September 3, 2020
When I was a kid, I loved playing with radio-control planes. It took a while to build them, but it was always worth it to see them take off and fly around. Not a single plane survived, but that’s ok… the crashes were inevitable. Then, I’d salvage the electronics (batteries, servos) and just build them into the next model. For me, and the way I flew those things, that was just part of it.
What wasn’t inevitable was how I lost a couple of helicopters… those, I didn’t build. But I did try to figure out how far away I could fly them before the radio control lost contact.
When you think about it, there’s really no good way to figure that out… it works, it works, it works, it doesn’t work. Oh. Then you watch it drift off into the distance. Modern drones will fly back to their home point, but not these old cheap plastic things. They landed on some distant rooftop or tree, never to be seen again.
What was I thinking? I was a kid, so don’t judge too harshly… flirting with that edge of possibility was part of the fun.
Similarly, Dr. Henry and Minister Dix gave one of their comprehensive updates today; lots to digest, but the summary of it is that things are pretty good… and that, as usual, it’s entirely up to us with respect to how things go from here.
On the “it could go this way or it could go that way” projections, we’re right at the edge. It’s actually flirting with that “out of control” tipping point much the same as the anchor brakes I talked about yesterday… and much the same as the helicopters mentioned above. Perhaps the range is 500 feet… and at 490 feet away, it’s flying perfect under control. And then it ever-so-gently drifts out to 510 feet and I give it a little right-turn nudge on the stick but nothing happens… and now I give it full-right, full-left, oh shit, up, down, engine off… etc etc, no response… and I watch it drift away, till it’s nothing but a little dot in the sky, lost forever.
If you look at the epidemiological (thank you auto-correct/spell-check) modelling, there are always these various lines… in this case (slide 20 on today’s presentation, available on the BCCDC website), you can see the effects going forward with respect to infectious contact percentages. At 50%, things go down. At 70%, they rise sharply. At 80%, they blow out of control. Floating around 60%, which is roughly where they’re at, they’re growing, but not crazily. And if we can nudge it down to 50%, we’d be in great shape. And all it takes is for the vast majority of us to follow the guidelines which we’re all very familiar with by now. And if you’re not, especially since a few (work spaces and schools) have been updated, brush up on it… on what’s ok and what isn’t.
Model helicopters, boat anchors, pandemics… what on earth do those three things have in common? They all have a tipping point, and the tipping point is entirely under the control of the single human (model helicopter), small group of humans (controlling dropping the anchor) or general population (pandemic control) – upon whom the outcome relies. It’s up to me, it’s up to us… and it’s up to all of us.
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September 2, 2020
If you’ve been around long enough and/or know something about hockey and/or Olympic history, you’re probably familiar with “The Miracle on Ice”. It happened back in 1980, at the Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games, where the Americans won the gold medal.
It all took place in the midst of the Cold War. The Soviet Union showed up with a veteran team of experienced superstars, who’d been crushing their opposition for years. They’d won the last 4 Olympic gold medals, and hadn’t lost an Olympic match in that entire time.
The Americans, on the other hand, showed up with a group of very young (average age 21) college players with zero NHL experience. A bunch of excellent amateur players… but way out of their league.
To make a long story short, in one of the most epic David vs. Goliath moments ever, the Americans defeated the Soviets and won the gold medal… but if you’re not too familiar with it all, you may not realize that when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R., that wasn’t the game that won them the medal. They still had one more game to go, against Finland… and the winner of that game would win it all.
U.S. coach Herb Brooks (played by Karl Malden in the made-for-TV movie) was well-known as an excellent motivator, but he had his work cut out for him. After the mental and physical exhaustion from beating the Soviets, they had to dig down and find it all again, one final time.
Needless to say, Finland was no pushover. They were playing for the gold too, and it was Finland that had the lead, 2-1, going into the final period. The entirety of what Herb Brooks told his players during that 2nd-intermission break isn’t known… but the last thing he said to them was this:
“If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f#@%ing graves.”
Then, he stormed out of the locker room… but, not quite. He stopped at the door, paused, turned around… and solemnly said, “Your f#@%ing graves.” Then he walked out.
Perhaps that was the differentiator. Who knows. Great coaches, great techniques, great ideas, great execution. The Americans scored 3 goals in the 3rd period, and the rest is history.
