"At one point [Mary Peltola] required her staff to feed her family's pet chameleon, which is named Meatball, which only ate crickets."

"At one point, they had to feed Meatball in her congressional office when she was in Congress, and these live crickets escaped, and staff had to recapture them. So that was an example where they felt this was beneath their duties or somewhat demeaning of employees.... So one of the employees Mary Peltola fired in August was her campaign manager, a woman named Elisa Rios. I began talking to Elisa Rios, and she told me a pretty incredible story about what really happened with Dan J. Sullivan and the role Democrats played in his candidacy...."

I'm listening to today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "A Plan for Two Dans: How Democrats Manipulated Alaska’s Ballot/An investigation by The New York Times looked at how two people named Dan Sullivan ended up on the ballot for the Senate."

The underlying NYT story was the subject of a blog post yesterday, but that one did not have crickets, and I can't miss a good opportunity to bring out my "insect politics" tag.

I mean, have you ever heard of insect politics? They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect....

A word to the wise politician: After you've demeaned someone by forcing them to scuttle about capturing crickets, don't fire them, not before the election. Better yet: Don't keep your pets in the office, especially not if they — or their food — creeps people out or smells like hell. That is, if you must keep a pet in your office and you are a politician, make it a dog. There are lots of dogs kept in the offices of congresspersons. Dogs are the official pet of politics. They signal that you are human and normal. You might need that. Trump haters love to tell us he's lacking a dog. And Nixon saved his skin by mentioning his dog named Checkers, Bill Clinton procured a dog (Buddy) to offset his cat (Socks), and Obama ostentatiously acquired the dog Bo. The dog is the animal if you want to be a politician.

Have you ever heard of dog politics? They're very friendly. No brutality, no live crickets. 

"When Gramsci was four, a boil on his back began hemorrhaging, and he nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin.."

"... which stood in a corner of the house for the rest of his youth. As Gramsci’s latest biographer... reports...  Gramsci was buckled for hours each day into a leather harness contraption that hung from the rafters, intended to repair his spine. He hardened himself with tests of endurance, such as hammering his fingers with a stone until they bled. He kept a pet hawk, and idolized the Sardinian bandit Giovanni Tolu, who outfoxed the local Carabinieri. At school he was rebellious and insolent. Once, he had a dispute with a teacher who did not believe Gramsci had found a monstrous, snakelike lizard with feet. (He had: It was an ocellated skink.)"

From "The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci/No one understood political battle lines better than a Communist politician from Sardinia" (TNR).

"For the first time, scientists have mapped out the molecular and genetic processes by which temperature determines sex..."

"...in bearded dragons, a species of lizard native to Australia.... At cooler temperatures, chromosomes prevail, turning on one sequence of genes to make a female dragon; at warmer temperatures, a completely different series of genes can override partial male development and produce a female.... Why would a temperature-dependent pathway to one sex or another evolve? In reptiles... the ability to change sex in response to environmental cues has been retained across diverse species, from sea turtles to crocodiles, indicating both that it arose early in their evolution and that it confers an adaptive benefit.... For reptiles living in [arid] environments, being born closer to the end of the breeding season, when temperatures are beginning to drop, it could be more advantageous to be male. That’s because males can grow to a size where they can mate with females within that timeframe.... Females born late in the season could have to wait until the next breeding season, when temperatures are warmer, to successfully mate and produce offspring...."

From "In a Warming World, Heat Interferes With Sex Determination in These Australian Lizards/Scientists have discovered how hot temperatures override chromosomes in bearded dragons" (Smithsonian).