Loved this Fran Lebowitz interview about being quarantined in NYC. "The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH ANDREW SULLIVAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: It’s Time for Conscious Uncoupling With China.
Stop Yarra Bay Rape Movement's celebration as the cruise industry will never recover in our lifetime: Plans for Sydney's third cruise ship terminal delayed for 18 months
Controversial plans for a new cruise terminal at Yarra Bay have been put on hold due to the crisis engulfing the cruise industry.
WHEN BILL MAHER IS THE SANEST GUY AT WARNERMEDIA…Bill Maher defends calling coronavirus ‘Chinese virus.’
US Congressman Matt Gaetz said: 'I'm disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.'
REVEALED: U.S. government gave $3.7million grant to Wuhan lab at center of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated
US Congressman Matt Gaetz said: 'I'm disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.'
REVEALED: U.S. government gave $3.7million grant to Wuhan lab at center of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated
BUT IT’LL PROBABLY COME FROM CHINA: We probably won’t see the next COVID-19 coming: The novel coronavirus is just one of many microbes that have jumped from animals into people.
As a precaution, we probably need to isolate China, and ban dense cities and mass transit.
The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're her now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Coronavirus Diaries: I’m a Lesbian. But Since the Lockdown, I’ve Been Sleeping With My Male Roommate
What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to Eat? (Ep. 412)
Covid-19 has shocked our food-supply system like nothing in modern history. We examine the winners, the losers, the unintended consequences — and just how much toilet paper one household really needs. The post What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to...
What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to Eat? (Ep. 412)
Covid-19 has shocked our food-supply system like nothing in modern history. We examine the winners, the losers, the unintended consequences — and just how much toilet paper one household really needs. The post What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to...
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: People Are Discovering Their Spouses’ Work Personas and It’s Hilarious:
Our testament like mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up. - Anthropologists Adam Barrowman and Women giggling like Adamd and Georgina ;-)
THAT WOULD BE VERY FAST: Coronavirus vaccine could be ready by September but there is no vaccine for mob stupidity. “Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford University, told The Times she was ’80 per cent confident’ that the vaccine being developed by her team would work, with human trials due to begin in the next fortnight.”
EVERY JOKE IS A TINY REVOLUTION OF 2024: One Twitter account may have the best way to silence the rise of Chinese trolls: Winnie the Pooh is the answer.
Shades of the old Soviet Union joke: “Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the USA? Yes! In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, ‘Down with Ronald Reagan,’ and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, ‘Down with Ronald Reagan,’ and you will not be punished.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
'I owe them my life': Boris Johnson thanks hospital staff
The British Prime Minister issued a brief statement thanking health workers after he was moved out of intensive care.
In grim milestone, United States logs world's highest coronavirus death toll
The grim milestone was reached as President Donald Trump mulled over when the country, which has registered more than half a million infections, might begin to see a return to normality.
I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't seem to stop making bad decisions. The weird thing is they don't sneak up on me. I can see them coming all the way down the pike.
Allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it make a date so much less boring.
"Wait," I say. "Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?" She considers this. "Yeah," she says, "seconds probably."I feel out of step.
Today I had a nap. A rainy-day late-afternoon two-hour nap. An emotionally necessary nap, not a physical one. I feel guilty about it. I need to make up work time.
They are starting to fine people for being outside unnecessarily, for gathering. This is fast becoming constitutionally treacherous territory. As if groups of two or more might be "conspiring." (Conspiring to what?)
The provincial premiers plan to release their modeled projections, but the prime minister is holding back. What does he not want us to know? Is he afraid of instilling panic? What would we do as a panicked society? The toilet paper and the flour are already gone. Congregate in the parking lot of Timmie's?
Or is it a question of timing? Maybe he's timing the panic response for maximum effect. To stop us dead in our tracks.
"What it takes to survive a crisis" looks at how people respond to life-threatening situations:
People simply don't believe what they're seeing. So they go about their business, engaging in what's known as "normalcy bias." They act as if everything is OK and underestimate the seriousness of danger. Some experts call this "analysis paralysis." People lose their ability to make decisions.The incredulity is starting to wane. We are entering another phase.
But this is a crisis on another scale. The times call for a benevolent dictator. We might be lucky. If we're lucky.
Weather is clearly about a different sort of crisis, but it's discussed (to this point) only tangentially. The feeling of crisis is broadly applicable.
That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brains refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.Where can we move to?
From Normal People, by Sally Rooney.
On readings:
A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self-conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer's work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn't know why he had come. He had read the writer's collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who'd already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he'd observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn't think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.And later, at the pub:
Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.See also The cult of Sally Rooney
'Our House Had Been Stricken by the Plague'
Good metaphors survive for good reasons. They work. They are useful and quickly understood. Even when turned into clichés by overuse, they communicate. One tries to avoid such overworked warhorses (see?), especially in writing, but they leave our lips spontaneously in conversation. One ameliorating tactic is to ironize them, exaggerate and make fun of their familiarity. Of course, we all know people whose speech is strictly used goods, second-hand wares (see?).
Take plague. The OED tells us the word is rooted in classical Latin, plāga, meaning “stroke, wound.” In post-classical Latin it morphed into “affliction, illness, plague, especially one interpreted as divine punishment.” Already it was metaphorical. It first shows up in English in the fourteenth century, in the Wycliffe Bible, in several senses. By the late fifteenth century it had arrived in the most common modern sense: “Any infectious disease which spreads rapidly and has a high mortality rate; an epidemic of such a disease.” In the following century it was applied to the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis – bubonic plague. Today, all of these meanings and more coexist. Consider this passage from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970):
“He was still a boy, but so alive with ideas that wherever he appeared in those years he always caused a stir. People sensed the dynamic strength fermenting in him and knew that he was doomed. Now our house had been stricken by the plague and become a death trap for anyone prone to infection.”
Context: In late 1933, Osip Mandelstam had written his famous “Stalin Epigram” or “Stalin Ode.” Mandelstam had read the poem several times at private gatherings. Someone ratted him out and he was arrested and exiled to Cherdyn, a thousand miles northeast of Moscow. There he attempted suicide. In the last sentence quoted above, Mandelstam’s future widow means Osip is politically contaminated. To associate with him could prove fatal. Nadezhda goes on to describe their situation in 1937, the year before his second, final and fatal arrest:
“Men would not come near our plague-stricken house, but sent their wives instead—women were less exposed. Even in 1937 most women were arrested because of their husbands, not on their own account. No wonder, then, that men were more cautious than women.”