On a more recent but less important similar event, the Canucks, last night – facing playoff elimination and playing with a playoff-rookie goaltender… managed to get it done. A gutsy and well-earned victory. Who knows what head coach Travis Green said to them… and/or how relevant it was… but it worked out well. A very good team with a very good leader.
On the flipside of all that… the L.A. Kings, two weeks before the end of a disappointing 2015 season (having won 2 of the last 3 Stanley Cups, but now about to miss the playoffs…) locked their coach out of the dressing room. They’d had enough of Darryl Sutter… and by the time Darryl had managed to find a rink attendant to open the door, he was greeted by three garbage cans and an empty room. It wasn’t too long before he was fired.
On a much, much larger scale… like, a national scale… what happens when the team loses confidence in their leader? Usually, they vote him out. Unlike hockey, there’s no General Manager or President of Operations or Ownership Group to pull the trigger. In a democracy, it’s assumed that when the majority tells you it’s time to go, you go.
If you’re actually doing a great job, a tremendous job, a beautiful job, people tell you it’s the greatest job being done that they’ve ever seen… well then, they’ll simply vote to keep you around. And if they tell you they’ve had enough… it’s time to go.
I’ve never heard of a hockey coach refusing to leave after being fired. On the flipside, history is unfortunately full of elected leaders who weren’t happy being defeated and decided it was time for a “different approach” to stay in power. There are different versions of what that can look like, and none of them are pretty. And I sure hope I’m speaking purely hypothetically with respect to the near future.
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September 1, 2020
Recently, having just clicked on a YouTube video, I was reading the comments below it. The top comment said something like, “If you’re watching this video, you’re probably procrastinating.”
Very accurate… I was probably eight levels deep, down the “Up next” smorgasbord. I’m not sure what powers the algorithm that fuels the suggestions that populate my curated list of suggestions, but it’s gotten pretty good at knowing me. Good bot.
So I somehow wound up watching videos of “anchor fails”. This is where a ship (the bigger the better!) is trying to drop their anchor, and they make a hot mess out of it.
I’ve learned a lot… I used to have the misconception that it’s the anchor that holds the ship in place, but it’s just as much the weight of the chain, a lot of which lays on the bottom as well. The anchor prevents the chain from moving, and the weight of the chain prevents the ship from moving. It answers the question I never quite understood… if the anchor is “anchored” to the bottom, how do they ever dislodge it when they want to leave?
The answer is… they simply lift it. If you imagine trying to claw wet sand at the beach… dig your hand in, and try to claw along the ground… it’s hard. But lift it straight up, no problem. The anchor doesn’t move laterally very easily, for the same reason… but lifts up no problem.
And… especially on the huge ships, the anchor weighs a lot. As does the chain. The mechanism to unspool it is huge… and is manually operated by some guys who operate the brake. The idea is to let the chain out… slowly, but not so slowly that you’re there forever. And certainly not so quickly that it gets going too fast because, like a runaway nuclear reaction, once it gets out of hand, there’s nothing to do but step back and watch the impending catastrophe… and when the brakes fail or the guys screw up and that chain is unspooling faster and faster… and now there are sparks… and now there is fire, and it’s so deafeningly loud that you can’t even hear the sailors screaming… well, you know what comes next.
There are colour codes on those chains, white markings every 15 fathoms (90 feet). At some point, they turn yellow… the warning shot. You really should be stopping by yellow. And, at the very end, something you should never see, is the red link… the danger shot. It’s also called the bitter end (ahhh, that’s where it comes from) and it’s weak, because it’s meant to break… because either it snaps and you lose the anchor… or you literally rip a hole in the ship as the entire anchor infrastructure makes its way through the hull, on its way down to the bottom of the ocean. Yes… go to YouTube and search for “anchor fails” – you’re welcome.
It got me thinking… somewhere in all of those disasters, there’s that tipping point beyond which now things are not recoverable. It’s impossible to really know. The guy opened the brake just a tiny bit too much… the anchor started dropping just a little too quickly… and suddenly, the whole situation is out of control.
In case you need some help with the symbolism… COVID-19 is the anchor, B.C. is the ship…. and we – you and me – we’re all in charge of the brake. And if we don’t operate it carefully, thoughtfully, kindly, calmly and safely… well, you see what can happen.
I mean it… I’m not just… you know… yanking your chain.
