Week 199: Live and die in confluence

June 25, 2022

Hello to everyone except some members of the US Supreme Court.
My daughter is starting school in September. The classes in the year are named after creatures beginning with the letter “B”. I know what has happened, they let the kids pick the names. Do you want to know what they are? Bugs, beetles, bumblebees.
You know how I know I am a fuckin’ nerd? It’s by how irritating I find the confusion of these names to be. A “bug” is often just slang for “insect” which is I think how the children (those tiny idiots!!!) are using it, but “true bugs” are an order of insects (hempitera) that contains bed bugs, aphids, cicadas etc. A “beetle” is anything of the order coleoptera, meaning “sheath-winged”. Maybe, maybe i will accept that by “bugs” they meant the order “true bugs”, in which case beetles and bugs are two sets that do not intersect. However I don’t think these four year olds are that smart. Finally we move on to something that is definitely a problem which is that bumblebee is covers over 250 creatures in the genus bombus. All bumblebees are of the order Hymenoptera. Hymenoptera includes bees, ants and other “membrane winged” insects. These kids could have kicked their class name up the hierarchy a little way by simply calling themselves “bees”, however there are no other orders of insect that begin with a B so that’s where it would have to stop. Anyway. There. I’m going to encourage E to get elected to school council and they can overhaul their janky class name system for something more rigourous.
[Joe Malia voice] I am bristling with blog posts [/end Joe Malia voice]. They are coming from writing a load of blog posts for my colleagues and then thinking “these cannot just live and die in confluence”.