19 April—Seven years ago today authorities in Western Australia announced the untimely death of #16, a female trapdoor spider. The cause of death was thought to be the sting of a parasitic spider wasp that did a runner. #16 was 43 years old at the time of her death in 2016. That’s right, 43 years old. Why did the Ozzies wait two years to make the announcement?

Details of #16’s private life are not available, but evidently she didn’t get out too much, preferring to spend her entire life in the same burrow (is that how Ozzies spell borough?), in which she dined on insects that recklessly trod on its silk trapdoor roof. It’s thought that the burrow had monthly trash collection by the arachnid mafia and cable television through the web. Had it not been for that nasty wasp, #16 might still be alive. But why couldn’t those damned Ozzies give #16 a real name? They had plenty of time to think of one.

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Corollary to Paul Revere’s midnight ride 250 years ago yesterday, today is the semiquincentennial of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the shot heard round the world.” Here’s Emerson’s whole typically pompous poem about it, “Concord Hymn,” first performed at the Completion of the Concord Battle Monument, 4 July 1837:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

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And what have we got to show for it today? A totalitarian regime under the thumb of an unbalanced, delusional, unreasonable, autocratic ruler who makes King George III look like a sane, rational, democratic populist . . .