Under the Skin

I haven't been good about updating my blog much recently.  I fell out of the habit, I suppose, while I was doing my first year of my PhD, and things have been crazy.  So, I will try to grease the blogging wheels by bringing an old stand-by of mine: Lists and Ranking. I don't know why, but today, the concept of YA film franchises popped into my head.  I think I saw something about YA book series having been optioned or had its rights sold or something.  But I then thought about it in the back of my head.  And I decided to rank the YA film franchises (or attempts at franchises).  Of course, if I haven't seen it/read it, it's not going in the list. 13. Eragon: This movie was plain and simply bad, and it doesn't help that the source material was generally uninspired.  I still have to force myself to choke through the last few books of this series.  The first book was endearing and charming, the second saw some potential even through Eragon's inflated elf trainin

I try to pay attention in church, but I don't always succeed.  This last week, I was trying to listen to a very long, very rambling testimony and failing, and my mind wandered to FDR. I'm sure there was some sort of thing that triggered this thought, but I don't, for the life of me, have any idea what it was. Did you know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn't walk, but the majority of the country was not aware of that?  He would have people bring him to the podium before the press arrived, stand him there with his leg braces, and then bodily hold himself up to the podium for the duration with his arms?  He put a plank on the side of the president's desk so that he could hide the fact that he was in a wheelchair.  He didn't want to appear weak.  Why?  Why do we hide weakness?  I mean, I know it's an evolution thing.  But, why now?  Why do we do this? I don't know that I have a really strong and insightful response to this, but I think it's t

It seems that fake news is, shall we say, in the news.  And today, I want to talk about a piece of fake news that really bothered me.  And no, this isn't about Trump, though we can have some lengthy discussions about that man as well.  This is about bananas. About a month ago, someone posted an article on facebook about how eight children had contracted HIV from bananas at Walmart.  What's worse, someone posted this on a facebook group for scientists.   Immediately, I knew that this was a prank.  How?  Because HIV can't be transmitted by eating a banana.  And because HIV is a virus that infects primate cells, bananas don't get HIV.  But it's just a prank, right?  Anyone who believes it is stupid, right? Wrong.  And I'm not talking about the possible hit to Walmart's public image, because let's be honest, Walmart having bad produce isn't really news.  I'm talking about HIV knowledge.  I wasn't born for this, but my understanding is that in t