I should know what sort of fish this is, but I know only that it resembles a member of the seahorse family and it’s dead. Poor thing.
We track where the sun sets in relation to the rock o.6 nautical miles offshore. When it’s north of the rock, we think summer, and when it sets south of the rock, we know summer is gone. The truth is that this shift from south to north this happens close to the Equinoxes. The sun set right behind the rock a couple of days ago.
A massive study involving over 43,000 cases of confirmed covid-19 in China estimates that young children are not at risk. That’s the good news.
As a nation we have bungled our response to a disease we cannot cure (only nurse) and cannot protect against with a vaccine (for another year or more). Most estimates suggest that covid-19 will kill 3.4% of those who contract it. Mostly they will be old. really bad news is, we have no idea how many Americans are actually sick. Continue reading
This is sea foam, not pollution, the product of heavy seas and plankton, not soap.
A family member believes that Paul McCartney has been dead for years and is being impersonated by a stand-in. You can tell he’s dead because he has bare feet on the cover of the Abbey Road album. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth II is a reptile. I watched a silly video of a white horse showing “distress” because the Queen is reptilian or reptoid or something. (The video has been obviously messed with, the sound track is entirely fabricated, and if that horse is shy at all, it’s not of the Queen but of the man beside her.) Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube knows about reptilian royals:
“The Reptilian Collective consists of several branches.
But then again, we are talking about scenarios that insist we need a Paul too much to let him go and both Elizabeths are concealing their true forms with crystal magic.
It should be funny. I laughed, but then I considered that a member of my own family does not get the joke. This isn’t even the person with diagnosed mental illness. If I let slip that this family member voted for Trump and reportedly has a picture of Putin on the wall, does it make more sense? Maybe not.
But then the President asked the CDC on camera last week if the flu shot would help with the COVID-19 epidemic and later claimed (also on camera) that he had no idea people could die from flu. Who knew? His grandfather died of flu in 1918.
More recently, in the 2017-18 season, 61,000 Americans died of flu, in part because “The flu season was exacerbated by a shortage of IV bags caused by IV bag plant closures in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María,” according to Wikipedia. But never mind that year was on Trump’s watch, and he didn’t even know people could die of flu?
In Washington State, Echo Lake Elementary School where I attended grades 1-6 has been exposed to the novel coronavirus by a father attending parent-teacher conferences. “Everyone who wants one” cannot get a test, and we have tested less than 1 in a million Americans for the disease. South Korea has tested thousands more per million. It is only one of the reasons they have diagnosed more cases.
A University of Washington medical team began developing a diagnostic test in January mostly for the heck of it because they wanted to see if they could. They could and did and they have been up and running since last week, providing a thousand results in 24 hours while the CDC needs 3-5 days to confirm diagnosis.
I have friends in cancer treatment, a tenant who just had a triple bi-pass, and many of the people I care about are over sixty. I am not panicking, but I have said for years, only half joking, that it would be a virus that killed me. I am susceptible to respiratory infections. (Second hand smoke throughout my childhood, scarring on my lungs, a history of bronchitis and pneumonia. But I got the flu shot in 2017 and did not get sick.)
Another friend, young and with no risk factors, is supposed to be a keynote speaker at an out-of-state conference in a few weeks and wonders if flying is safe, if the conference will go forward, if exposure in another state might endanger relatives who do have risk factors such as age and illness. I have tickets to an event in Portland in a couple of weeks and am seriously expecting the speaker to cancel and to cancel my hotel reservation and stay home.
It will be at least a year before we have a vaccine for COVID-19, but the vast majority of people who become ill during the next 12-18 months will not die or even get very sick, though I might.
So what scares ya’, Baby? Reptilian royalty, fake Pauls, or large crowds?
