Antarctica, day 21-25

March 26, 2022 • 12:30 pm

We are winding up our voyage by heading to the port city of Valparaiso, an hour’s drive from the Santiago airport—the gateway to Chicago.There’s a palpable sense among passengers that the best part of the trip is over, which is true. Granted, we still have a few places to visit, including Puerto Natalas (and if I’d never seen Torres del Paine National Park , several hours from the town, I’d be juiced). But I’ve seen it before and it’s a long all day trip., mostly sitting on a bus. I signed up instead for a free tour of the region.

And I just discovered that that tour includes a visit to Cueva del Milodón Natural Monument, a “sacred” site for evolutionary biologists. For it was in these caves—in particular in the 200-foot-deep Milodón Cave—where the remains of Milodon darwinii, an extinct giant ground sloth, were first found.

Darwin found similar fossils of this behemoth in Argentina, and the animal now bears his name. It was the resemblance between the remains of the giant extinct sloth and those of the smaller and still extant sloths that helped Darwin realize that fossils are often found in the same are as similar living species. That, in turn, implied that the former were ancestors of the latter. Mylodon, then, is one piece of the puzzle that led to Darwin’s theory of evolution.

However, as far as I can see, Darwin’s fossils came from Argentina, not Chile. Here’s a photo of the mouth of that cave taken from Wikipedia:

But for the past several days the scenery has been one of rain, clouds, and hidden fjords, with not a penguin in view. It’s too foggy to see much, and people are playing bridge in the bar. Here are a few photos from the past couple of days.

As we approached Cape Horn yesterday afternoon, I heard loud rock music blaring from outside my cabin balcony. “What is that?” I asked myself. Going outside, I saw that a Chilean boat had transferred a pilot to our ship. Chilean law mandates that a Chilean pilot be used to steer the ship not just around Cape Horn, but through the Beagle Channel, where we traveled last night. Here is “dropping the pilot”.

I was amazing how close the boats got. Emannuel, my friend and server at dinner, told me that the pilots simply step from one boat to another. The Chilean boat, still blaring music, then turned tail and fled:

As I said, the best part of the Beagle Channel—the series of glaciers that so impressed Darwin—passed in the dark last night. We’re out of it now, and are in parts of the Strait of Magellan, a passage further north that was the first one used to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific without using the treacherous Drake Passage. On either side are islands, fjords, rain, cloud, and fog.

Before we started through the Channel, though, we stopped for a couple hours in Puerto Williams, often described as “the southernmost city in the world”. There is debate about that, depending of course on what you define as a “city”, but with a population of less than 3,000 people, it surely is more of a “town.” It does have a wonderful setting, though, backed by jagged, snow-capped peaks.

x

A panorama of the area around the “city”.

And so we steam on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly towards Valparaiso:

 

 

Even I have a bit of ennui, and have lost a lot of my appetite. Maybe it’s because I’m not doing landings and climbing, but I’m also tiring of the fare, even though the chefs do their best to make it diverse.  Last night I had three chicken steamed buns and a glass of white wine. I couldn’t even manage a milkshake!

After I return home, I’ll barely have time to take care of business, check on the ducks (we have three hens: Honey, Dorothy, and Cyndi, with an aggressive drake named Putin), and prepare for my next trip, as lecturer on an alumni trip to the Canary Islands, Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, and Portugal. That’s a short one (13 days including flights), but I’m looking forward to seeing Gibraltar for the first time (the last time I visited it couldn’t be entered from Spain) and visiting Morocco again, where I haven’t been since 1972.

And then I will rest and tend my ducks, who will be close to having babies.

Caturday felid triefecta: How to toilet-train your cat; David Baddiel and his beloved moggies; and Owlkitty the video star

March 26, 2022 • 10:45 am

I bet you didn’t know that the world famous jazz bass player Charlie Mingus also specialized in toilet training cats! Although Mingus died in 1979, the NYT just issued an article about his book on toilet training your moggy. (You know you’re an ailurophile if you know about that book).

An except of the article:

Sometimes, at Charles Mingus’s apartment, you would have to wait outside the bathroom as a cat finished using the toilet. The legendary jazz composer and bassist had grown tired of coming home to an overflowing litter box. So he devised a solution. And in 1954, he wrote it up on a single sheet of paper and began handing out copies. A pamphlet version followed.

“The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat” arrived in my mailbox in the second year of the pandemic. I learned about it after Topos, a bookstore and small press in Queens, reissued it — a piece of paper folded into three parts, its title in Cooper Black font, a photo of Mingus’s tuxedo cat, Nightlife, on the cover.

It took Mingus three or four weeks to toilet-train Nightlife. His method, in a nutshell, was to fill a shallow cardboard box with torn-up newspaper, instead of litter, which can clog the pipes. He placed the box far from the bathroom to start, then began inching it closer. “Do it gradually,” he writes. “You’ve got to get him thinking.”

Try this at home, if you want; it actually works for some cats.  It’s actually a short pamphlet and the link says you can buy it at brick-and-mortar stores in some cities, including New York and Berkeley.

*************

Here’s a nice Guardian article that several readers sent me. I didn’t know who David Baddiel was, but he’s apparently quite popular in the UK; his Wikipedia bio describes him as “an English comedian, presenter, screenwriter, and author.”

It’s a lovely paean to cats, and echoes many of my feelings, though I’m a bit in doubt about this:

 I am a fundamental atheist, but when I look at one of my cats – I presently have four – curving like a Matisse in a shaft of sunlight, I believe in God. Some people on social media see me as the antichrist, but really, I am the anti-Zouma.

But Baddiel redeems himself:

It isn’t, however, just about beauty, because cats are not just beautiful (although they really are: what other small animal is a perfect micro-copy of their big version? When I see Ron, my all ginger polydactyl – he has seven toes – boy, I just think: this is a lion cub. I basically live with a lion cub). Some of you may be aware that although my day job is still, nominally, comedian, late in my career I’ve been pulled into a type of activism, where I spend much of my time trying to redress various negative stereotypes and myths and bad imaginings that surround a long-maligned group. It may be time however for me to move on from Jews, to cats.

