THE SCIENCE OF ARTHROPODS, METEOROLOGISTS, ALCOHOL, EGGS, ASTHMA, NO ASTHMA, GUTs, AND HOW GREAT YOU ARE – by DON

Mar 24, 2025

A longer, less humorous title would be, “The Curious Case of Don Having an Advanced Engineering Degree, But Not Believing in Science Despite the Overwhelming Evidence From Blowhard Idiots Like Joe Rogan.” Or maybe, “Why Science Chaps My Ass- by Don.”

There. That’s it. Next year I’m going to put together a drunken spelling bee for April Fools. See if I don’t.

Arthropods

Since we moved back to Maine from Washington State in 2008, Liana and I are disgusted with the proliferation of ticks and the introduction of the browntail moth. What the hell were you Mainers doing in the nine years we were gone that incurred this kind of God’s wrath?

Sure, Washington State has bzillions of bloodsucking insects and poisonous creatures abound. But in the Puget Sound Lowlands where we lived, there were only fat spiders the size of horseshoe crabs that showed up every fall. They made sure every walkway and path was strung with menacing looking webs that could surely trap a wildebeest. And Dog help you if you came home at night and walked into one of their webs. The web signaled all the spiders within a 100ft radius to run over and try to burrow themselves in your ears, eyes, pants, and down your shirt collar. Also up my dress if I was at that kind of party.

But the spiders in the Puget Sound Lowlands were NOT poisonous. They were abhorrent-looking and they were everywhere. Like Mormons. But when the first swarm bit me and found my blood alcohol level enough to permanently blind 6 out of their 8 eyes, they retreated back to the webby shadows and waited for something more manageable to come along, like a raccoon or small child. Liana used a 3ft-long car ice scraper in front of her like a Tentative Jedi. She moved trepidatiously from her car to the safety of the front door over the course of only a couple hours on The Seattle Spider Days.

You’d need to cross the Cascades before finding deadly and really nasty things like the Brown Recluse Spider, Black Widow, Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and liquored-up hillbillies. That’s why almost no one except hillbillies lives east of the Cascades. And statistics prove you are much more likely to be killed in Seattle from contracting Hepatitis A at a coffee shop visited by Eddie Vedder.

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Meteorologists

This year, Maine went through a glorious six-week period where it was absolutely frigid with no snow cover. Why “glorious?” Because everything I’ve been told by “experts” about ticks and browntail moths say they die in frigid temperatures with no snow cover.

Then in March, all the “expert” meteorologists climbed up their lofty Ivory Towers and declared the summer of 2025 would produce a bumper crop of ticks and browntail moths not seen since the plagues directed at the ancient Egyptians by an angry Hebrew God.

Then it struck me.

No matter what kind of winter Maine just had, the ticks and browntail moths were always going to be worse than the previous year. The Maine meteorologists did all they could to keep Mainer’s hopes up by saying things like this:

1) It was a mild winter. Expect fewer ticks and browntails.
2) It was a cold winter, but there was a lot of snow pack. Expect fewer ticks and browntails.
3) The beginning of winter was cold with no snow cover, but the end was warm with a lot of snow pack. Expect ticks and browntails everywhere.
4) The beginning of winter was warm, but the end was cold with without snow cover. Expect ticks and browntails to be excessive this summer.
5) “I’ve been drinking for 10 days straight with what turned out to be a scarecrow! Those ticks and moths are gonna suck this summer, bzitches…. huh? wha?”

The Maine meteorologists might as well scream, “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! THERE’S NOTHING GOD, NATURE, OR MAN CAN DO TO STOP THE TICKS AND BROWNTAIL MOTHS FROM SUCKING OUR CHILDREN DRY AND RAPING OUR WIVES!!!! Now here’s an important announcement from Fred’s Clam Shack in Otisfield.”

Meteorologists admitted in murmurs that “scientists” might not really know why these pests keep coming back in larger numbers every year. Frankly, they confessed, just thinking about it gave them all headaches and they were going to take a hot shower, swallow a couple junior aspirins, and explore a bottle of Creme de Menthe in bed for the next couple days.

But let’s go easy on the meteorologists. It’s not like they wrote 500-page PhD dissertations on winter survival rates of Arthropoda in Northern New England. Meteorologists just need a BS degree, a record clean of major felonies, look good on camera, and read the NOAA forecasts convincingly. And they must utter the phrase “a risk of drizzle” sound life-threatening enough for people to drop what they’re doing and scurry into their underground bunkers after hoarding baby formula despite not having a baby or knowing anyone who does.

And yes, I once heard Todd Gutner of WCSH 6 warn me about a “risk of drizzle” if I was driving to Bucksfield on a July day. Later in the year I heard him say, “…the risk of flurries…” Those phrases probably sent thousands of otherwise calm, logical people on a deranged, Mad Max-like kill-fest odyssey for food, fuel, bunker oil, ammunition, and breeding females.

Well done, Mr. Gutner. Well done. We are indeed living in a society governed by lowest common denominators.

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Alcohol

I grew up in Boston and everyone drank. My father brought me to dive bars in the city named Victor’s Bar & Grill. My younger brother pronounced it as “Victor’s Girlie Bar,” which got my mother on another level of hatred towards my father.

My father let me take long draughts from his warmish, shitty beer when I was 8 or so. Not only that, everyone drove drunk everywhere with impunity. I remember my father and my uncle Joe in the front seats, and my cousin Joey, and myself in the back seat of a shitty Volvo speeding 90mph down Morrissey Boulevard in Quincy at midnight. Our fathers screamed, “Fuck the Casbah!” at the top of their lungs. I remember that moment of my life fondly and credit it with my lifelong love affair with swearing colorfully and with conviction. Also drinking stupidly.

Then in high school, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) took hold of the national zeitgeist and showed the horrible effects drunk drivers had on the American roads. The victims were always youngsters brimming with promise, and had “their whole lives ahead of them.” They never mentioned drunk drivers who killed only pedophiles, other drunk drivers, wife beaters, serial killers, or politicians.

The counter movement, DAMM (Drunks Against Mad Mothers), briefly counterattacked, but just as quickly disappeared as microbrews captured the wino imagination everywhere.

Like so many things in this great country, drinking was a continuing and pointless battle akin to the battle regarding eggs. Were eggs healthy for you or not? Cereal manufacturers conducted nationwide research concluding the cholesterol in eggs would give a Hippopotamus a stroke after only 4 eggs. The egg industry conducted research showing consumption of eggs made you more virile and able to screw breakfast cereal CEO’s wives and daughters.

I knew the tables had turned when my college freshman orientation, my mentally-inferior and susceptible freshman ass was forced to sit down in a large auditorium with thousands of other wonder-eyed freshmen and told how unfunny drinking was. I bet 60% of the auditorium was buzzed or worse. At least it smelled that way.

We were hectored at length about all the horrible roads drinking would definitely lead you down: drunken homicide, drunken beating your wife, drunken serial killing, becoming a drunken Yankees fan, and how it was a “drunken gateway drug” to heroin and PCP.

They showed us clips from movies like “Animal House” we all thought were enormously funny and put a gruesome twist on it. Like the scene where Otter seduced and slept with Dean Wermer’s wife. They showed the scene and asked us with great fervor and the microphone noticeably louder, “WHAT IF THAT WAS YOUR MOTHER?”

I’ve always been pretty insensitive, bordering on narcissistic, so I laughed out loud at all the forced drama. I was one of about 20 in the crowd of 2,000 freshmen who laughed. At the very least, I knew out of about 20,000 students on campus, 20 had senses of humor like mine. Possibly more students, possibly more senses of humor. It was tough to tell how many were skipping this farce for a frat party, or dropping acid in the woods nearby.

“They” recommended not binge-drinking more than 2 days a decade and drinking plenty of water, eating raw vegetables, going to church on Sunday, and calling your mother once a week.

The alcohol “debate” has raged over the internet ’til this very day.

