(Continuous musical accompaniment to the last post of the week from the blog’s most popular living Canadian.)

Republican vice presidential candidate J. Divan Vance continues to surprise and astonish. He has less than 100 days to alienate every subgroup of his fellow citizens before the presidential election. Now, it seems, he is targeting the descendants of every European immigrant group of the past two centuries—German Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans. That might have worked if he had been Millard Fillmore’s running mate. But now it just goes to show that we shouldn’t trust history to people who think it’s a tackhammer. Earlier this week, Vance awkwardly tried to connect his voters’ obsessive panic about immigrant criminality to the historical violence of previous waves of immigration and the violence that immigrants practice in return. Vance seems to suggest that these particular groups have not yet assimilated to his liking. And, adding to the irony, he spoke on this issue in Milwaukee, whose entire character was so changed by the refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 that the city eventually elected four socialist mayors.

And also –Gangs of New York? What is this guy’s biggest problem?

Another damn thing. From FoxWeather:

Fireworms, also called bristle worms, are small worms covered in tiny, needle-like spines that are filled with venom, according to the national park. Over the past two days, the animals have been washing up on large logs covered in barnacles. They determined that the worms may have been feeding on the barnacles. The Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies is warning beachgoers to beware of the worms, as the animals can inflict tremendous pain on those who touch them. “WARNING!!! Your worst nightmares are about to wash up in the form of bearded fireworms!” it said.

Nature continues to be impatient with our nonsense.

WWOZ Weekly Click-A-Tip: “Rice Pump” (Lost Bayou Ramblers): Yes, I still love New Orleans.

Weekly visit to the Pathé archive: Here, from 1952, is the first plot point for the 2004 film, National treasure. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are moved from the Library of Congress to the National Archives building. This seems to have been quite a set-up. There are some beautiful shots of the documents being lowered into the vaults beneath the main exhibition hall, which, as we learned at the multiplex, were not Nicolas Cage-proof. History is so cool.

And now a word from the former chief naturalist:

The wind ruins everything, kills all the birds, destroys the fields, all these beautiful fields, there are windmills everywhere and there are birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Just walk under a windmill. The bald eagle. These windmills flatten them like nothing.

Just to clarify: I don’t want to see a bird cemetery.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From the Colorado Magazine for Arts and Science:

In November 2022, Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus excavated at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classical studies. The two scientists also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II during their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna. She began studying the high-resolution photo of the papyrus (Egyptian law prohibits the physical export of artifacts from the country) and examined its 98 lines in detail.

“After further research, I realized I should bring in an expert on Euripides fragments,” she says. “Fortunately, my mentor in the department is just that!” Together, Trnka-Amrhein and renowned classical studies professor John Gibert began many months of hard work, meticulously studying a high-resolution photograph of the 10.5-inch-square papyrus. They deciphered words and made sure that the words they thought they recognized conformed to norms of tragic style and meter. Eventually, they were convinced they were working with new material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino. Twenty-two of the lines were already known in slightly modified versions, but “80 percent was brand new material,” Gibert says.

And what pieces they were.

Polyidus retells an ancient Cretan myth in which King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë call on the eponymous seer to resurrect their son Glaucus after he drowns in a barrel of honey. “It actually has a relatively happy ending. It’s not one of those tragedies where everyone is dead,” says Trnka-Amrhein: Polyidus is able to revive the boy using an herb he previously saw one snake use to resurrect another. The papyrus contains part of a scene in which Minos and Polyidus discuss the morality of resurrecting the dead, she says.

Ino was almost one of Euripides’ best-known plays, Gibert says. Parts of the text were engraved on cliffs in Armenia that have been destroyed in modern conflicts. Fortunately, Russian scholars in the early 20th century had preserved the images in drawings. The titular character is an aunt of the Greek god Dionysus and part of the royal family of Thebes. In previously known fragments of a related play, Ino is an evil stepmother who wants to kill the children of her husband, the Thessalian king from a previous marriage. The new fragment introduces a new plot, Trnka-Amrhein says.

“Another woman is the evil stepmother and Ino is the victim,” she says. “The king’s third wife tries to get rid of Ino’s children. … Ino turns the tables and makes her kill her own children and commit suicide. It’s a more traditional tragedy: death, chaos, suicide.”

I don’t think enough of our great literature has been carved into the cliffs and mountainsides. At least Ron DeSantis hasn’t been able to touch it with his clammy hands.

Hey, ^ “New York Times: The New York Times”. Is today a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news! We found the source of the murder weapon!

The nature of this apocalyptic object, known as the Chicxulub impactor, has sparked fierce debate, including a long-running argument over whether it was a comet or an asteroid. But in recent years, evidence has mounted that the roughly 10-kilometer-wide impactor belonged to a family of asteroids that formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter and rarely impact Earth.

The Chicxulub impact remains a mystery, as does the role that asteroid impacts more broadly have played in the origin and evolution of life on Earth—and possibly on other planets. Carbonaceous asteroids have wiped out countless species on our planet in the past, but they may also have helped provide Earth with water and other vital components at the dawn of the solar system.

And while the Chicxulub impact doomed the dinosaurs, it also enabled the emergence of mammals, including humans. So we owe this rogue asteroid a certain amount of gratitude. “What would our Earth look like today without this impact?” said Dr. Fischer-Gödde. “We should probably appreciate a little more that we are here and that it is perhaps a happy coincidence that everything turned out the way it is today.”

I’ll be back on Monday, live from the DNC in Chicago. In the meantime, think of the people in the path of Hurricane Ernesto, in Morocco, Colombia, in the flood plains in Libya, in the flood plains throughout the Ohio Valley, in the Horn of Africa, in Tanzania, Kenya, in the English Midlands, in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, California, in the flood plains of Indonesia, in storm-tossed southern Georgia, in Kenya, in the flood plains in Dubai (!), in Pakistan, Brazil, in the flood plains in Russia and Kazakhstan, in the flood plains in Iran where escaped crocodiles are becoming a problem, in the flood plains on Oahu, in the fire plains in Oregon, in western Canada, in Australia, in northern Texas and in Lahaina where they are still trying to reclaim their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and the people traumatized by gunfire in Austin, at UNLV, in Philadelphia and in Perry, Iowa, and especially our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, they deserve so much better from their country than they have received.