And he takes a clear side in the eternal debate of Cats Versus D*gs. Here he refers to those who “genuflect reflexively toward dogs.”

Cats have won. In the eternal battle between them and the barking, snappy ones as to who humans prefer being around, there is no doubt that first place has gone to the felines. People who don’t accept this will point to the fact that in the UK, there are still slightly more dog-owners than cat ones, but these are analogue people who presumably have never heard of the internet. In 2015 – these are the figures I can find, now it will be 10 times that – there were more than 2m cat videos on YouTube, with an average of 12,000 views each, a higher average than any other category. So from the point of view of what animals people like to watch and look at on their screens, these TV commissioners genuflecting reflexively towards dogs are just incorrect.

Secondly, it’s wrong. Because cats don’t pander to humans, that doesn’t mean that they are inexpressive. I’ve really had a lot of them, and each one has been very different and absurdly idiosyncratic. Pip, Ron’s mother, is often lazy and irritable, but will come over all kittenish and adorable if my wife sings her, at a particular pitch, Only You by Yazoo. Chairman Meow would stick her tongue out at you if you ran your fingers over a comb. Tiger, Ron’s brother, will grab your attention by tapping you gently on the arm with his paw, which is not unusual in and of itself, but he often becomes uncertain about the tap on the way to the tapping moment and so just stays with his paw poised in the air staring at you in hope and confusion, which is so cute it makes me want to die. These are just the tips of the various icebergs of personality that a few of the cats I’ve owned display.

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Reader Laurie sent me an NPR article or video called “Cat videos get the Hollywood treatment, thanks to one videographer.”  I have the link, but it doesn’t work for me, perhaps because I’m overseas. However, the videos are apparently adorable because they star a black cat named “Owlkitty”, who has a website here.

A note:

Lizzy (stage name: OwlKitty) is a 5 year-old floof living in Portland, Oregon. She stars in all your favorite movies and tv shows and gets lots of treats and cuddles in return. Offscreen, Lizzy loves her laser pointer, her adoptive mother (a 12 year-old tabby) and the taste of cream cheese. She’s never caught a bird.

So far, OwlKitty has made appearances in such classics as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, How to Train your Dragon, The Shining, Titanic, 50 Shades of Gray and Risky Business. You can also find her in Game of Thrones, Ariana Grande’s music video and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Here are two videos featuring Owlkitty. I can’t watch either of them on the ship, as we don’t have streaming video, but I believe I’ve seen them before. And, as I recall, I wasn’t impressed, but I guess others are.

Owlkitty in Jurassic Park:

Owlkitty in Titanic:

You (but not I) can see other Owlkitty videos here.

h/t: Matthew, Laurie, Debra

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 26, 2022 • 8:57 am

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO THOUGHT I MIGHT BE DEAD: I’m alive. But the ship’s Internet shut down just when I finished today’s Hili dialogue. So here it is, better late than never. It’s just now come back; we’re in thick fog in Patagonia and perphaps that plays hob with reception. In the meantime, I’ve just given a lecture so posting will be light today. As always, I do my best.

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that last night we traversed the Beagle Channel, and, sadly, were unable to see the famous icebergs because it was dark. Here’s our position and yesterday’s route: we’re emerging on the west coast of South America and will now proceed northwards toward Valparaiso, docking in eight days:

All around us are the scattered islands of western Patagonia, one of the reasons why it was hard to find a way from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Straits of Magellan or the Beagle Channel:

Below was the view from my cabin balcony at about 7:15 this morning. (I was returning from my rapid test for coronavirus, which was negative; this is required for when we go ashore to tour Puerto Natales tomorrow. Since I left the U.S. I’ve had more swabs up my nose than Murphy has pigs.)

So a hearty “good morning” on another Cat Sabbath: Saturday, March 26, 2022, with only a bit more than a week to go on the voyage. I’d better fill up on milkshakes, as it’ll be a long time till I have another. It happens to be National Nougat Day, but it’s best to avoid this tasteless “confection”:

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 26 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

I’m late with the news today because I am lecturing again this morning and suffer from a want of time. Here, though, is the headline from the New York Times click screenshot to read). It and the accompanying articles suggest that Russia may not be doing well at all, and might be satisfied with taking just the eastern part of Ukraine:

*And here are the headlines:

President Biden wraps up a three-day trip to Europe on Saturday, having met with NATO leaders over the military and economic responses to President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, as Russian military officials signaled that the war could be entering a new phase focused on securing control of separatist regions in the east of the country.

Mr. Biden is scheduled to meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland, a key NATO ally, on Saturday and is expected to visit in Warsaw with some of the more than two million refugees who have arrived in the country after fleeing the fighting in Ukraine.

It is heartening to think that I may have been wrong in thinking that Russia would take over Ukraine, either absorbing it like an amoeba ingests a protozoan or taking over part of it and leaving the rest in the hands of Putin’s stooges. I hope I was wrong, but the “solution” I just outlined is hardly satisfactory. Millions of Ukrainians might end up displaced, and Russia (at the cost of thousands of soldiers) will have gained a bit of land. I have given up trying to guess what will happen.

*The paper says that experts warn, and this is pretty predictable given the conditions in some cities of Ukraine, that “a public health crisis is looming“:

Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with H.I.V. and hepatitis C, and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and Covid-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and other diarrheal diseases, not to mention respiratory plagues like Covid-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis.

Organizers of efforts to help people with those conditions in Ukraine are rushing to prevent the war from morphing into a public health disaster. The conflict, they say, threatens to upend decades of progress against infectious diseases throughout the region, setting off new epidemics that will be nearly impossible to control.

*According to the Washington Post, the theater in Mariupol that was supposed to be a safe haven for civilians, but which the Russians bombed anyway, might contain 300 or more dead Ukrainians. Another war crime for Putin. My fondest wish is to see him tried, but that might be hard, since he has to be tied to the crimes by specific orders. I do think there will be enough evidence, but getting Vlad to the Hague is no easy task.

