[Seth Says] With Great Power...

...you can do all sorts of stuff! You can bend people and even rules to your will. (Maybe that's why they call it "going on a bender"?)(It isn't.) Having power is really convenient, so it makes lots of sense why people are always trying to get more of it. Some people will do anything to have it, but when those people go beyond bending the rules and downright break them repeatedly, there's a small chance of consequences. (And I guess a small chance of truth.) 

Certainly doesn't happen all the time, as any billionaire will (decline to) attest. But the mug shots gracing your social media feed over the past week suggest that at least occasionally, there might be consequences for people who break the rules. (By which I mean, occasionally consequences for people with power. Obviously, people without power can face consequences all the time for breaking the rules, or even for following the rules but in a way that powerful people just doesn't like.)

I don't have a lot of power in the sense of political influence or rule-bending, but I do have solar power, and I'd have to classify it as pretty great. Maybe not in the immediate payoff sense, since it'll probably still be a decade or two before I break even on the amount I paid to line my roof with solar panels. But it's definitely great when your monthly electricity bill fluctuates between zero and the electric company sending you a small check. So lar, so good! Plus there's the added bonus of feeling like you're contributing slightly less to the accelerating destruction of our climate. 
 

Somehow that sounds like an advanced placement class. "Oh yes, our little Timmy is quite the prodigy, he placed into the *accelerated* destruction class. Yes, and a perfect score on his L-SPLAT." 

But it's a strange thing to feel like destruction is just ramping up all over the place. Certainly the past year has seen no shortage of destructive extreme weather events, from fires to floods and back again with Hawaii now in dire straits. Oddly, the weather this summer in the Berkshires was surprisingly mild, although it definitely felt buggier than usual. I couldn't go for a walk without being mobbed by a cloud of bugs, and my few attempts at patio dinners this year mostly ended with swearing at bugs and fleeing indoors.

It seemed like I couldn't open my window at night without being deluged by bugs, even with a screen in. Tiny bugs just zipped right through the screen and then buzzed around the office repeatedly biting me as if I were made of meat. (I guess I am made of meat. Some days I'd rather have been a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue.) But the bugs are vicious, and the spiders that grace my house have been no help in stopping them, so I've continued to swear at the bugs and have done a surprising amount of hitting myself in the face. (Anyone who was thinking, "not *that* surprising...", please give yourself five demerits.)

I guess I'm a little disappointed in the spiders. I had hoped they would do more in defense of our shared domicile. I was likewise unsuccessful when I tried to move a bathroom spider to a kitchen cabinet to catch fruit flies. If they're not going to work, they should pay rent; I'm not running a spider charity.
 

I am trying to make the theme of this newsletter spiders, because that's the theme of my latest column and so I hope you'll enjoy
 

which is a very fun column that is not about current US news, because right now current US news is today's racist mass shooting in Jacksonville, and between that and the Trump coverage nobody is talking about the shooting at a White Sox game that apparently happened yesterday, and why do these things keep happening in this country, I guess we'll never know. Oh wait it's because our national policy on leading causes of death is, "Eh, just learn to live with it," or at least that's what a bitter ranting person would say, but I am pretending I am a fun person who is here to talk about spiders.
 

There are approximately 38,000 known species of spiders. Although oddly, there are only 38 known individual spiders, and three of them are named Sam. It's very difficult to get to know a spider because they spend all their time on the web. And then if you want to take one on a date, it costs an arm and a leg and another arm and another leg. And spiders are like me, they just like to hang around in the house, which is why I am trying not to greet them with the L-SPLAT. (That's Spanish for "splat".)

To sum up, guns bad, spiders good. Make spiders, not war. But seriously, wouldn't it be awesome if we just replaced guns with spiders? I think for many people, they'd still even have a similar threat effect. "Give me your wallet!" "Look out, he's got a spider!"  And then after the inevitable proliferation of semi-automatic spiders, there would be calls for more regulation. And you know what that means:

Spider-Ban, Spider-Ban!

Thanks for reading, and back in two weeks with another column.

O What A Tangled Web We Weave,
Seth