One side claims drinking a glass of wine a day for the antioxidants is beneficial. The other side claims people who drink a glass of wine every day have cracked chromosomes and shrunken, void-ridden brains. Then it was revealed that teetotalers died alone and in trash compactors 79% more than people who measured their daily intake of wine in 55-gallon drums. Through the fight, both sides remained united in loathing any hard liquor in any amount.

We now hear SO much about the dangers of ANY alcohol. Listening to some “experts,” drinking a shot of Sambuca this Friday at Chili’s is as dangerous as camping out next to The Elephant’s Foot in the Chernobyl sarcophagus with your living room couch cushions and a case of warm T@B.

And if you just criticized me for sanctioning drunk driving…

Congratulations! You are a Lowest Common Denominator! You are unable to process sarcasm or to think critically. You react only to predictable and obvious tear-jerk emotions and contrived self-righteousness. Facts elude you!

You’re what’s wrong with this country.

Have a nice day!

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Asthma / No Asthma

I was in college and got drunk despite all the information available to the contrary.

I was in Bar Harbor on a September weekend. I couldn’t find an obliging woman’s bed to kick in with. So I settled for a filthy couch on an outside porch in Bar Harbor.

When I woke up in the morning, I had an enormous headache and a vague sense I was a huge pain in the ass to everyone the night before. Some kind soul put a thin wool blanket over me. I didn’t see any blood or vomit on my clothes or the couch, so I sent the whole situation off to the “Fuck It File,” where so many of my alcoholic blackouts reside to this day.

I headed for my truck without waking any of my friends in a classic Irish Goodbye. My throat was dry and scratchy. My nose was plugged with heavy snot. On the way back to Orono, I drank about 3 quarts of various, unnaturally-colored Gatorade and ate about a pound of not very good teriyaki beef jerky and felt a little better. It turns out Gatorade and beef jerky isn’t healthy for you at all. And it was certainly no match for the roiling germs I’d scooped up from a filthy, outdoor couch in a 40-degree night.

I developed bronchitis that night, and after a month of the persistent wheezing driving me crazy, I walked into the Orono Campus Health Care Center totally nude and demanding my naughty bits and lungs be treated or at least photographed.

Haha! No. I wasn’t nude. And my naughty bits were fine, and I had plenty of photos of them. I only complained about the unrelenting, deep rasping of the infection in my lungs. After waiting patiently for over an hour, I was led to a room where I was ordered to take off all my clothes by a short, chubby nurse with long, braided black hair. After a couple curt questions, the nurse gave me a smile and left. I waited in that room for what seemed like a whole Adam Sandler movie.

I was completely naked and my nipples were more erect then they’d been since 1982 when my male teenage body was made aware of Pheobe Cates’s female teenage body.

Maybe there was a new treatment where doctors observed infected lungs through rock hard nipples. I had no medical training. And where the hell was that flimsy garment what covered up the front of you, but left The Catacombs open? Was my health insurance that withholding and cruel? Whatever the reason, I was completely naked for the third time that day and expected the worst.

A youngish doctor came in with great bluster and came up to the same short, chubby, cute Indian nurse. I stood up and shook his hand, making my member move in an ever-so-slight, side-to-side motion that projected “Hello!” to my new medical friends.

The Doc immediately sent the cute nurse for a “hospital smock.”

He asked why I was bothering him. I told him the story about the drinking, the failure to hook up despite feeling sure of hooking up, the couch, the unnaturally-colored Gatorade, and the bronchitis. He studied me intensely with narrowed eyes like I was some kind of trilobite from 400 million years ago. He remained silent. I told him again I had bronchitis and just needed antibiotics. I said I’d had this condition a couple times before.

Nothing pisses a doctor off more than a self-diagnosing patient.

Did the patient spend an enormous number of college Friday nights and the proverbial “boatload” of money studying the endocrine system? No. Did The Doc get to drink himself stupid on his college Friday nights in Bar Harbor, hit on attractive women, and pass out on filthy couches? No. Did the patient have to retake an entire semester of the lymphatic system because of a prolonged, stress-induced, mental breakdown? No.

So The Doc summarily dismissed my assertions and said the conditions I described all pointed to asthma. I would need to perform a bunch of breathalyzer-like tests to confirm it. I told The Doc again that I didn’t have asthma, and asked him where the hell my see-through hospital smock was.