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August 31, 2020
Numbers are out, and they’re pretty-much what was to be expected… relatively consistent, but slowly creeping upwards. Dr. Henry today talked about it with an interesting spin… that when this all began, we answered the call, did what needed… and it worked.
Then… we purposefully took our foot off the pedal a bit… took the Summer off, as it were… hung out, visited friends, had a good time.
But now, as before, it’s time to take it seriously again, and we know how to do it because we did it successfully the first time. The case counts we’re seeing are higher than ever, but it’s no reason to panic. Fair enough… the first time around, nobody really knew what was coming… and that, possibly, despite our best efforts, this whole thing could blow up.
There doesn’t seem to be that sense of urgency this time around… which isn’t necessarily a good thing. We think we know what we’re dealing with, but it was a lot easier back in the Spring, when we weren’t heading into “respiratory season”.
The fact is, given all of the social distancing and masks and care, “respiratory season” really shouldn’t be as big a deal this year. The precautions we’re taking against transmitting C19 should prevent common colds and flus from spreading as well. We shall see.
I was curious to hear Dr. Henry’s response to a question that was sure to be posed to her today, related to the TV ad she’s in which you may have seen… where she’s in a completely unrealistic classroom set-up, answering kids’ questions. It was, in fact, the first question asked.
The classroom has like 6 kids in it, all spaced out… there’s a sink, for hand-washing, off to the side… all of it not looking like any B.C. classroom any local teacher has ever seen. Her answer was that indeed, it was just a comfortable setting for kids to have their questions answered. There was no intent to imply that this was the way classrooms would look. Hmm.
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August 30, 2020
No pandemic numbers to update, but let’s talk about something relevant in my last 24 hours… my involvement in the World Series of Poker, which was going really well, until… suddenly… it wasn’t.
Unfortunately, that is the nature of the game, and there’s actually something relatable to the world in general, especially these days.
In tournament poker, unlike cash games, you play until you have all the chips (and win) …or you bust out with nothing. Often, in tournament poker, you’re put in a position where it’s blatantly obvious what you should do, but plain old (good or bad, depending who you are in the story) luck will have something to say about it.
Even in the most extreme and obvious cases… and here’s the math on one of the most extreme examples… things can (and do) go wrong.
Let’s say it’s just you and me battling against each other in a hand. You have a pair of Aces, the best possible starting hand. I have a 2 and a 7 of different suits, which is generally the worst starting hand. For some misguided reason, I think you’re trying to bluff me with whatever you did to kick-off the hand, so I go All-In on you, meaning I bet everything I have… not because my cards are any good, but because I think you don’t have anything that good, and as per what I wrote yesterday, this is a game of money played with cards, not the other way around. As long as you think I have something better than you, you should throw away the hand.
But instead, this scenario is a dream for you. Someone pushing All-In, while you have pocket Aces. You call instantly, and are even further delighted to see my awful cards. Here’s the math: After running 5 board (common) cards, you should win 88% of the time. I, through sheer luck, will win 12% of the time… having hit 2 pairs or 3 of a kind or who knows.
And that’s the thing… one out of eight times in that dream scenario, you will lose. And it will feel like someone sledgehammered you in the gut… and if you visit the hotel bar at any poker tournament, you will see an ever-increasing group of gut-sledgehammered people wandering in to drown their sorrows and tell anyone who’ll listen how they just got completely screwed by some idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
I will spare you all the details of exactly what busted me out of “The Big One” this year, but there’s no expert that’d tell you I did anything wrong. I got all my money in with a much better hand, and the other guy got lucky. In a real tournament, “IGHN” – I Go Home Now. Silver lining of course… I already am home. And instead of having a bunch of drunk, depressed poker players to make me feel better, I have my dog licking my face.
What’s relatable? That sometimes, doing the exact right thing… doesn’t yield the results you were hoping for or expecting. You’re wearing a mask, you’re social distancing… and somehow you caught the bug. It’s happened. Bad luck. But in no way does that negate what you (and everyone else) should be doing. Knowing that sometimes things aren’t going to work out is no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.
And, for what it’s worth, there are still some smaller WSOP events I might jump into. If things go well there, I assure you, you’ll hear about it. Kind of like the pandemic… when that starts going well, rest-assured… I’ll be here to tell you all about it.
