Sunday, December 27, 2020

Pandemic Holiday Report

Well, no time for a full post this week, but I don’t want to blow you off entirely.  What can I talk about?  Hmmm ... how about some reports on how our holidays are going?

  • For our weekly family gaming session, my eldest ran a Christmas one-shot: we all played elves (no, not those kinds of elves; those kinds of elves), and we had to rescue Santa, who had been captured by a demon and taken to Hell.  At first, Santa was under the demon’s spell, and we actually had to fight him, but we managed to break him out of his charmed state through a combination of non-lethal attacks and appealing to his better nature.  I played a mostly-monk (I took one level of fighter, mainly for the fighting style) who used a candy cane as a mace and also punched things.  My middle child played a warlock (whose patron, naturally, was Santa) with a celestial bent (so he could heal and flame strike), and my youngest child played a druid who turned into things like arctic hares (for speed) and polar bears (for sheer mauling power).  We were 10th level, and we all had complicated backstories of what toymaking department we used to work in before joining Santa’s personal guard, based on which artisan’s tools we were proficient in (for the record, I was leatherworking, the Smaller Animal was glassblowing—for ornaments, natch—and the sprite was a carpenter ... you know, for making blocks and Lincoln logs and whatnot).  Best line of the night: Santa pulls a holy avenger out of his sack (my eldest actually rolled that randomly on a magic item table) and runs the demon through; my youngest pronounces “damn ... Santa is gruesome.”
  • The super-creepy surveillance elf is gone for another year, thank <insert deity of choice>.  We actually tried to avoid having that thing back this year, but our youngest actually started asking about her back in October or so.  So, you know ... Santa does what is necessary to please the children.  No matter how creepy, apparently.
  • We watched one of those old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials on Christmas Eve.  We sort of wanted to watch “the one with Snow Miser and Heat Miser in it,” but that’s one of the few that isn’t in our DVD box set.  As a next best thing, we watched “the one that tells Santa Claus’ origin story,” because the Winter Warlock is sorta-kinda-the-same-as Snow Miser.  Besides: I had just said something about Burgermeister Meisterburger to the Smallies the other day and they both looked at me like I was crazy.  So, you know ... they needed the education.  I probably hadn’t seen it in a decade or so, but it holds up moderately well.
  • My youngest got a stuffed narwhal which is actually a bit larger than she is, when measured from tip (of horn) to tail, and enough Littlest Pet Shop buildings to create her own LPS compound.  My middlest got a giant Nerf Fortnite dart (shot)gun and the new Spider-Man game for the PS/4 (the one with Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker).  My eldest got a new bedframe (as the old one is falling apart) and a promissory note for a new office chair (we didn’t want to buy one without them testing it out first), or, as they described it when talking to the grandparents: “nothing much, just a couple pairs of headphones and a toothbrush for my dogs.” Being an adult sucks, apparently.

Although the pandemic has meant fewer trips out to visit friends, we were never going to travel for the holidays, and it’s rare that anyone comes to stay with us.  Or even to join us for Christmas (Eve) dinner ... my brother has come over a couple of years in the past, and I think we hosted my best friend and his wife at $lastjob once, but that’s about it.  My brother has moved on from wife-with-family-in-LA to wife-number-three, and my friend moved back to Florida to be near his family, so we’re used to spending the holidays “alone.” I put “alone” in quotes, though, because there are 5 of us humans here—not to mention the two dogs, three cats, and various aquarium denizens, including Jeffo, the immortal dwarf African frog—so it can actually get rather crowded at times.  So “alone” is not really the proper term ... perhaps “isolated,” on occasion, but at least we have each other for the holidays, and a few new toys to play with, and plenty of videogames and movies to play and watch, and loud-ass cats who need to yowl around the house for a few hours before they snuggle up beside you in bed, and dogs with horribly stinky breath who love you unconditionally and often inconveniently, and people to do things with.  Christmas Eve I read The Velveteen Rabbit to my youngest; Christmas day the older two made Oreo truffles together.  The Mother and the youngest did all the tree decorating, and worked on several art projects to create cards or ornamants or other holiday frippery.  Last night I spent an hour playing a videogame with my middle child that no one else really likes to play but us.  So we can’t complain, and we know that many folks are having a worse time than we are right now.  We’re pretty lucky, overall, and we’re pretty happy about it.  We’ll be glad when we can go out again, when things return to some semblance of normal—or as close as we’ll get to that, I suppose—but, for now, this is good.

