Our dog has always had the luxury of having me, my wife or both of us at home on work-days. With Covid, we're coming up on two years of both of us working from home every day. Except weekends. Weekends are off, for us.
What our dog likes, is to lay around--usually in my wife's ground-floor office, but very occasionally, in my 3rd floor lair. I like to think that it's because she (the dog) is lazy, rather than that she loves my wife more than she loves me. The dog is lazy and old, but she really does love my wife over me, though I think she loves and somewhat fears me.
Machiavelli, may have said that it's better to be feared than loved and that it's best to be feared and loved, but the dog would rather hang out with someone she loves and does not fear.
On a normal work day, this is the ideal situation for the dog. This is her weekend. She is at ease and happy. Our weekend is her work week. On the weekends we run errands and leave her behind. She doesn't know when we will be back, she stays calm but there's got to be some tension: What about being fed, or let outside for bodily functions? This absence of my people is untenable! Or we taker her on an outing to give her some exercise. Again with the work! When will these two days be over and I can settle into my 5-day weekend?
This is what she's thinking, on our weekend, which is her work-week.
I am pretty confident that if Trump were still president, there would be wall-to-wall headlines:
"US Passes Grim Milestone As Deaths From Covid-19 Exceed 800 Thousand"
There hasn't been much note of it in news, though--probably because there is no credible way of blaming a Republican. The closest I could find was:
Yesterday was the Marine Corps Birthday!
I must have felt the spirit though: I clean and jerked 160 lbs for the first time since my birthday and on that day, my present was having my bride as a spectator.
Due to fears about global warming, the logical response, at least to greens, was to invest in solar and wind energy.
One obvious problem is that it isn't always windy and the sun doesn't shine at night. To some extent, you can mitigate these issues by placing wind turbines in generally windy places and solar cells where the skies are generally clear.
BUT
How, if you think the climate is a-changing, do you know that generally windy places will remain windy and generally sunny places will not become cloudy all the time? It's almost as if, in response to certain change, they are assuming no change.
WEIRD
Change or no change, an atomic power plant will give you > 90% capacity utilization 24/7 for like, 30 years.
It was an innocent (Are any of them really so innocent though?*) Facebook question about your first car.
Mine was a brand new 1983 Toyota Tercel. I wanted to wryly comment on how underpowered it was and guessed a 0-60 of about 18 seconds. But this is the information era, there is no need to guess anymore, about anything.
According to KFF, 23.6% of US Residents are 0-18, which is significantly more than those 65 and older, 16.5%.
Over the span of the Covid pandemic, 3,906,056 people 65 or older died from all causes. Of these, 485,290 died of Covid. At the other end of the spectrum, there were a total of 53,193 children under 18 who died from all causes. So, as a kid, you're about 1/70th as likely to die in a given couple of years as a person who is older than 65. Of that 53,193, how many would you guess were from Covid?
361
Likelihood of a 65+ person dying in a given period/Likelihood of under 18 dying of Covid = 15,476
Also, the total percentage of Americans who have died of Covid has yet to reach 1/5th of 1%.
If you're a fan of Phillip K. Dick, you also likely know that he was obsessed with Linda Ronstadt. So far as I've been able to determine, she never met Mr. Dick and possibly never knew he existed. When he first heard "You're No Good", he thought she was speaking directly to him. He wrote about her directly in "novels" like VALIS and she appeared pseudoanonymously in other works, as a galactic diva.
Ms. Ronstadt didn't live entirely in the music industry--she dated the Governor of California.
At the peak of her career, she was extremely well known, but now--It's dubious if many young people have heard of her. Too bad. She had a distinctive voice and many of her covers are the best known versions of songs.
Over the decades, probably starting with Blade Runner, Phillip K. Dick has slowly become a legendary figure--even though all the films and shows, so far, have only glanced off-of what made his work brilliant. As a side note: Each of Galactic Pot Healer, We Can Build You or Martian Time Slip, would be great material for a streaming series, with 10 1-hour episodes. Don't change anything, just use exactly the dialog from the books.
I can't be the only one to imagine that eventually, Ronstadt will be more known for Dick's fervid ideations of her, than for Ronstadt's own considerable music career.
Dick's thoughts, probably.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more.It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.― William Shakespeare, Macbeth
We can debate if the cost of remaining was worth-it to the US national interest. I think it was clearly worth it to have a secure base of operations next to the Stans, Iran and Pakistan. We could have kept this up for 100 years and had a side benefit of an excellent training ground for our military.
The analogy I return to, is the idea of giving a diabetic insulin. If you give the treatment for 20 years, the patient lives a fairly normal life. If you suddenly decide to stop providing insulin, he will quickly become ill and die--which is sad and unnecessary and shouldn't be done. But say it was done. He gained 20 years of life that he wouldn't have gotten, had you never provided the medicine.
On the drive up to Burlington VT, I saw a sign on a truck:
Not Responsible For Broken Windshields. Thoughts which went through my head, in order. This is BS! A stupid bumper sticker couldn't possibly relieve an operator from liability if something falls from his vehicle and damages another! Or maybe, the sign simply reflects that the law doesn't generally hold operators liable--this also seems dubious. Final conclusion--the driver is communicating that HE thinks it isn't his fault and will fight you. This makes me all the more willing to press the case! He knows that he's caused broken glass and his solution is not to load more carefully, but to buy a sticker. What An Asshole!
Later that day, we had a flat tire. I decided to borrow the full sized spare from my daughter's car and put the compact spare in her trunk rather than drive 200 miles on a doughnut. Even though the spare was a real tire, exact same size as the rest, it still had the 50 MPH speed limit stickers all over it. There was no way I was going to drive 50 on the freeway, all the way back! So, I was thinking--is this warning legally binding? Like, could a cop have a legal right to give me a speeding ticket if I drive faster than 50 MPH?
A terrific neo-noir film, but take a look at some of the actors:
Carroll O'Connor, as an accountant for the mob--four years before he became Archie Bunker.
Angie Dickinson, looking great at 36 and showing huge acting range.
Finally, Lee Marvin! Walker, no first name: Double crossed by his wife (Dickinson plays the wife's sister) shot and left for dead by his best friend. On a determined mission to confront them both and get his half of the money!
How old would you say Marvin is here?
Walker walking:
Sister in law troubles:
She loves him, but he can be frustrating.
It's not all fights:
Maybe we live in a simulation or maybe so many things happen, that there are bound to be coincidences...
--When I was an undergraduate, I met a young woman in astronomy 101. We spent a fair amount of time together, but not much happened romantically. She liked to hold hands on long walks, we went to the movies a time or two and kissed once. Anyways, she was a Hotel & Restaurant Management student and spent a summer in India, working at a large international hotel.
--After I graduated, I spent a year and a half living in Sun Valley. One one of the many drives between Sun Valley and Spokane, I picked-up a hitchhiker who, I discovered later, had dropped a ball point pen in my car, which was from the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe Vermont.
Also, while living in Sun Valley, I developed a deep friendship with a woman who had gotten a degree in Journalism at University of Idaho while I was in Pullman. One of the many things I remembered was her telling me she dated a guy with the memorable last name of "Custer". He attended WSU and they met because she spent a Summer as a lifeguard at the public pool in Pullman. She noted that he--even though a STEM guy, could really write--which was kind of a mixed blessing since he wrote beautiful but rather mean post-break-up letters to her. The name was familiar to me: I took a Science Fiction lit course under the legendary Paul Brians and in this small-ish class, we would review each other's papers. There was a Custer in the class, IIRC he was stem and he was an amazing writer!
--After Sun Valley, I returned to Pullman to prep for grad school, via a degree in Biology. One of the first courses I took was Organic Chemistry. It was an equipment/glassware intensive lab and each student had a row of drawers of their own stuff. A label on a piece of glassware read "Custer". I became friends with the Indian-American TA and through her, met my Indian-American wife. She grew up in the Boston area, which is how we got into the vicinity of Vermont. We got into Vermont itself because we figured that since entry-level jobs paid so little, we might as well live someplace with a lower cost of living. It happened that UVM advertised in The Boston Globe. We ended up living in Vermont for 8 years.
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