill them....  So, I quit giving a milquetoast answer to the question of where I draw the line. Now I say: 'We know insects think and feel, so if we ever have an option to avoid harming them, let’s go for it.' If there are insects in your home, Peta has developed a handy guide to non-chemical, non-lethal methods of asking them to please go somewhere else to think things over."

Writes Ingrid Newkirk, in "He hid, hoping against hope I’d leave: how a cockroach changed my mind about killing insects" (The Guardian).

Also at the link to the handy guide:

"For about nine minutes, they watched a white, off-shoulder dress being sprayed onto Bella Hadid’s body."

"The substance — a patented spray-on fabric developed by a London-based company called Fabrican — looked like spider webs at first, until the fibrous layers thickened, instantly drying into a pebbled fabric and effectively mummifying the model.... The Parisian brand Coperni is named after the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Founded in 2013, the brand is interested in fusing science, craft and fashion.... The dress could be taken off like any other tight, slightly stretchy one: a process of peeling off and shimmying out. It can be hung and washed, or put back into the bottle of its original solution to regenerate...."

Jessica Testa explains in the NYT.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by New York Times Fashion & Style (@nytstyle)

The model was, reportedly, very cold, but when it was all over, she said, "I think that was the best moment of my life."

I've seen some commentary — I forget where — likening the spraying of the sticky white fibers to 2 men ejaculating. It made me wonder — is spider silk like semen? There is something called a sperm web. Britannica has this: 

"Before he goes out to hunt, Brian Leydet pulls on his hiking boots and his all-white jumpsuit, fetches a homemade flannel flag..."

"... out of his car and then, most importantly, duct-tapes his socks to his pant legs. Then he heads into the undergrowth, dragging his flag around like a morose matador.... Mr. Leydet’s quarry is quick to attach to the white flannel, using its tiny hooks on their legs to grab hold....."

From "Tick Hunting: The Prey Are Tiny, and the Bait Is Human Climate change and other factors have brought several new species of ticks, and frightening new diseases, to New York in recent years" (NYT).

"People should try to learn to live with them. If they‘re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they're just going to be back next year."

Said Andy Davis, University of Georgia research scientist, quoted in "Millions of Palm-Sized, Flying Spiders Could Invade the East Coast/A huge invasive spider that invaded Georgia from East Asia could soon take over most of the U.S. East Coast, a new study has revealed" (Scientific American).

It says that the "palm-sized Joro spider" is a "3-inch" spider, which is an annoying discrepancy, but must have to do with whether you're including the legs.

Still, that's pretty big. But with all that's going on in the world, hordes of big, flying spiders may be a welcome diversion. You can worry and express anxiety, but the thing is right here in front of you — "jet-black body... with bright yellow stripes, and... intense red markings" — and, though a classic fear (spiders!), quite harmless. The opposite of the unseen and deadly covid.

It's an antidote of an anxiety, perhaps just what we need to reset our brain.

ADDED: From the "big and small" archive here at Althouse: "Large boulder the size of a small boulder." I'm just helping any of you commenters who happen to be here at 5 in the morning and working on a comment sort of like "Large spider the size of a small spider." Do you even know what I'm talking about? As I said at the time — January 2020 — "If you ever want to get me to laugh at your jokes, just remember 'Large boulder the size of a small boulder.'"

Ah! January 2020 — just before the descent of the Great Unfunniness.

ALSO: I'm pushed back in the comments about whether palms in fact do tend to be 3 inches. I'll just post a photo of a Joro spider on a palm, where you can see the the spider body without including the legs is quite a bit smaller than the palm, but including the legs, the spider is larger:

"There’s duck poop everywhere, and it’s murky. It’s a solid brown-green on a good day. It’s just gross … We were getting [bitten by] duck mites. Apparently they like to eat ducks’ poop. We were covered in bites... it built character. I’m funnier because of it."

Erica Sullivan, discussing training by swimming in Lake Mead when the swimming pools were closed for coronavirus — quoted in "Get to know silver medalist Erica Sullivan. Everyone else wants to" (WaPo).

Before I ran into that quote, I was all set to make a post out of this other quote of hers:

“I’m multicultural. I’m queer. I’m a lot of minorities. That’s what America is. To me, America is not about being a majority. It’s about having your own start. The American Dream is coming to a country to establish what you want to do with your life.”

So she was doubly blog-worthy for me. What a delightful, amusing young lady! Tracing her character back to poop, to which we could, perhaps, all of us, trace our character. What would we do without ducks, lakes, and arachnids?