*As for the military clashes, here’s today’s headline from the Wall Street Journal (click on screenshot):

And here we learn this:

Russia said it was refocusing its mission in Ukraine on the country’s east, a shift from its initial attempt to capture the capital, Kyiv, and swaths of the country after meeting relentless resistance and suffering heavy losses.

The military pivot came as Moscow more than doubled the tally of its service members killed since its invasion and as President Biden traveled to Poland, signaling U.S. support for Ukraine in the form of high-tech weaponry. Mr. Biden also met with troops and with Poland’s president, a day after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit at which members pledged further military backing of Ukraine.

When Russia launched its assault on its smaller neighbor, it attacked on several fronts and rushed to take Kyiv with an airborne assault that quickly faltered. A thrust toward Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, also stalled.

Is it possible that, in the face of fierce resistance by Ukrainian soldiers, the mighty Russian army could fail to take the country’s capital? Well, the Nazis didn’t take either Leningrad or Stalingrad, so anything’s possible. Even Mariupol, battered and crumbling, has not been taken (but for a heartbreaking video, go here.) I imagine Putin stumbling around the corridors of the Kremlin at night, just as Nixon did in the White House during Watergate, asking himself why things went wrong.

*After a week in the hospital with an unspecified infection, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is out on the streets again, free to undermine American jurisprudence. But during his confinement the guano hit the fan, for text messages released between Thomas’s wife Virginia and Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6 debacle show that she’s as much of a right-wing loon as her husband. What this means for us (“here’s what you need to know”) is that a judge is supposed to recuse himself from cases in which their spouse is involved. And there are already two cases that Thomas voted on having to to do with Insurrection Day. As a Los Angeles Times op-ed notes,

. . .  on Feb. 22, 2021, Clarence Thomas dissented when the court rejected a Pennsylvania case from Trump Republicans seeking to throw out some mail-in ballots. This year, on Jan. 19, he was the sole dissenter in the court’s 8-1 decision to require the National Archives to release Trump papers related to the insurrection to the House committee investigating the attack. No fair-minded citizen could read Ginni Thomas’ texts and not doubt his impartiality in those cases.

There will be more such cases, and since there’s no higher court to review Supreme Court decisions, Thomas can do what he wants. But the lunacy of his wife, which may have influenced him, is astounding. Just one excerpt:

She passed along bizarre conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was being sent before military tribunals at the Guantánamo Bay naval base for “ballot fraud,” and another, popular among QAnon adherents, about a pro-Trump sting operation involving watermarked ballots. Meadows replied, “We will fight until there is no fight left…Thanks for all you do.”

Oy!

*And if that wasn’t enough bad news for this morning, several readers sent me links to reports tnat Antarctica appears to be melting. Well, a huge section of an ice shelf, the size of New York City, broke off the continent, and that may be a sign of climate change, especially because that area of East Antarctica hasn’t been prone to diminution.  As the Associated Press reports:

The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 70 degrees (40 Celsius) warmer than normal in some spots of East Antarctica. Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica’s stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula.

The ice shelf, about 460 square miles wide (1200 square kilometers) holding in the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from the warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and 16, said ice scientist Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She said scientists have never seen this happen in this part of the continent, making it worrisome.

Did you see the mistake in the report above? While 1200 square kilometers is indeed about 460 square miles (equivalent to a square about 21 miles on a side), the story reports area as if it were width (“The ice shelf, about 460 square miles wide. . . ).  I doubt that’s a typo; it’s probably some reporter who thinks that “square miles” is a linear measurement.  Regardless, and I know this is selfish, I’m glad I live in a time when I was able to see the continent in nearly its full glory.

Readers: see the continent while it’s still there!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has become a music critic!

Hili: Do you hear birds singing?
A: I do.
Hili: They are singing out of tune.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy słyszysz śpiew ptaków?
Ja: Słyszę.
Hili: Strasznie fałszują.

And Andrzej has a letter to readers of Listy accompanying a picture of Karolina (the 8-year-old visitor from Kyiv). I’ll give Malgorzata’s translation, and you can see the original Polish here.  (BTW, they have another refugee, more temporary this time, sleeping upstairs in the lodgers’ flat.)

Dear readers,

Because of the war which caused an increase of the number of people on our floor surface, we are working under different conditions. This may cause more mistakes in our work, either because of difficulties concentrating or because of interference from small fingers belonging to a small human being who lately likes to help us. We are asking for your understanding and for informing us about any mistakes you notice.

The picture shows my new helper with the cat bed on her head, in the process of heroic efforts to make me look at her and not at my computer screen.

From Jenny, a clever and practical use of medieval paintings:

I’m starting to get more ads populating my Facebook page again, but found this one particularly offensive because of the attempt to gussy up the word “shoes” by giving them the foreign-sounding name “Schüs”—even putting in an umlaut!  It’s like “Häagen-Dasz” ice cream, whose name means absolutely nothing in any language, but was made up by Reuben Mattus, a Polish Jew who emigrated to the U.S. and started selling frozen confectionary. Wikipedia tells us the rest:

The Senator Frozen Products company was profitable, but by the 1950s the large mass-producers of ice cream started a price war leading to his decision to make a heavy kind of high-end ice cream. In 1959, he decided to form a new ice cream company with what he thought to be a Danish-sounding name, Häagen-Dazs, as a tribute to Denmark’s alleged exemplary treatment of Jews during World War II, a move known in the marketing industry as foreign branding. Rose Mattus would dress up in fancy clothing to distribute free samples, giving the ice cream an air of sophistication and class.

Who knew?

From Crap Bird Photography:

A tweet from Ukraine:

After a long hiatus, Titania has tweeted!

Real men hydrate squirrels:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

 

Tweets from Matthew:

Real men rescue birds, too:

Duck on the loose!

What can you say but “oy”?

If I’ve posted this before, well, then I’m posting it again. Do you think the cat’s really showing off her kitten?