The Doc gave me an officious, short snort and pivoted around to the door. As he exited, he left the the door open. The whole hallway was full of patients, employees, and children gaping at my mediocre frontal lewdness.

I gathered my clothes unceremoniously off the floor, inadvertently Brown-Eye mooning the entire hallway. I swear I heard a child start crying.

I wasn’t sure why I was ordered to disrobe in the first place until the cute nurse showed back up and giggled when she saw my predicament. She put the flimsy gown on the chair arm and ran out of the room like I had leprosy. Some of the hall voyeurs applauded as the thick hospital door slowly shut with a dungeon-like “THUNK.”

If the Doc and nurse intended to embarrass me by exposing an entire hospital floor to my naked body, it was a pretty lame attempt. I knew my body and private bits were unremarkable. I had come to terms with this fact ages ago. It was everyone else’s problem now.

The nurse came back in the room and began guiding me to “The Asthma Room.” She was pretty funny. She purposefully bounced up and down in her gait so her braid flung around. And she looked back at me pretty seductively. I went to grab her braid like a 6th grader, but she ducked and shooed me away with laughter. I would have gotten her braid if I wasn’t dressed in a large taco wrapper exposing my ass, and clutching all my clothes (sans boxers), shoes, and coat to my chest.

The Doc was already in The Asthma Room with his clipboard and his severe look. The nurse slid herself behind The Doc and made goofy faces at me. The Doc was obviously irritated and ordered me to put my clothes on the hangers provided. I dropped them on the floor and kicked them into the corner. I made sure when I bent over that the hospital gown split and revealed my amazingly not-attractive ass to him. I’m sure he was a great doctor and had seen things worse than my asshole, but it was nice to get a little psychological advantage over him. It would also get “Giggles” going to my advantage.

And so we began.

The Doc had me blow into about 500 miles of medieval organ tubes. I gave it a little extra because I was still pretty much naked. At times, I would wobble my exposed “gear” back and forth in front of The Doc purely for effect and to get Giggles going again.

After about a half-hour of painfully pushing and pulling air through my bronchitis-ravaged lungs, The Doc said to me, “You don’t have asthma. Here’s a penicillin prescription for your bronchitis,” and tore it off his sheet. He left the room abruptly.

I thanked him as the door was swinging closed, and asked Giggles if she had any qualms about making out with a diseased white man in need of antibiotics. She put her hand over her face and ran out of the room just as fast as The Doc. I slowly put my clothes back on and put the smock in my coat. It would come in handy for any police questioning. And I left my underwear in The Asthma Room. I’m told it’s still in the Lost and Found even today.

Two weeks later I got a bill for $302.74. It was $275 for the asthma test, $25 for The Doc to treat me rudely, and $2.74 for the penicillin. There was no charge for the short, chubby, funny nurse. This was in 1996 dollars. It felt like I would have to work much harder in my life to pay this joke of a bill off. And extra work was something I couldn’t let happen.

I immediately became a howling lunatic, thirsting for Orono Health Care Center blood. Or any blood, really. My roommates physically and mentally delayed me. They helped me expel the greater part of my rage into their faces and ears. Sometimes the back of their heads. I can’t thank them enough.

When I got to the Health Care Center with a couple close friends in tow, I looked up and saw a banner that said, “Asthma Awareness Month!”

And then it hit me. As well-meaning as these campaigns are, they disproportionately report the occurrences of diseases. It’s not that asthma or autism, or Chrohn’s Disease, or food allergies are becoming more and more prevalent in the population, it’s that those diseases are more rigorously tested for, and accurately diagnosed in the general population. I was just pissed that this knowledge came at my expense.

And I was also pissed that I told The Doc firmly, “I don’t have asthma,” several times and was pretty much forced to perform the test anyway. And why didn’t The Doc say the asthma test cost $275 before I started it? To this day, I fret I didn’t make my point to The Orono Health Care Center that day as clearly as I could. It went something like this:

Me: “BLEAHRRRAGH!!! BLAG GRATH BALNN BLANG BLEAAAAHHHHRRRGGGGG!!!! TWOHUNNERDANDSENNEVYFIVE DOLARS YOU AAHLE! WHY DID BARRGARNG!!!! YOU BLA!? MONEY!!!!! MORMLONEEBLAGAGRRHA!!!!!”