And I like hearing about her after she's won. All these people who are supposed to win.... Why not wait? Otherwise, the only interesting thing they can do is lose.

"People are notoriously bad at discerning how dangerous a situation really is. 'I’m going to die of heat stroke' will always trump 'I’m going to get babesiosis'..."

"... because feeling hot is more immediate than the possibility of getting sick a few weeks from now. Now, if you felt ticks crawling up you, you might feel a more immediate need to keep those critters off your skin. But ticks are notoriously sneaky with their small bodies, stealth method of walking on their toes, and ability to inject pain killers and antihistamines."

From "Tick Bite Prevention – Dressing the Part" (Cornell). This video quickly explains how to dress for your forays into tick territory (and will also earn a "men in shorts" tag):

As for babesiosis, it's not like the new word I learned writing the previous post — "horsiculture" — which actually has to do with horses. There are no babes in "babesiosis." It's a tickborne disease: "Babesia microti is transmitted by the bite of infected Ixodes scapularis ticks—typically, by the nymph stage of the tick, which is about the size of a poppy seed." It can kill you.

Milkweed with spider.

"It’s just incredible, when they blow in the winds they look like wave. It does look creepy the way it covers all the signs and everything."

"You can’t really see it in the photos but there are spiders all over. It’s like thousands and thousands of spiders."

Said Jena Beatson, quoted in "'They look like waves': spider webs blanket Gippsland after Victorian floods Flooded roads and paddocks disrupt local spiders which seek higher ground on road signs, trees and any tall grass they can find" (The Guardian).

"After years of protests from fans and Native American groups, the Cleveland Indians have decided to change their team name..."

"... moving away from a moniker that has long been criticized as racist, three people familiar with the decision said Sunday. The move follows a decision by the Washington Football Team of the N.F.L. in July to stop using a name long considered a racial slur, and is part of a larger national conversation about race that magnified this year amid protests of systemic racism and police violence.... One option that the team is considering, two of the people said, is moving forward without a replacement name — similar to how the Washington Football Team proceeded — then coming up with a new name in consultation with the public."... Other professional sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Blackhawks, have said in recent months that they have no plans to change their names... The [Indians] club has said that the name was originally intended to honor a former player, Louis Sockalexis, who played for the Cleveland Spiders, a major league club, in the 19th century and was a member of the Penobscot Nation. Some have suggested that Cleveland adopt the name Spiders as a replacement."

The NYT reports.

Trump tweeted" "Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for 'Indians.' Cancel culture at work!"

Personally, I think all baseball teams should be named after a type of animal, preferably one that you can picture holding a baseball bat or attempting to play baseball in a silly fanciful manner. But the only team that meets my standard is the Cubs. Maybe the Tigers. The best trend actually represented by the existing name is birds — Cardinals, Orioles, Blue Jays. So I recommend another bird. Maybe Crows — for the alliteration and because there are crows in Ohio. But Spiders is perfectly good. It's got some Cleveland tradition, it might scare the opposition, and it's an animal. It's a type of animal not currently represented among the major league team names, but it would provide company for the Diamondbacks, which are currently the only team that's named after a type of animal that isn't represented by any other team. Anyway, don't name a team after a type of human being. That was never a good idea. And don't name a team after items of clothing. That's just stupid.

"A gigantic spider and a car full of young ladies..."

A gigantic spider and a car full of young ladies... pic.twitter.com/F7seARbOXa

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 27, 2020

At Itsy's Café...

... it's nice to see you again (on the first day of autumn!).

(And let me remind you about the Althouse Portal to Amazon, where you can buy all sorts of things?)

Apple's new iPhone has a set of 3 camera lenses in back... and it upsets people with "trypophobia," the fear of clusters of small holes.

WaPo explains.

The backlash comes from people who say they suffer from an obscure and perplexing condition called “trypophobia” ⁠ — a fear of clusters of small holes like those found in shoe treads, honeycombs and lotus seed pods.... The phobia isn’t recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... But self-described sufferers and some researchers claim the images can evoke a strong emotional response and induce itching, goose bumps, and even nausea and vomiting....

Ah, yes. Of course. I've written about trypophobia twice already on this blog. In 2013, I told you about the subreddit devoted to the peculiarity, r/trypophobia. And I see that they're expressing themselves about the new phone:

It’s all camera from r/trypophobia

And here's my 2017 post, on the occasion of an "American Horror Story" poster that triggered trypophobes.



Back to WaPo and the new iPhone:

In 2016, Kendall Jenner raised the condition’s profile when she wrote a blog post saying the images give her “the worst anxiety.” “Things that could set me off are pancakes, honeycomb, or lotus heads (the worst!)," she wrote. “It sounds ridiculous but so many people actually have it!”

Pancakes! I know what she's referring to — the look of the batter when it's time to flip.



Flip the pancake. But for some people, apparently, flip their lid.



Back to WaPo:

Researcher Arnold Wilkins, a professor emeritus at the University of Essex, theorizes the mathematical principals hidden in the patterns require the brain to use more oxygen and energy, which can be distressing.... “We know the images are difficult to process computationally by the neurons of the brain, they use more brain energy.”

Photos of honeycombs and strawberries — common sources of the creeps, or worse, for people with trypophobia — also share those mathematical qualities with more sinister sights like mold and skin lesions. Other research suggests the discomfort might come from an innate drive to avoid infectious diseases and contaminated food. Some have also hypothesized the fear could stem from an evolutionary response to dangerous animals like poisonous frogs and insects, which often display patterns similar to those seen trypophobic photos.

Camera lenses are a special problem, I think, because they're sort of eyes. When we look at eyes, we have the feeling that it's a living thing, and if it's not 2 eyes, the living thing feels alien — heartless or cruel:



Have I triggered your arachnophobia? Again?

Back to WaPo:

What can you do if you want to wretch every time you see the new iPhone?

Is it "wretch" or "retch"? It's retch.  Fortunately, wretched editing doesn't make me want to throw up. "Wretch" isn't even a verb. You wretch.

ADDED: If "wretch" isn't a verb, why does the word "wretched" exist? "Wretch," the verb, is obsolete. The OED has it as a transitive verb meaning "To render miserable" and as an intransitive, Scottish verb meaning "To be or to become... parsimonious." From 1633: "As the wretch wretcheth, the more he is enriched."

So WaPo's spelling is fine if these iPhones are making you parsimonious (in Scotland in the 17th century).

MORE: To be wretchedly precise, the OED does not say that the adjective "wretched" comes from the obsolete verb "to wretch." It says the etymology happened "Irregularly" by adding the "-ed" suffix to the adjective "wretch." "Wretch" was once an adjective that meant "poor, miserable, deeply afflicted" (that is, having the qualities of a wretch). Thus, in the 1400s, one might write: "Allas! I, woful creature,..I, wreche woman."

By the way, originally, the noun "wretch" referred to a banished person, an exile: "Goo naked vngry and bare foot.., as wrecch in werlde þou wende." As you wend your way through the world, you wretch, go naked, hungry, barefoot, and phoneless.

At Itsy's Café...

... weave your orb.

And get your supplies through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

For those of you who couldn't see the spider in last night's café...

From the comments in last night's Picnic Spider Café: "I didn't see any spiders, but I'm sure they're in there somewhere...."

(Not positive it's a spider. I count 4 legs on one side and 2 on the other. That adds up to 6 so...)

At the Picnic Spider Café...

... you can lurk...



... or talk all night.

(And don't forget the Althouse Portal to Amazon, where you can buy whatever you want.)

"Eleanor Roosevelt lived across the hall in the 1940s when we first moved in."

"My mom, Jane Bishir, was a Midwestern girl who’d come to New York to make it as a writer and became the closest of friends with Vivian Vance long before she was on 'I Love Lucy.' She was my godmother. My godfather was the best babysitter on God’s green earth, Garth Williams, the illustrator for all these wonderful books. He would be doodling, and there was one evening where he showed me three or four spiders: 'Which spider do you like?' He and E.B. White were going around the bend to avoid the Disneyfication of 'Charlotte’s Web,' and he wanted to try it out on a kid. My dad was a classical harmonica player and good friends with Burl Ives, who asked him if we could let this songwriter from Oklahoma stay at our house for a while. So I’m in bed, and in the next room I hear Woody Guthrie singing and playing, and in my total infancy I thought, 'He’s not as good as Dad.'..."

Said John Sebastian, quoted in "How ‘Summer in the City’ Became the Soundtrack for Every City Summer/The dog days of 1966 were filled with riots, protests and a nation on edge. Not to mention a brutal heat wave. But in Greenwich Village, something new was happening" (NYT).

At the Spiderweb Café...

... what have you caught in your web?

(Here's the Althouse Portal to Amazon where you can snag various juicy consumer goods, such as this collection of 10 preserved insects, this mixed bag of edible insects, and — in case, unlike the spider, you want to repel the little buggers — this eucalyptus stuff.)

"Top 5 Wisconsin wildlife risks to humans? Maybe not what you think."

Okay. I'll  play. I only read the headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and have not glanced at the answers, though I did see the photo of bees. So I will include bees. The other 4? I'll say: spiders, bats, deer (car crashes), and ticks.

Okay, now I'm looking. Deer was correct. I left out mosquitoes (even though I was thinking about mosquitoes! I feel like cheating and adding mosquitoes to my list). Ticks was correct. Bees was correct. Bats and spiders were wrong. The final category is bears, wolves and cougars, and I must say I considered bears and wolves but decided against it, in part because of the "Maybe not what you think," but also because I can't remember ever reading about a bear or wolf attack in Wisconsin. You think of the big predators when you're out in the wilder places, but when do they ever get anywhere near you? It's those pesky ticks, waiting on the tip of every leaf, that will get you.

The threats to humans from Wisconsin's largest wild predators are, statistically speaking, extremely low.

Yeah, so why are they on the list?

The last recorded injury to a human from a bear was in June 2017 when a man sustained a bite to the thigh in Florence County.

"Most of these bear/human interactions are a result of dog/bear interaction and the human rushes in to save their dog," said USDA's Hirchert. "An actual predatory action towards a human from a bear is extremely rare in Wisconsin."

There has been no wolf or cougar attack on a human in Wisconsin in modern history, according to USDA records.

That said, the big animals rightfully elicit an abundance of caution.

That said! I'll that-said you. You said, "Maybe not what you think." That said, you shouldn't have put bears, wolves, and cougars on the list. Did you check bats and spiders? Hmm?! I'm checking.

Well... 2 brown recluse spiders have been found in Wisconsin in the last quarter century.

As for bats: "The last four cases of human rabies in Wisconsin occurred in 1959, 2000, 2004 and 2010. All four Wisconsin cases acquired the disease from infected bats." The thing about bats is that they can get in your house and you have to deal with it as if the bat carried the horrific disease. You're never lying in bed and suddenly think There's a bear in the house! and spring into action. I mean, I know it has happened....

"There are a lot of movies about reading. I think there are a lot of people who consume movies that cater to their self-image as a reader of books."

"It's quite silly," I wrote in the comments to the post about the trailer for the high-action, special-effects HBO movie based on "Fahrenheit 451." My comment was inspired by a comment from Ron Winkleheimer:

I'm surprised that HBO made this movie since the people in charge are all leftists. I suppose they are still flattering themselves about being the side that's in favor of knowledge and learning and free speech and all that.

What are the movies about reading that cater to this vanity I'm imagining exists?

Here's "25 best movies about books" (Stuff), but many of these are about writing books. The central character is a writer, not a reader. "Neverending Story" "The Princess Bride," "Fahrenheit 451," "Misery"... those fit my search.

Here's "When movie characters read books." For example, the guy in "Friends with Kids" reads "Cod," so, yeah, you get it: That guy! The guy who reads "Cod." Matilda reads "Moby-Dick." You know what that means!

Anyway... it's a hypothesis. Something else reading-related that I was reading this morning is "RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Fun, Friends, Maybe More" (New York Magazine):

[A] fun and playfully shady conversation between several of the queens has Asia O’Hara reading Vixen for wearing someone else’s wig during last week’s Best Drag runway. It’s an understandable thing to pick at, and the Vixen responds good-naturedly about it. Until Aquaria butts in.

“Can we talk about how your best drag is someone else’s wig, though? That’s confusing.” Game over. As the Vixen prepares to go fully in on Aquaria in response, a spider crawls its way up someone’s tulle and wreaks total pandemonium* with its mere existence....

Boldface added. I had to look up "reading" in Urban Dictionary:

In gay culture, the act of pointing out a flaw in someone else (usually publicly and in front of them) and exaggerating it.

Gay guy 1: "Those shorts weren't made for you, honey. Look at that muffin top. More like a cupcake top!"

Gay guy 2: "Bitch, why are you reading me?

Also, "read":

To tell someone about themself, mostly used by gay black men.

"That was a read honey!"
"Don't do it hone[y], I will read your ass"

Great slang. Perfect!
___________________________

* Pandemonium — originally "The abode of all demons; hell, the infernal regions" (OED) — is now usually "Utter confusion, uproar; wild and noisy disorder; a tumult; chaos." Like this:

United Airlines — now, with scorpions.

"It's not clear how the scorpion got on the plane...."

Probably by bumping some lesser arachnid.