We hope you all had a very happy holiday, whichever holiday it happened to be, and we wish you all the promise of a better year to come.









Sunday, December 20, 2020

Isolation Report, Week #41

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


Happy pandemic holidays!  And if you’re pissed off that I didn’t say “merry pandemic Christmas,” I will refer you to my (now classic) happy whatever post.  And, also: suck my left nut.  Not the right one—I’m not rude or anything.  Just the left.

Also, it’s worth noting that that very post contains my first volume of Christmas music that I ever shared with you guys.  Back in those days—nine years ago now—I considered trying to share my mixes via some sort of Internet playlist ... Pandora, Rhapsody, what-have-you.  But the only decent option that would be free for everyone was YouTube, and, while there was a lot of music on YouTube, there was also a lot of music not on YouTube.  And, especially given my eclectic tastes, there was just too much that wasn’t already out there.  But much has changed: YouTube handles licensing for songs you upload differently nowadays, resulting in way more songs being uploaded, and it’s also easy to upload them yourself.  So there really is no excuse any more.

Thus, here you go: my inaugural holidy mix, as a YouTube playlist:

You’ve still got 5 days or so to listen to it.  And it’s quite peppy, and it’ll put you in the holiday spirit.  You know, unless you’re all grinchy.  Actually, there’s a few songs in there for the grinches out there as well.  Fun for the whole family.

Actually, I don’t know why I said that: there are quite a number of F-bombs in those songs.  So, you know: share with children at your own risk.  In my house, I just listened to my 8-year-old tell a mother on television who had just said “Language!” to her daughter “oh, just let her say ‘fuck’ ...” But, hey: I’m not in charge of your kids.  Probably you should be happy about that.

But, speaking of my kids, they’re all getting ready for Christmas, as they do, and (mostly) not letting the pandemic put a crimp in their holiday spirit.  We’ve been buying our gifts nearly 100% online for years anyhow, and we never travel for Christmas ... when you’re trying to organize 5 humans, 2 dogs, and 3 cats (and even more various animals in years past), the idea of traveling is pretty insane.  We just figure, if our families want to see us, they can drag their asses to our house.  We’ve got more room, and all our furniture is pre-chewed.  So far, not too many takers.  But we don’t mind.  Sometimes just having each other is enough.  This year, of course, we’re mostly sick of each other ... but I think we’ll be okay.

Hopefully.

Anyhow, you’re very unlikely to get any sort of substantial post next week, as it’s that fallow time between Christmas and New Year’s.  So I’ll avail myself of this oppotrunity to wish you merry christmahannukwanzaakah,* and here’s hoping next year will be better.  I think it probably will be, but I don’t want to be too confident.  Don’t want to jinx it.  But, for your sake as well as ours, I’m definitely wishing it.  For us, for you, and for everyone around the world.  Just a little bit better ... doesn’t have to be a lot.  I’m not greedy.

__________

* Again and as always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.











Sunday, December 13, 2020

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

Our power company thoughtfully turned off our power this week for 30 hours because it was windy.  They claim this was to prevent fires, but of course every time they do it, they turn the power back on and something blows and it starts a fire.  (This year was no exception, although the fire wasn’t anywhere near us this time at least.)  Personally, I think they’re doing it because of the Camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise (there’s actually a new documentary about it on Netflix, although I haven’t watched it).  Anyway, a judge held the power company responsible for starting the fire and it cost them a bunch of money, so ever since then they turn off the power when it’s windy ... but only to the primarly residential areas, so as to piss off the consumers and have them complain to their local governments in the hopes that they’ll finally get sick of it and pass some law or other that the power company can’t be held responsible for keeping the power on.  Notably, most of the primarily business areas (where the power company presumably makes the most money) are not turned off at these times—this week, there was about a 10-block-square chunk right in the center of our city which had power the whole time, which was sort of like adding insult to injury, even though it did make it nice to be able to drive about 2 minutes to someplace that had power.  Still, annoying to have a corporation thumb their noses at us so blatantly.

Of course, I have no proof of any of this, so you could accuse me of peddling a conspiracy theory.  I would counter, though, that it doesn’t take much of a “conspiracy”: just 4 or 5 folks at the power company who care more about the bottom line than than whether all my frozen fish food is turning into disgusting goop in my freezer.  And, honestly, if you don’t believe there are way more than that number of people with that attitude running the power companies in our country, then I have nothing more to say to you.  Well, except for this lovely bridge I’ve got to sell you.

Anyhow, it’s sort of put a crimp into my whole week, and I never really caught up.  This should be a “long post” week for me, but as last week’s “short post” was, in fact, quite long, I think I’ll just skip this week, except for the obligatory ranting above.  Which you’ve already suffered through enough, I’m sure.

Back next week for another virus isolation report.









Sunday, December 6, 2020

Isolation Report, Week #39

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


So, lately all the pandemic talk has been focussed on the vaccine(s).  I have to say, I’m a bit irked at the media’s coverage of the vaccines: we seem to have breezed past any discussion of safety and started arguing about who “gets to” get the vaccine first.  I mean, I’m pretty much always irked at the media’s coverage of vaccines, and in particular their attitude that anyone that dares to have any reservations about any vaccine is therefore a crazy person.  But this particular round of vaccine coverage has a whole ‘nother dimension to it that really saddens me.

You see, when Trump was promising a vaccine “very soon now,” the media was very quick to point out that you can’t really rush a vaccine.  The entire concept of vaccination is to infect you with something that will hopefully “fool” your body into thinking it’s sick without actually getting sick, so that it therefore produces antibodies that will protect against the infection before you ever even get infected.  This is actually a very clever idea, and, when it works, it’s pretty amazing.  Unfortunately, when it doesn’t work, it can be pretty devastating: early implementation of the polio managed to cause 40,000 new cases of polio.  That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with the idea of vaccinating against polio, although I’m sure that some people interpret it that way.  No, the problem was simply a manufacturing error ... if we can describe a situation involving tens of thousands of infections of a paralytic and in some cases fatal disease as being “simply an error.” So taking time to study the vaccines carefully and make sure they’re being developed with all due rigor is pretty damned important.  Before the election, the media seemed to know that.  They considered it quite reasonable that some people—many people, even—would not want to take a vaccine which had been rushed to market to make Trump look good and was certified as “safe” by a government with a vested interest in doing just that.

But, somehow, now that the election is over and Trump has lost, now we’re back to statements like “some people may not want to take the vaccine, because of crazy conspiracy theories or whatever.” Look: I’m obviously no fan of Trump.  The fact that he even existsthat a person can be considered “rich” without demonstrating any actual monetary value, that a person can commit crime after crime without ever facing any consequences, that a person could demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for the truth and even for human life—the fact that there’s anyone like that on the planet, much less in the White House, that offends me on a fundamental level.  I’m also, contrary to the opinions of some, not opposed to vaccines in general.  There are many vaccines—including that for polio, despite the tragedies associated with its initial rollout—which I believe are medically essential for us humans to continue to endure.  But that doesn’t mean that I believe that anything that has the word “vaccine” printed on the side of it is therefore safe and necessary.

Concerns about these vaccines, which were very much rushed, are not crazy, and they’re not a result of believing in conspiracy theories.  Well, perhaps for some they are.  But the media made lots of good points before Trump was defeated, and those points are still valid.  There were very good reasons for rushing these vaccines—I’m not disputing that—but that doesn’t make them any less rushed.  Each one has had a single study done on them, and, despite the fact that those studies appear, by all reports, to be pretty damned thorough studies, a single study can’t conclusively prove anything.  Moreover, the studies were focussed on efficacy (which, again, is perfectly understandable and appopriate, given the circumstances), not on safety.  There simply hasn’t been enough time to figure out if the vaccine is fully safe.  Now, there could be situations where the threat of a disease was so dire, and the consequences so heinous, that the risk of not fully knowing the safety factor of a vaccine would be outweighed by the risk of contracting the disease.  But I believe that this disease doesn’t meet that standard.

Reasonable people can disagree.  After all, death rates are rising, people will point out, and for the first time in recent memory—possibly for the first time in living memory—we experienced a week where heart disease was not the number one cause of death in the United States: it was COVID.  But, let’s be realistic: our death rate isn’t so high because this disease is so dangerous.  Our death rate is so high because we’ve been remarkably stupid in handling it.  People refuse to wear masks.  People were explicitly told not to travel for the holidays, but they did it anyway.  This week we’ve heard about a rash of politicians telling their constituents to stay home and avoid gatherings while they themselves were doing the opposite, including the remarkable case of the mayor of Austin telling people to avoid travel from his hotel room in Mexico.  It’s silly to imagine that these things aren’t all connected.  And, anyway, the proof is simple: while the whole world may be experiencing a resurgence of the disease, only our country has numbers like this.

And I’m certainly not saying that staying home and wearing masks guarantees that you won’t get the disease.  Recently I received the unpleasant news that one of my coworkers, who by all descriptions was far more paranoid about being exposed to the disease than I or my family have been, contracted it.  It sounds like he and his girlfriend are going to recover, but it’s still a chilling reminder that nothing is 100%.  Of course, the vaccines are not 100% either.  If the initial efficacy numbers hold water, you’ve still got a 5% chance of catching COVID after you’ve been vaccinated with one of the current candidates, and we simply don’t know what the chances of any potential side-effects are yet.  Given that, and given how good our chances are for not catching the disease by simply continuing to observe the same best practices that we’ve all been doing for close to year now, it still makes sense to me to wait a bit and see how these vaccine fare in the real world before committing to anything.  Oh, I will be getting this vaccine eventually.  But I’m not in a hurry.

The thing that disturbs the most about the media coverage, though, is the hypocrisy.  When it was “Trump’s vaccine,” we shouldn’t trust it.  Now that Trump is on the way out, mistrusting a vaccine is a crazy conspiracy theory.  I’m sorry, but there’s no conspiracy theory, nor any sort of crazy, required.  The media made some great points about the dangers of a rushed vaccine, and Trump being defeated doesn’t change any of those points.  There are essentially two options here for what’s going on.  The first is that the media was just saying that we should be suspicious of a vaccine produced under Trump, for political expediency.  But that’s exactly what Trump was accusing them of: remember how he claimed that, once the election was over, we’d never hear about COVID again?  Obviously that was crazy, and also stupid.  But somewhow we immediately stopped hearing about the possibility that the vaccine might not be all rainbows and sunshine.  That means that Trump was essentially right—in the abstract, if not in the details—and that possibility makes me really sad.  Also the concept of Trump being right about anything upsets my grasp on reality.

But the other possible explanation isn’t any more comforting: that, rather than being insincere in their claims then, they’re insincere in their claims now.  That they know perfectly well that there could be consequences and ramifications to just shoving this vaccine into everyone’s veins ... and they just don’t care.  Or, to be more generous, that they believe that the number of people who will be hurt or maybe even killed will be low enough not to matter.  But, here again: that’s been the attitude of the Trump camp.  I don’t want to see that blossoming on the other side of the political divide as well.

One more particularly relevant analogy that I’ll give.  Last month, “Dr.” Scott Atlas, a “medical” advisor to Trump, was ridiculed extensively for talking about “herd immunity.” In one example story, ABC called herd immunity “a concept lambasted by public health experts as ‘dangerous’ and called ‘ridiculous’ by the federal government’s foremost infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci.” I specifically remember thinking at the time, “man, they better be careful how they disparage herd immunity, because that’s central precept of vaccination policy.” I was really curious to see how they’d handle it when it was time to actually push for herd immunity using the newly created vaccines.

And now the time has come, and, you know what?  They just all pretend like they never said that.  Now herd immunity is all good, and we all need to be concerned about whether we can achieve it, becauase of all those crazy conspiracy theory nutjobs, you know.  They’re essentially saying exactly the opposite of what they said before and not acknowledging that anything is different.  But, here’s the thing: that’s what Trump does. And, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make it okay when it’s “my side” doing it.  It’s still wrong, and vaguely nauseating.  Have we had to turn into Trump in order to defeat him?

Let’s hope not.  Because that’s not okay.