Antarctica, day 21b: Leaving and heading north

March 25, 2022 • 1:00 pm

This is the second part of yesterday’s post (recounting the events of Wednesday) that began with a wonderful morning visit to Cuverville Island. After lunch, we turned stern and headed north, with the next stop being Puerto Natales, gateway to Chile’s fantastic Torres del Paine National Park. (I was there on a 2019 trip, and rather than see it again—though you MUST at least once in your life—I opted for a tour on Sunday of the local area.)

But here I want to show the three hours of wonderful views we had heading north, before we left all the land behind entered the turbulent Drake Passage.  Wednesday afternoon was sunny, the glaciers were abundant, and islands were one one side of us and the Antarctic Peninsula on the other. I froze my butt off taking photos and running around a deck slippery with melted snow.)  At this advanced age I always wonder, when leaving a place I love, whether I’ll ever see it again, and so I wanted to imprint on my neurons as much as possible of the magic of Antarctica.

There will be few penguins, as we weren’t on land, and perhaps you’ve seen enough snow-capped mountains and glaciers, but in case you hadn’t—and just for the record—here are more.

First I want to show two similar pictures of a trio penguins. The photos are almost the same, but they’re among my favorites from this trip.

A trio of gentoos facing Cuverville Harbor.  Please don’t forget to click at least once on the photos to enlarge them!

Peaceful penguins:

Frolicking penguins:

The waters around Cuverville:

On the way out:

One of the lovelier bergs I’ve seen. Note Darwin’s “beryl-like blue” that he noticed in the glaciers of the Beagle Channel.

When I was walking around the next-to-upper deck, a nice British lady came up to me to show me a picture she took with her cellphone. It was a bird lying on the top deck, and she asked me to identify it. I didn’t know, but told her and her companion to report it to the Exploration Desk, as they were experts in dealing with seabirds that land on the ship.

I then went to the top deck and they showed me the bird, huddled in a place that was inacessible to normal humans. I couldn’t tell if it was sick or just hitching a ride. It turned out it was neither. The women duly reported it downstairs, and thus saved its life.

That evening, Lancy, our bird expert, explained that this was a beautiful specimen of a Cape Petrel (Daption capense), one of the handsomest sea birds of the Southern Ocean. They’re the only species in the genus Daption, and are extremely common, but none the less beautiful for that.

It turns out, or so Lancy tells us, that many seabirds landing on a solid surface, or land, are unable to take off; for some reason they require water (perhaps they need to paddle to get airborne). Once this bird landed, it couldn’t take off again, and needed to be rescued. Unable to take off, it would starve to death.

Lancy and several team members (we were told; I didn’t see this), first tried to crawl out there and grab the bird, as sometimes they keep them overnight before release. But they couldn’t reach it, so plan B was to simply push it off the edge, hoping it would fall into the water and be able to take off. And that’s apparently what happened, though I’m not sure if the falling bird even hit the water before it began flying. It flew near by the ship for a while, and then flew away. I was very glad that it wasn’t ill.

Below: the waters outside the dining room. For some reason I can watch the waves or churning water for hours; it gives me an odd sense of peace.  Whenever I watch the sea, the words of Prufrock come to me:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

Dinner the night before last: culturally appropriated Chinese food. Two courses: dumplings (shrimp, pork, and beef). They were good.

. . . and three steamed buns (beef).  There is almost no vegetarian food in the Fredheim, but sometimes they have chickpea dumplings. I gave them a pass.

And my favorite dessert, a milkshake (cloudberry this time):

And last night I felt I deserved a burger and fries, so I had the “steakhouse burger” with bacon, cheese, tomato, and lettuce, washed down with the house sauvignon blanc, for which I’ve acquired a taste. I will had to go on a detox regime when I get back to Chicago.

And a strawberry shake for dessert:

I watched the Sun until it began to sink beneath the sea, hoping to see the vaunted “green flash” that sometimes occurs right when the Sun disappears (it’s actually a green dot that you can see at the aforementioned link). I’ve looked for it many times, but have never seen it.

I regarded Wednesday as my last real day in Antarctica, because that’s the last time I saw its beautiful snow-frosted mountains.

Will I be back next year? I hope so, but even if I don’t go again, I’ve been there twice in my life, and that’s something.

Two readings on academic snitches

March 25, 2022 • 10:32 am

The internet is moribund on the ship today (It happens), so instead of writing a longer post, I’ll simply call your attention to two pieces worth reading. Both are criticisms of academic culture; one comes from the Left and the other from the Right.

Laura Kipnis is a liberal and a professor of Media Studies at Northwestern University, and she’s has been subject to more Title IX investigations than any academic I know.  This is because she treads dangerous ground: her speciality is writing about relationships on campus and the tortuous nature of sexual harassment policies that monitor them. Because she’s a critic, even though she harasses nobody she gets in repeated trouble simply for writing about what happens to other people. But she’s never been found guilty of anything.

Kipnis’s distinguishing trait (beyond her superb writing skills and dry humor) is that she won’t shut up about these investigations, but turns them her own books and articles. And when she does that, she gets even more Title IX violations for writing about them. In 2017 the New Yorker had an article about Kipnis called  “Laura Kipnis’s Endless Trial by Title IX,” but she’s still clashing with campus authorities, this time for creating an online Google survey about love during the pandemic. For that she got entangled with the campus’s Human Subject Research Board, which ultimately exculpated her. (I wonder if I could get into trouble with my online political-opinion “surveys”?)

Kipnis’s latest piece is in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below:

Here’s the introduction, which is a good example of how to draw a reader into an essay. It also shows one of Kipnis’s appealing traits: weaving her own persona into her pieces, even if they’re about more general topics—like the prevalence of snitching in college.

When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi. The next time I get in trouble, will my employer emulate the classy behavior of the Michigan Board of Regents and release troves of my own embarrassing emails for my enemies to savor and mock?

My next thought: Who was the snitch? I knew none of the players, but my inner Hercule Poirot went right to work, assembling likely suspects in the drawing room of my imagination (betrayed spouse, disappointed paramour, assorted foes and rivals, maligned underlings), cleverly disarming them with my continental charm until the culprit was exposed — most likely by the irrepressible look of creepy satisfaction playing across his or her face. To bring down an apparently much loathed and vastly overpaid university president, even for the stupidest of reasons: what ecstasy!

Among the questions prompted by Schlissel’s termination is whether higher education has, on the whole, become a hotbed of craven snitches. From everything I’ve heard and experienced, the answer is yes.

Her question then is why, when the Left used to be dead set against “snitches” (remember the Army/McCarthy trials and Hollywood blacklisting, both vigorously protested by liberals?), now seems to glory in it, creating what Kipnis calls a “carceral campus”? To wit:

. . .First let us pause to consider our terms: Was Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges, or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of academic and intellectual freedom.

This last is a variant of the “social-justice snitch,” a burgeoning category composed of those who want to defund the police and reform the criminal-justice system but are nevertheless happy to feed the maws of a frequently unprocedural and (many say) racist campus-justice system. There are, to be sure, right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected. What’s not is the so-called campus left failing to notice the degree to which the “carceral turn” in American higher ed — the prosecutorial ethos, the resources reallocated to regulation and punishment — shares a certain cultural logic with the rise of mass incarceration and over-policing in off-campus America. Or that the zeal for policing intellectual borders has certain resonances with the signature tactics of Trumpian America, for which unpoliced borders are equally intolerable. But what care social-justice types about fostering the carceral university if those with suspect politics can be flattened, even — fingers crossed! — expelled, or left unemployed and penurious?

The major answer—this is a spoiler alert, but Kipnis also gives so many bizarre episodes of snitching that the article will make your jaw drop—is this: social media, and the responsiveness of universities to social-media complaints or mobbing (even when the accused have done nothing wrong) gives people a way to get back at those they don’t like or who stand for someting they don’t like. This form of revenge is promoted by the swollen bureaucracy that colleges have created to deal with complaints of harassment and bigotry, bureaucracies that often lack work to do and so leap upon specious complaints.

Has anyone stopped to ask whether this is actually what we want the world to look like? Take, for instance, the complaints about gendered-speech missteps that are lately swelling the allegation coffers and occupying the swarms of bureaucrats and deanlets on call to aid every manner of snitch. Title IX offices have become the go-to for reporting pronoun errors or faculty members who accidentally misgender students (even when it involves reading a name off a roster, in one case I know of). Or for using a trans author’s pre-transition name on a syllabus, even when the book in question was published under that name: An older queer art-history professor at Pennsylvania State was turned in by younger queer students for doing just that a few years ago. The phrase “It’s generational” is often heard about this surge of accusation, a cliché meant to reconcile the apparent contradiction of gender-nonconforming progressives deploying the campus carceral apparatus to enforce their ideas of progressivism and queerness.

The lawyer Samantha Harris, who often defends speech-infraction cases, told me that N-word violations are also now a snitch’s paradise on earth. There are still, it seems, occasional old-school types (often leftists) who persist in thinking that there’s a distinction between quoting James Baldwin or Martin Luther King Jr. in full and hurling an epithet. The college-admissions consultant Hanna Stotland, who specializes in “crisis management,” told me that the snitching impulse is taking hold among younger and younger students. She used to have two such cases a year; she’s had 20 in the last two years. N-word offenses are a cottage industry here too. High schoolers squirrel away incriminating texts, or videos of friends at age 15 singing along with rap lyrics, then forward them to admissions committees when the friend (or frenemy, rather) gets an athletic scholarship or is admitted to an Ivy. Colleges are so quick to act on the intel, says Stotland, that they’ll sometimes retract an offer without even giving the accused student a chance to respond.

Of course to want to snitch on somebody like Don McNeil (the NYT writer fired for using the n-word didactically), you also have to claim that what’s been said offends you, causes you palpable “harm.”. But these often faux claims of “harm” are themselves promoted by colleges and by the media willing to take action against the accused. If you can get back at someone whose views you dislike by saying you’re “offended,” even if you really aren’t, well, as Church Lady said, “Isn’t that convenient?”

You can see why, although Kipnis leans Left, she repeatedly gets into trouble. It’s because she Speaks the Truth and also has moxie. She concludes this way:

These are a mere smattering of the hundreds of stories I’ve heard. There are obviously thousands more that people are too ashamed or cowed to disclose. I’m no psychic, but I can predict what will happen when this essay is published. My inbox will be flooded with cases of specious and horrific overblown accusations, sent by people who’ve been warned that if they talk about what they’ve been through, even when accused of verifiably false stuff, they’ll be punished — charged with “retaliation,” then face expulsion or job loss. These effective gag orders mean that administrators will get to keep operating with no public scrutiny, turning ostensibly liberal institutions into cell blocks.

My plan is to feature this new crop of stories in a regular column, or maybe a website, dedicated to the Academic Snitch of the Week. Hey, I know — if we run low on cases, we’ll solicit anonymous reports. Warning: We will be naming names. Of the snitches.

*****************************

A reader called my attention to the story below, reported mainly on right-wing sites that often indict colleges for the same stupidity that Kipnis describes. To find out about this stuff, you more or less have to visit these sites once in a while, for “mainstream media” simply doesn’t care much about injustice done by social-media snitches.

Here’s what the reader wrote me with the links:

I thought you may find this interesting (in a sad way) as it  concerns a scientist having what sounds like serious negative professional repercussions for a party costume.

I can’t find any mainstream media addressing this event. Like most people, I am familiar with the racist history of blackface and believe white folks ought to err on the side of caution. However, in addition to the event being 13 years ago, she was dressed in a costume because (I assume) she was honoring the celebrity [JAC: Michael Jackson], not because she was engaging in racist demeaning mockery. Considering the nature of her life’s work, it sounds sadly ironic that she is being publicly criticized by her employer . She sure sounds like exactly the kind of scientist any research university and university hospital would want on their staff. It appears she has a history of mentoring African scientists. She has so far declined to make a long groveling apology.

There are lots of these stories, but this one is particularly striking because the punishment is way out of line with the offense. The offense, as my correspondent wrote and the articles below report, consisted of wearing a Michael Jackson Halloween costume (including darkening her skin) 13 years ago. Yes, a bad decision, even back then (but much more so now). But worth getting raked over the coals about, and forced to undergo “reflection and reeducation”? No way.