Receptionist: “OH MY GOD!!! DON’T HURT ME! I HAVE A FAMILY!!!”

They took back the asthma test charge on the promise I would simply go somewhere else like El Cheepos for “Wet Pitcher Wednesday.” It was the best deal I would ever negotiate with the American Health Care System. And that’s the night I met Liana, my wife of 25 years.

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Stringy Theorum-Like GUTS

GUT = Grand Unified Theory. Simply, the marriage of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

GUTS = I’ve got plenty of the physical and psychological. Just come check it out.

Yes. Your idiot, insane, prattling, tangential online pet-supply store owner is going to lecture you on String Theory. I’m sorry. Don’t get too excited. You can bounce out of this website with your tiny brain intact in most cases for just a small, recurring fee. Haha! That phrase “recurring fee” probably cost me a thousand readers with all the spam and decency filters at work in our country. I can’t speak for Sweden that seems to grow and grow in attendance of these confusing blogs.

No doubt you’ve briefly scrolled past online articles like this:

“String Theory Predicts 351,200,719 Dimensions with Steely Dan. Only 4 Dimensions With Procol Harum. Is YOUR Dimension Safe from Self-Involved Shitty 70’s Music?”

Here’s a branch of science that’s gotten billions of US research dollars despite never predicting anything more than the Heaven’s Gate cult did.

The indisputable aspect about String Theory? It’s intrinsically beautiful. It naturally flows from the integration of Maxwell’s Electro-Magnetic equations into Einstein’s equations of General Relativity without any mathematical hocus pocus. It sounds significant, compelling, and beautiful, right?

But only Possible. Not Probable. Beauty and coincidence are not truth. And they definitely do not translate into the physical laws of the universe.

The trouble with String Theory is that it has never predicted anything important. It has only incorporated empirical results discovered in particle accelerators. And to me, the failure of String Theory to predict consistent results smacks of religion or mysticism.

When the equations weren’t beautiful anymore, the String Theory Priests all got together and started filling out classified ads for Physical Theorist positions. Sadly, this great nation had a glut of Ordinary Theorists walking around late at night screaming into dumpsters and holding conversations with “Satan Claus.” When they were on the verge of homelessness, a huge government audit, and trained attack dogs, they did something called “normalization.” It’s a trick of mathematics where all infinities in a set of equations are arbitrarily reset to zero. Normalization has no real-world application.

That worked. Then the equations became ungovernable again.

To make String Theory relevant again, the String Theory Priests introduced 11 dimensions into the equations. Why 11 dimensions? That’s what Juan Maldacena found made the equations work again. And it brought the mathematics back into the realm of the believable.

When that solution petered out, the String Theory Priests incorporated “infinite dimensions” into the mathematical fray. Why infinite dimensions? Because it helped the equations stumble forward.

And when that approach ground to a halt, the Priests suggested human beings could never understand String Theory because our tiny brains lacked the “mathematical framework” to describe String Theory.

Now THAT’S a religion. Don’t ask for proof, or reproducible results, or follow evidence, or explore different avenues of research. The only measurable thing in String Theory all of a sudden became the believer’s faith. String Theory is a great example of how otherwise intelligent people can be drawn into dangerous things like cults and product warranties.

Since the late 1970’s, despite not predicting anything, String Theory has gobbled up the US Government’s scientific research budget. There were/are other serious GUT theories out there. They never get any funding because the “String Faithful” made counting the proverbial angels on the head of a pin “a sure thing.”

Now, I’m a self-actualized, simple rube. I like my whiskey. I like my dogs. I like my wife when she agrees with me. And I like Red Sox baseball when they’re good.

I’m not against religion. Only when it’s in my physics.

Think I’m nuts? Read this and become nuts, too. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/requiem-for-a-string-charting-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-theory-of-everything

— Don (Not a Dog)