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August 29, 2020
No AB or BC numbers today (or tomorrow)… so, like waiting for that final “river” card in poker, we wait to see how the hand plays out on Monday.
Indeed, poker is on my mind because I’ve spent the better part of today (and will continue into the night) trying to advance a bit further in the World Series of Poker Main Event. It’s all online this year, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
The biggest advantage of course is being able to sit at home, comfortably, and scream at the computer and throw your mouse at the wall in frustration when appropriate to do so. I haven’t done the latter, but plenty of the former… certainly something you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) do in a real cardroom.
If you’re only familiar with the game of poker from what you’ve seen on TV, you might have a bit of a misguided notion… but here’s the deal: Poker is not a game of cards which you play with money. Rather… it’s a game of money which you play with cards. It’s a subtle distinction, but it makes a huge difference.
Watching on TV, you’d think most hands are people throwing their money into the pot and hoping for the best as the cards get dealt. Certainly, that does happen… perhaps one out of ten times. The other nine times, all the poker playing takes place before any cards are seen… or just a few. It’s 80% luck, 15% mind games and 5% math.
Everyone knows the math, and the 80% luck aspect can be rolled out of the equation… other than it serves to level the playing field to the extent “good” amateurs like me can go toe-to-toe with the pros for a while, but eventually they’ll get caught by that intangible 15% of mind games. There’s a reason that, after 5,000 people have entered a tournament, you always wind-up with a lot of familiar names in the top 500… the guys who can stare at you from across the table; stare into your soul and make you think exactly what they want.
To some extent, not having that be a part of it… helps a bit. Nobody can tell what’s going through my mind while it’s counting down, waiting for me to do something. For example, at this moment, for the last two minutes, I’ve been typing here while some guy in Italy put me All-In and is waiting for me to Call or Fold. I already know I’m going to Fold, but he can wait.
If we have to wait till Monday to know what's going on, he can wait 120 seconds extra.
And with that, the break is over — I will gratefully accept your wishes of good luck and let you know tomorrow where I'm at.
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August 28, 2020
To be honest, not great numbers today, if you’re looking at new cases… as we head into the weekend, today’s new-case counts are the highest ever, here in B.C… and in Alberta as well. The only positive thing about that, one would hope, is that it serves as a wake-up call. We’re presently heading in the wrong, direction… albeit slowly. And now is the time to address it. We can at least appreciate the transparency with which we’re handed this information. That’s not the case everywhere.
The U.S. election is 67 days away, and Donald Trump needs to make sure things look as good as possible during that time. All other issues aside, his continued waffling and ineffectiveness with respect to managing the pandemic (the U.S. response is now ranked 2nd-worse on the planet, only slightly better than the U.K.) has made him look awful, no matter what he says. His insistence that things are going well, and it’ll soon be over and all that… most people are wising-up that this is far from the truth.
He’s taken two significant steps in trying to put lipstick on this particular pig. One is that the testing data no longer goes directly to the CDC. It goes to the White House, where it’s compiled, curated and released to the public. The other is his strategy of testing less… because, you know, the less you test, the less positive results you get… and the better it looks. Duh.
The combination of those two things has led to a significant decline in positive test results.
If you average the number of positive tests in the U.S. (and Canada, in [brackets], whose population is about 1/9th the size), starting a month ago, the 4 subsequent weeks were:
56,061 [395]
55,197 [382]
47,356 [377]
42,872 [425]
Wow – those are some great American numbers… look at that downward trend, even as Canada, at best, stays flat… or goes up a bit. Let’s hope some aide doesn’t jokingly suggest to The President to cut testing altogether… because what’s better than zero positives!
Of course, when reality checks in, things look a little different. Here are the daily deaths averages for those same time periods:
1,053 [5]
1,095 [7]
998 [6]
1,059 [7]
Remarkably consistent. No matter how you try to hide the numbers with respect to this disease and its spread, it’s hard to hide the deaths. Those numbers are beyond the reach of the White House to “manage”.
The President of the United States may not be aware that there are two things in life that are a certainty… death and taxes. You can’t escape either….and history will not be kind in exposing his attempts to cheat on both.
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August 27, 2020
In school, you could always tell who was left-handed. It was all the students whose left hand had an accumulated smear of blue ink running down the left edge of their hand; you know, the edge closest to the paper. When you’re doing cursive writing and dragging your hand across the page, that’s what happens. One of the many perks of being left-handed.
Needless to say, my handwriting was awful, and the resulting pages of in-class effort often resembled, as one teacher once told me, “a sloppy dog’s breakfast.” I’ve never met any left-handed people with good handwriting. For the most part, I switched to printing in ALL CAPS, something that seems to be pretty common these days, but I was doing that decades ago, when it was barely tolerated. Teachers would question it.
“Why do you write like this?”
“So you can read it.”
My dad would’ve been left-handed, had he been allowed. He was forced to sit on his left hand while learning to write, though he hit left with tennis and kicked left with soccer. He’s the one who taught me all-caps printing thing.
Back in elementary school, while I wasn’t forced to write with my right, there was little accommodation otherwise. For example, every single baseball glove owned by the school was for right-handed people. Catch with your left, throw with your right.
I throw very well with my left. I can’t throw at all with my right… the result being, I was always the goof who’d catch the ball, and attempt to quickly remove the glove, the ball from it, and then throw it. It’s ridiculous. I spent all my time on the field praying the ball wouldn’t get hit my way, because every time I had to make a play, chances were it’d be a botched mess.
But among all of those failed, miserable, laughable screw-ups trying to field a ball, there shines this particular moment (and apologies to those who don’t know how baseball works, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it):
There was this player… Michael Finch… truly a great ball player in comparison to the rest of us. He was an actual Little-League star; we were a bunch of hacks. And every time MF came to the plate, he’d swing on the first pitch and launch it into the stratosphere. Every single time. And he’d hit it so far that there was no way to play it. It’d either go soaring over everyone’s head, or you’d be so far out that there was no way to make any play. Either way, he’d already have rounded the bases by the time the ball made its way back to the infleld.
On this particular day, our team was ahead by a couple of runs going into the bottom of the last inning, but they’d loaded the bases, and even though there were two outs, it was MF himself coming to bat. “Oh well…”, I thought to myself, “We almost won.”
I was somewhere out in right field, far away from where he’d typically hit it anyway, but I didn’t want to be part of the game-losing play. I was muttering that mantra to myself… “pleasedonthitittome pleasedonthitittome…” as he stepped up to the plate, wound up and, as usual, uncorked on the very first pitch with a tremendous crack of the bat. But this time, unlike every other soaring, towering arcing cannonball, this one was a missile… a line-drive, in my direction.
I wish I could say I made some amazing, diving play… but the truth is, it was coming directly at me. I took one step forward and then put up my glove, more than anything to shield my face.
It’s good think I took a step forward; had I been standing still, I think the momentum would’ve knocked me backwards. The ball hit my glove so hard I couldn’t have dropped it even if I’d wanted to; the ball’s leather seemed to fuse with that of the glove. My hand exploded in pain, but I barely noticed. I stood there for a moment, staring at my glove — and the ball embedded in it — with the same dull surprise of man who’d just accidentally slammed the hood of the car on his hand.
And then I was surrounded by my team, all cheering wildly as if I’d just returned from the war. I recall seeing MF just dropping the bat and walking away with his astonished frustration. I remember the coach from a distance, giving me a huge smile, nod and fist pump.
For the next several days, all sorts of random people I didn’t know… other students, staff, and even (gasp) girls were coming up to me…
“Hey, nice catch”
“Way to go”
“I heard you made a nice catch”
It was, without a doubt, my 15 minutes of fame. I faded back to obscurity after that, but obviously I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t know where Michael Finch is these days, and I doubt he remembers it, but it meant a lot to me when he came up to me afterwards and said the same thing… “Nice catch.” He meant it. In the grand scheme of things, that little event was nothing to him, but he realized how much it meant to me. Mike – if you’re out there somewhere – cheers.
And…uhh…. this posting was supposed to be about left-handedness, but somehow I got lost along the way. I was going to talk about how even though only 10% of the population is left-handed, 6 out of the last 12 U.S. presidents were as well. And that a similar over-representation finds its way onto other lists as well… writers, painters, Nobel Prize winners.
But you know what – you can Google all that, if you’re interested… this is already long enough… and there’s probably a pandemic-related connection to make… perhaps something like… even though it’s looking like things are setting up for a disaster… it all turns out ok.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
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January 7, 2021
Kool-Aid has gotten a bad rap over the years. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” has become synonymous with believing in something crazy. It was over 900 people who died by suicide… many of them children, fed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid by their parents… parents who poisoned their own kids before taking their own lives. Over 300 kids.