There are two similar pieces about it, one in The College Fix and the other in The Daily Wire. You can ignore them because they’re from the Right, but the story they tell is true. It’s also summarized in Wikipedia. Click on the screenshots to read the tale:

From The College Fix:

and from The Daily Wire:

The scientist at issue is Julie Overbaugh, and she is indeed a top female scientist, a decorated researcher at “The Hutch” and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her Wikipedia biography, which details her accomplishments and awards, has a section called “Advocacy for diversity in science” immediately followed by a newer section called “Resignation”. This will be a blot on her career forever.

Overbaugh’s is guilty of a single unwise by not “violent’ decision 13 years ago to dress as Michael Jackson in one of her lab’s annual “themed Halloween parties. The theme was the best-selling 1982 album “Thriller”, so it would not have been a stretch for Overbaugh to dress as Jackson. The mistake was the darkening of her skin, not donning a hat and a silver glove.  I’ll let Wikipedia give the details:

In early 2022, Overbaugh was placed on administrative leave from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. A photo of a Cancer Research Center Halloween Party from 2009 was anonymously distributed that allegedly showed her wearing blackface while dressed as Michael Jackson as part of a group “Thriller” costume. While determined to be an isolated incident, and although an interview of her peers and coworkers failed to reveal any pattern of inappropriate behavior “of any kind in the past or at any time while employed at Fred Hutch”, Overbaugh ultimately agreed to step down from her role as a Senior Vice President at the Center. She was also removed from all leadership duties in order to engage “in an education and reflection process” after publicly apologizing for her past action in a town hall meeting. As described by the President of the Hutch in the town hall: “Julie has offered to step down from her role and Senior Vice President of Education and Training and I have accepted her resignation”. “She will continue to be a prominent investigator at the Fred Hutch in the Human Biology Division working on viruses that affect so many people around the world”.

And the reaction by her bosses, taken from The Daily Wire:

As The Federalist noted, the incident didn’t occur at UW Medicine, yet its CEO Dr. Paul Ramsey and Equity Officer Paula Houston sent an email to staff announcing Overbaugh’s punishment for the “racist, dehumanizing, and abhorrent act” of “blackface.”

“Ramsey and Houston claim that the UW Medicine community was ‘harmed’ by the 13-year-old photo that most staff didn’t know existed until reading about it in the Feb. 25 email. ‘We acknowledge that our community has been harmed by this incident and the fact that 13 years elapsed before action was taken,’ they wrote. ‘We are convening a series of affinity group meetings in the next few weeks to provide spaces for mutual support, reflection, and response,’” the Federalist reported. “Neither Ramsey nor Houston explained how the photo ‘harmed’ anyone. Indeed, beyond one confirmed complaint, it’s unclear if anyone even cared about the old photo.”

Forced into re-education because she “harmed” the community! Apparently the community, and Overbaugh’s bosses, have no capacity for even a bit of forgiveness after 13 years. The words and punishment are harsh, way beyond what was deserved.

The statement issued by the Hutch is here, talking about her required “education and reflection process” after having being removed from her administrative posts. (Thank Ceiling Cat she can still do research!)

So, as journalist Jesse Singal noted in a series of seven tweets, her blackface was “not a good idea” (I suspect we all agree about that given the history of blackface), but the punishment was seriously disproportionate to the offense. You can read Singal’s tweets by clicking on any one of them below:

It’s this kind of stuff that makes me think the American academic world has gone off the rails.

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 25, 2022 • 6:30 am

Where we are now: The ship’s real-time map shows that we’re pretty much through the Drake Passage and are approaching Cape Horn. We’ll now turn left and head up the coast of Chile to Valparaiso:

A weak sunrise from my balcony at 7:30 a.m. (breakfast is half an hour later on a day with no landings). Now the sun is gone again:

We won’t be able to land at Cape Horn because the weather is a bit dire, with high winds, but that’s okay—I’ve been there before and can say I’ve stood on what many see is the southernmost bit of South America (see here for my 2019 post on the site; I note sadly that comments were more numerous then).

The best part of the site is the famous albatross monument made by Chilean sculptor José Balcells and installed in 1993. The albatross is seen in the space between two offset metal plates. It’s beautiful and very clever.

My photo from 2019

It was another rough passage but the seas have abated a bit. I don’t have to lecture today but will do so tomorrow.

If you want to help out with “this day in history”, go to the Wikipedia page for March 25 and give us your favorite notable events, births, and deaths.

*Here’s today’s headline from The New York Times (click on screenshot to read):

And the NYT news summary:

After meeting with NATO allies and announcing a deal to help secure more liquefied natural gas for the European Union to reduce its dependency on Russian fossil fuels, President Biden is traveling to the Polish border with Ukraine on Friday to highlight the growing humanitarian catastrophe caused by the war and to underscore the moment of peril for Europe as it confronts Russian aggression.

Even as Mr. Biden continues to rally European allies to keep up the pressure on Russia, Ukrainian forces have launched several counteroffensives that appear to have changed the dynamic of the war. But Western leaders worry that as Russian forces are stymied on the battlefield, President Vladimir V. Putin may turn to unconventional weapons.

In a new sanction, Finland has stopped its last trains to Russia (a line from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, so that there is no longer any direct train service from Russia to Europe.  The war is “grinding on”, as the paper says, with Russians continuing to wreak havoc on Ukraine’s infrastrcture but not gaining much territory. In an act of remarkable stupidity (or nastiness), the Russians are shelling areas near the Chrenobyl nuclear power plant, now in Russian hands. Another nuclear disaster, with the release of radiation, is possible.  And the NYT has an absorbing gallery of photos of the last five weeks of conflict in Ukraine (has it really been that long?)

*Supreme Court Justice Clarence “I Never Speak” Thomas et famille have turned up in the news. First, his wife, Virginia, is known from a series of 29 saved messages to have been pretty deeply involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. As the Washington Post reports, Thomas

repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

She’s as much of a loon as her husband! I suppose this means that, according to judicial protocol, Thomas would have to recuse himself from adjudicating any Supreme Court cases involving the January 6 insurrection, as judges aren’t supposed to deal with cases that involve their spouses.

*As for Thomas himself, the 73-year-old Justice was hospitalized last Friday for an unspecified “infection”.  All we know is that he experienced “flu-like symptoms,” is said to be responding to antibiotics, and is expected to be released very soon. There has been no comment from the Supreme Court itself.

*Remember the “superyacht” Scheherazade, thought to be owned by Putin or bankrolled by his buddies for his use? It’s been cooling its heels in an Italian port while authorities investigate its ownership—possibly before confiscating it. According to the NYT, all the Russian crew members have suddenly quit their jobs.

The crew members had been fixtures in the small port of Marina di Carrara since the fall of 2020, when the 459-foot-long yacht, Scheherazade, arrived at a dry dock less than four months after being built. No owner has been publicly identified.

“They were replaced by a British crew,” said Paolo Gozzani, the local leader of Italy’s General Confederation of Labor trade union, on Wednesday. “I don’t know and don’t care whether the yacht is indeed Putin’s or not, but I worry about the repercussions on shipyard workers if police impound or confiscate the vessel.”

Workers at the shipyard and regular visitors to its private lounge confirmed that the Russians had routinely supervised the work done on the yacht and had drinks at the bar or played pool there in the evenings. The yacht, estimated by the website SuperYachtFan to cost about $700 million, has two helicopter decks, a swimming pool with a retractable cover that converts to a dance floor and a gym.

. . . This week, the research team of Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, published a video in which it argued, based on a 2020 crew manifest, that a dozen of the Russian crew members of the Scheherazade either worked for or had a connection with Russia’s Federal Protective Service. The team drew the conclusion that the yacht must belong to Mr. Putin or some of his closest aides.

The ownership of the yacht is obscured by being filtered through shell companies, but here’s a picture of what is likely to be Vlad’s Big Toy:

*Reader Ken sent me a WaPo article by Jennifer Rubin called “Biden is proving all the awful foreign policy takes wrong.” (He added that “I’ve come to be a regular reader of her columns, as they are usually spot-on, fact-based, and generally from the perspective of a ‘traditional’ liberal.”

I don’t recall the MSM bashing Biden nearly as hard as they bashed Trump, but Rubin says they pretty much did. Regardless, I agree with her defense of Biden’s foreign policy (except for the Afghanistan debacle):

Certainly, there were plenty of critics bashing Biden after his administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, but even then it was clear Biden’s foreign policy bore no resemblance to Trump’s. From the get-go, Biden elevated U.S. alliances, stressed democracy as a core value and ended the United States’ fawning over dictators. The United States under Biden rejoined the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords and negotiated a breakthrough deal on nuclear submarines with Britain and Australia.

After the Afghanistan withdrawal, media coverage was full of prognostications that Biden had lost the confidence of allies and had eroded the United States’ international credibility. We know now that as these complaints were raised, behind the scenes Biden and his team were knitting together a historic, coordinated response to Russian aggression.

. . . There will be rocky times ahead, but Biden’s recent accomplishments should prompt more humility and circumspection among the media that are all-too-willing to paint him as a failure.

And yet she admits that “Media coverage finally seems to have caught up to reality,” so she’s kvetching about the past. Granted, I haven’t read the Right-wing media lately, but I’m sure they’re bashing Biden on all fronts, for that’s what they do.

*I have to preen a bit about my prescience here, as I predicted that the Taliban’s promises to allow women equal access to education in Afghanistan were lies. Now it seems that I was right, at least according to the Associated Press.  The relevant article is called “Many baffled by Taliban reneging pledge on girls’ education” and it notes this:

A news presenter on Afghanistan’s TOLO TV wept as he read the announcement. Images of girls crying after being turned back from school flooded social media. Aid groups and many others remained baffled.

The Taliban have so far refused to explain their sudden decision to renege on the pledge to allow girls to go to school beyond sixth grade. Schools were supposed to reopen to older girls on Wednesday, the start of the new school year.

The ban caught even the Taliban-appointed Education Ministry unprepared. In many places across Afghanistan, some girls in higher grades returned to schools, only to be told to go home.

But crikey, why should anyone be baffled? Limiting women’s opportunities is part of their religion; and that’s exactly what they did when they had the country before. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that their “pledges” to the world after they gained control were mere window-dressing to make nice and get aid. They should remain pariahs to the world.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka’s got the heebie jeebies, but she’s right. All three cats are there!

Hili: I have a feeling that somebody is walking behind me.
Kulka: You are imagining things.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że ktoś za mną chodzi.
Kulka: Zdaje ci się.

Below is a sweet picture: the Ukrainian guest/refugee, 8-year-old Karolina, cuddling little Kulka in Dobrzyn. It’s an Andrzej monologue.

Andrzej:  Putin, war, our village is quiet, so I’m talking with a little girl in her third language using sentences from a primer.

[JAC: The language is Polish, which Andrzej is teaching Karolina.]

In Polish: In Polish: Putin, wojna, nasza wieś spokojna, więc z małą dziewczynką rozmawiam w jej trzecim języku zdaniami z elementarza.
And some news about Karolina and her mother Natasza, both in Dobrzyn:

They got a TV today. It was a collective effort of a few inhabitants of Dobrzyn. One family donated a used TV, another an antenna, and a mechanic installed all that. When I wanted to pay the mechanic, he was almost annoyed. “You must be joking!” he said to me. Unfortunately, still no news from Natasza’s husband.

When I asked Malgorzata if they could pick up Ukrainian channels in Dobrzyn, she responded: “Yes, they can get Ukrainian channels and now Polish TV is broadcasting Ukrainian programs both for adults and stories for children.”  Isn’t that lovely! But don’t forget that despite the hospitality of the Polish people, their government remains a regressive, right-wing organization.