An update from Friday the 13th, four days after I wrote the text above. All the public school in my state are closed. My son who works on computer was (finally) told today that he should work home for the immediate future. My other son and his wife work in the theater, usually big shows. My daughter-in-law is not prepping for the opera in Portland today, she is striking the show (dismantling it). All the larger venues are shutting their doors, so they will be busy for a few days striking shows that are postponing their openings or flat out cancelling. He has one still planning to open tomorrow in a small theater in Washington.
So when we think about how and whom to help . . . consider the children with little to do and no school-provided meals, parents who may or may not be working, contract workers who not only have no benefits from their employers, but minimal options for lost work.
From The Atlantic today:
“The U.S. remains dangerously behind on testing for COVID-19, thanks to “bureaucracy, equipment shortages, an unwillingness to share, and failed leadership.”
“An investigation co-led by The Atlantic could only confirm that 16,471 people in the U.S. had been tested as of this afternoon. For comparison, at this point in its own outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people.
“When asked at a press conference earlier today if he takes responsibility for the lag in availability of testing kits, Donald Trump replied, ‘No. I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ”
Just for a bit of perspective, we have about 330 million people in the United States. Do the math.
A man called his girlfriend a “chick” the other day to me. He didn’t notice my expression. I was thinking: If you knew me well, you would know I don’t like hearing women called “chicks.”
I feel like all the small things I count on are fluttering like ash to the ground. Deaths from covid-19, the five recalls on my car, friends who are ill or their mothers are ill, the only way I can open a new post here on Chrome, but Chrome will not open my photos, my son went to the ER a week and a half ago and no one bothered to tell us, the man in the bakery was rude. The trivial and the terrifying? Conflating disease and rudeness? None of this is killing me. Yet. Challenging the ease of a white author against the injustice of struggling to find a publisher of a woman of color’s memoir with strikingly similar themes. I don’t know. Isn’t it like happy families? All abusers are alike? I haven’t read the memoir. I rarely do. #MeToo?
I read the novel, My Dark Vanessa.
I read until four in the morning, desperate to complete this incredible novel. Vanessa is an intelligent and lonely girl of 15 when she meets the man who will play on her inexperience and insecurities. She knows about rape because one of her musical heroes has told about it.
What she does not understand and fails to recognize is the selfish exploitation of her innocence and desire for love when it arrives. The author is at pains to make clear that this is fiction, not her life. It is a necessary distinction since Russell gets everything so right. The molester announcing that he is the “toughest” teacher his students will have in high school. Maybe in college. [Scary that I used to warn students that my Honors class would be their hardest in their Junior Year (an appeal to hubris), and students often thanked me for that after attending college.] The parallel visions, flipping back and forth between then and now chapters in these pages explore both how she is groomed and “seduced” at 15 and how she excuses and redefines that experience into her 30s. It is explicit, very much so. [I don’t usually read explicit sex. A warning there.] I was not molested as a child, but my tolerance for reading about abuse is very low. I have never been able to read Lolita but I admire what Russell does with the novel and other writings here. I am amazed I could stand to read it. My favorite Ninth grade teacher had an affair with a Seventh Grader. When a friend told me, I recall two powerful and simultaneous reactions: Why her and not me? and It’s a lie. I was ashamed to have felt jealous of what I thought in my naiveté must be love and knew even then that envy was unhealthy and pushed it aside. But it was years before I was forced to accept that the accusation of molestation was not a lie. Yes, he did that. He had a relationship with a child of no more than twelve. I have since witnessed men do this to vulnerable young girls—men who were trusted as teachers, coaches, a campus cop. These men NEVER acknowledge their trespasses because they serve only their personal desire. Abuse is heaped on victims of sexual exploitation. The girl is blamed, threatened, and ruined by the violator and by society. So is Vanessa. Her abuser so redefines her identity that she is ruined, truly and utterly ruined. The ending satisfied me, though I feared throughout the reading that it would not. I believe this story. It is very hard not to believe it is all true. |
And then there’s hope.
The video is fantastic:
