Clogging

There is an advert currently airing that shows a couple saying how much they like their new apartment, apart from the fact they have a clogging problem.  Cut to family upstairs wearing clogs and doing Irish dancing on their wooden floor while completing everyday tasks.  Hilarious right.  No, not really.  But unfortunately, this brought back some bad memories of somewhere I used to live in Seattle.  No, I didn't have particularly noisy neighbors above me (that was Austin).  But, and this is true, there was an Irish dancing studio on the ground floor of the apartment complex - directly below, but several floors apart, from where my apartment was.  And yes, I could certainly hear it when they were dancing.  I don't know - yes I think I am overly sensitive to noisy neighbors, but I also seem to have had some remarkably bad luck or made some remarkably poor choices in choosing where to live.  So although where I live now is not quite perfect, I am extremely grateful to be renting here compared to some of the real stinkers I've had in the past.

Song of the Week #3

Next "random" song, a live track from what IMHO might be the best band of the last 25 years.  They are releasing a live track every Friday during social isolation, and these YouTube videos are criminally unseen.

Outdoor Recreation

It's been announced that Washington State parks and State public lands will be reopened next week.  Thank god - it can't come soon enough.  I am getting increasingly bored with the limited hiking options in my neighborhood - there is only so far I can go in each direction, and I've pretty much exhausted each way.  Invariably the state parks are going to get absolutely packed as soon as they open, so I wouldn't be surprised if they get quickly closed again (and we are supposed to "recreate locally", but I have no idea how far away that really means).  But I might try to go early, and screw work I might even try to go during the week.  Anywhere different would be good at the moment.

Skype and Zoom

I've so far avoided having to use video in any of my work meetings.  But this is going to change this week - apparently some directive from management has come down that says managers have to encourage their reports to use video in online team meetings in order to feel more connected, or some such malarkey.  I taped over the webcam on my work laptop some time ago, so it seems I'm going to have to take that off now.  However, I'm not having any of my colleagues judge me based on what they can see in the background of my video (it's bad enough that I now feel obligated to shave the morning of the meeting!).  So I've just downloaded a virtual background to use in the video.  It was a difficult choice, but I've plumped for the bridge of the Enterprise.  I suspect most of my mainly Chinese colleagues will not recognize it.  None of them have said anything about the image I now use in Skype, which is what we use to exchange messages at work - a shot of Kevin McCallister.  Yes, I'm "home alone" etc etc.  So far, only one person has commented on this.  And he is Caucasian.  Disappointing.       

Color/Colour

This might be the most colorful time of the year outside, with lots of plants flowering right now.  So I went round my yard the other day, and took photos of anything that had some color.  Yes, yet another example of what going stir crazy stuck at home has come to.  And yes, I know that most of these are probably weeds - but hey, even weeds can have some color.

Windy

With absolutely no warning, at least in the weather app I use, it was really windy today.  Like 40 mph gusts, knocking bits of tree off windy.  Strong enough to bring down whole branches windy.  But did we get any sort of weather advisory or warning?  Did we heck.  And how do I know it was strong enough to bring down branches?  Because about 2.15 this afternoon I heard the loud break of something large coming off a tree nearby, quickly followed by a loud pop as a transformer went - and sure enough, my power promptly went out.  Yep, a large branch or something brought down the power lines somewhere on the road at the bottom of my driveway.  This was the catalyst for a number of other things to go wrong.  Firstly as I was looking at the power lines, I made conversation with a neighbor I'd never seen before who had also lost power.  And tried to shake his hand, totally forgetting about the whole social distancing thing.  Serious faux pas.  But at least I was kind of forced to go out for a walk this afternoon.  But then I made the mistake of incorporating trying to find a geocache in the walk I chose to do.  Something I haven't done for a very long time.  And it showed.  Spent half an hour unsuccessfully trying to find this bleeding geocache - that in my geocaching app was supposedly an "easy" one.  I'm clearly out of practice, and it was so demoralizing that I'm not sure if I'll try again any time soon.  Especially not this one, which just to rub it in was on a very muddy trail.  But at least when I got back around 6 pm, I saw all the utility trucks and repair people doing their thing and power was restored not long after (fortunately, because some of their trucks were parked in my driveway, blocking me in just when I was considering going out to get some takeaway food).  So that was my "exciting" afternoon.           

Dangerous Ignoramus

I just read an article that posited whether Trump is a stable genius or a dangerous ignoramus.  I think you know my opinion.  But I thought I'd share the article, because it strongly resonated with what I think.

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out, in a minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. You’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me.”

That was President Trump’s contribution on Thursday to the portfolio of misinformation, quackery and jaw-dropping ignorance he has shared with the American people during the coronavirus pandemic.

But there was more. “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way you can apply light and heat to cure. You know? If you could,” Trump said to Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator. “And maybe you can, maybe you can’t . . . I’m not a doctor.” Birx, blinking so nervously one would have thought she was transmitting Morse code (“Get me out of here!”), looked like she wanted to disappear into the folds of her silk scarf. She managed to say with a straight face that, no, that would not be a treatment. Medical doctors were compelled to warn people not to ingest poisonous chemicals; the makers of Lysol felt obliged to say “under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).” 

We can laugh (uproariously) about Trump’s ignorance and inanity, but like his hawking of hydroxychloroquine — which induced hoarding of medication needed by patients with other diseases (and perhaps others to harm themselves) — this is one more instance in which concern for public safety should spur news networks to discontinue live coverage of the daily briefings. Like a con man peddling patent medicine, Trump dispenses false hope and crackpot remedies, thereby promoting disdain for scientific inquiry and valid research. Once more, one is compelled not only to shudder that such an intellectually unfit man could be president but that legions of right-wing hucksters and sycophants could regularly contort themselves not merely to defend his blabbering but also to lionize him.

It is little wonder that only 23 percent of Americans, according to the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, have a high level of trust in what Trump says. (Some of us find it disturbing the number is that high, although the poll was taken before his latest quackery.) Sixty percent of the country thinks Trump does not listen enough to medical experts. (A poll of his medical experts surely would show unanimity on that point.)

In case you wondered whether Trump’s soft spot for crank potions and cures matters, Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority who was removed from his post this week, is filing a whistleblower claim. The Post reports on Bright’s lawyers’ statement: “In our filing, we will make clear that Dr. Bright was sidelined for one reason only — because he resisted efforts to provide unfettered access to potentially dangerous drugs, including chloroquine, a drug promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which is untested and possibly deadly when used improperly.”

In other words, a respected scientist performing valuable duties in the interest of public safety was removed because he refused to go along with Trump’s unapproved and potentially dangerous prescription. That not only deprives the American people of a skilled scientist at a time they need the best minds working on the coronavirus; it also inhibits truth-telling and promotes dangerous sycophancy. Less remarked upon but also preposterous, Trump falsely insisted we are close to a vaccine — only to contradict himself seconds later — and then publicly disagree (absent any basis in fact) with Anthony S. Fauci’s assessment that we are not as far ahead on testing as we should be.

Instead of amplifying Trump’s disinformation and misinforming the public about a life-threatening pandemic, the media should report only after the briefings on any actual news and on the list of untruths Trump uttered. Frankly, by not showing these fiascoes live, the media would be doing the science-addled president a favor. They surely would be performing a public safety function.