Below: a comparison that’s a bit over the top, but still funny. From Jesus of the Day:

From Anna:

From Phil:

A journalist in Ukraine reports some words she heard:

Two from reader Barry. First, “how to pet a porcupine”. WITH the grain!

And “a sneaky fish indeed!” Some flounders can actually change their body pigment (like some squid) to match the surface on which they’re resting.

Tweets from Matthew. This first one is funny, but not exactly in the best of taste for an obituary:

BATMAN!

This species is in a genus of terrestrial flatworm:

A giant deep-water sea cucumber from the deep-sea rover Nautilus (they have a livestream at the link). Be sure to watch to the end.

Live and Learn Department: Loris have brushlike tongues! Three tweets, one with a video:

Antarctica, day 21a: Cuverville Island and lunch

March 24, 2022 • 11:45 am

Yesterday morning we had a visit to Cuverville Island, a small but magical place I hadn’t visited since 2019. It was even better this time as the weather was a mixture of sun and overcast sky, and there was little wind (wind is the visit-killer down here).

My previous post is here, and I’ll give the same introduction (indented). Before we start, I recommend again that you click once (or twice) on the photos to enlarge them, as I’ve beefed up the pixel numbers compared the photos I posted in 2019.

Here’s a bit of what Wikipedia says about the place:

Cuverville Island or Île de Cavelier de Cuverville is a dark, rocky island lying in Errera Channel between Arctowski Peninsula and the northern part of Rongé Island, off the west coast of Graham Land in Antarctica. [JAC: it’s only 2 X 2.5 km] Cuverville Island was discovered by the Belgian Antarctic Expedition (1897–1899) under Adrien de Gerlache, who named it for J.M.A. Cavelier de Cuverville (1834–1912), a vice admiral of the French Navy.

The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports a breeding colonyof about 6500 pairs of gentoo penguins, the largest for this species on the Antarctic Peninsula. Other birds nesting at the site include southern giant petrels and Antarctic shags

Here’s where Cuverville is on Google maps; it’s a tiny island in the inlet marked below:

And a bigger map from The Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty site. Note the “landing site” (where we landed) and the adjacent gentoo penguin colonies, most of which are off limits. But there are plenty of gentoos you can visit, as you’ll see below. I saw colonies to both the north and south, walking up the cliff until we were prohibited from going further.

And a photo of Cuverville Island—not mine, but taken from the site Alli’s Excellent Adventures!:

Now we begin the post for yesterday’s visit, and the photos are mine. There’s really not much to say except that the site epitomizes what’s so amazing about Antarctica: the scenery, unmatched anywhere in the world, yet with a limited palette of colors, the huge scale of the place, and, of course, the penguins.  They’re all gentoos, and the island has one of the largest gentoo rookeries on the Peninsula.

This is what you see as you land. The penguins were all adults, many of them molting.

I love to frame shots that seem to show a penguin admiring its environment, but of course that’s a fantasy:

More penguins:

A rookery on the west side of the “landing site,” with majestic scenery and—SUN!

An iceberg. They really are this blue; I don’t enhance the blue color when I post these:

In the rookery the birds are busy attending to their toilette:

A plump resting penguin, with a bit of last year’s coat still showing:

More penguins and a glacier:

This guy was patiently sitting on a rock trying to photograph the gentoos, unaware that one was right behind him:

You can see that many of these are still molting. It takes several weeks to shed the old coat and grow in the new:

I wanted to take a vanity photo of myself reflected in an expedition guide’s goggles, with penguins in the background. I got mostly myself and you can barely see the penguins. But if you click on the photo to enlarge it, and then click again, you’ll see a pile o’ penguins behind my head.

Penguins doing their best to match the background:

If you love penguins, then you hate skuas, as they eat both eggs and penguin chicks. Penguins hate these birds, too. This is the head of a South Polar Skua (Stercorarius maccormicki), although I’m not 100% sure, as it could be an Antarctic Skua. (Readers can help here.)

There were more bergs in the bay than there are in the Brooklyn phone book (I’m allowed to say that). You can see the passengers for scale.

Moe Bergs:

The alternating cloud and sun made for some lovely views. Here’s the estimable MS Roald Amundsen awaiting our return by Zodiac:

Spot the penguin!

Here we have the tracks of three penguins who were sick of stumbling through the thick snow and decided to toboggan on their bellies. There are three parallel belly tracks, and you can see the sporadic imprints of their flippers (wings), which they use to propel themselves:

Another of my favorite photos: “Lone penguin in the vastness of its environment.” It’s the penguin equivalent of the Pale Blue Dot.

Now here’s a weird feature of many polar cruises: they offer passengers a chance to strip to their bathing suits and immerse themselves in the polar seas (-1.9° C, a bit below freezing) for a quick dip. After they jump in, scream loudly and hustle back out, expedition guides are there to wrap them in towels. For that they get an official “Antarctic Beach Club” certificate.

I don’t understand this, but so it goes.

I returned to my cabin and decided to take a selfie wearing my “landing” outfit.

Then I decided to have lunch. I wasn’t all that hungry, but wanted to show the readers what is available in the “fancy” dining room. (There’s an even fancier one that’s free for suite passengers, but costs us proles 25 Euros for a meal.) Here’s me in the Aune, sipping a diet Coke while admiring the scenery. By this time the sun was fully out.  I prefer to photograph in overcast conditions, though, for both the atmosphere and the reduced contrast.

A panorama of part of the Aune dining room:

It’s amazing to have a meal with scenery like this outside. It’s too easy to get jaded!

And my meal, with the courses quoted from the menu:

Starter: “Pasta salad with pesto, baby corn [JAC: it was adult corn!], radish, cherry tomato and parmesan.”

Main: “Local sausage fried mushrooms, leeks, mashed potatoes”:

Dessert: “Peanut cake with pear compote.”  It was good. Desserts seem to be the most consistently good course here, but that could be because I have a sweet tooth.

I had so many photos from yesterday that I’ve divided them into two bits. Tomorrow I’ll show the sights after we left Cuverville to head north along the Peninsula, and show my dinner as well.