This was all thanks to Jim Jones, a charismatic cult leader who’d rather die, and take everyone down with him… instead of facing the music. There’s obviously a lot wrong with this picture… that one man could convince so many people to die for his cause.
The first thing that’s wrong is the Kool-Aid itself. It wasn’t actually poisoned Kool-Aid that they all drank; it was Flavor Aid. No big deal, what’s the difference, who cares… well, I’m sure the marketing department at Kraft-Heinz would beg to differ. It’s impressive the good-will that Kool-Aid must have had before that massacre that they would choose to keep the name instead of just re-branding the flavoured juice crystals. Oh, yeah.
Kool-Aid aside, just how deep down the well do you need to be to go along something like that? The aforementioned Jonestown massacre of 1978 is the most well-known, but cult mass suicides happen… well, not “all the time”, but they’re perhaps more common than you might believe.
There was the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in 1997, where 39 people in California killed themselves because their cult leader, Marshall Applewhite, had convinced them that a UFO was lurking behind the Hale-Bopp comet that was heading towards earth, and that “leaving the human world” was the only way to hitch a ride on it. Accordingly, Applewhite provided some poisoned applesauce for the group…who put on identical black tracksuits and matching Nikes (they got a good deal on the bulk purchase), poisoned themselves, and waited for their ride to another planet. One of those was the brother of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek… but that’s about as close to a spacecraft as they got.
There was the Order of the Solar Temple suicides, led by charismatic leaders Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret… where are total of 74 people killed themselves to “escape the world to a higher dimension”. They were from Switzerland, Canada and France.
In March of 2000, there was “Judgement … [Continue Reading]
January 6, 2021
In April of ’86 (in this case, 1886), the city of Vancouver was established. A couple of months later, it all burned to the ground… but, they rebuilt it… better, this time… more brick, less wood… and here we are.
Eighty-six years later, a group of local businessmen set out to bring professional soccer to this city… and a couple of years later, in 1974, the Vancouver Whitecaps played their first game in the North American Soccer League. The highlight of that team came in 1979 when they won SoccerBowl, the NASL championship. Unfortunately, a few years later, the team (and the entire NASL actually), burned into bankruptcy.
In 1986, on its 100th birthday, Vancouver hosted the world… for a World’s Fair – Expo 86… which undoubtedly changed the landscape of the city forever. It was a big year for the city, and it was a big year for professional soccer. Like the city that itself had risen from the ashes, so did a team… the Vancouver 86ers, founded by 86 people who put up $500 each to get it all going.
It was an impressive team; they inherited plenty of Whitecaps firepower. Waiters, Valentine, Lenarduzzi to name a few… then, add to that the homegrown talents of Mobilio and Catliff…it was a great team right off the bat. Perhaps they were named after the 1886 founding/resurrection of the city. Perhaps they were named for the World’s Fair/100th anniversary. Or, perhaps they were named for the verb… to “86” someone means to eject, reject, discard or cancel them…. and the 86ers did plenty of that; that powerhouse team went on to win 4 straight league championships and finished at the top of the league 5 straight years. Their streak of 46 consecutive games without a loss is a North American professional sports record that stands to this day.
But the powerhouse 86ing I’m obviously going to discuss today is the one taking place south of the border. It was supposed to have been simple; eighty-six the Trump presidency by the established process that’s been in place for centuries. Instead, that ceremony was vocally, violently and frighteningly interrupted by a mob of domestic terrorists who overran the Capitol. They took over the floor of the senate where VP Mike Pence, moments earlier, was trying … [Continue Reading]
January 5, 2021
There’s that old saying… “Never ASSUME, because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME”. There’s an assumption I made a while back that’s clearly wrong… and it changes a lot of other assumptions that go along with it.
My assumption was that when a vaccine finally arrived, it’d be welcomed with open arms. You wouldn’t be able to plug it into people fast enough. Sure, there’s the fanatic “Bill Gates/5G/mind control/conspiracy” crowd, but I’d thought it’s a handful of people, similar in numbers to the tiny pockets of anti-vaxxers who cause measles outbreaks from time to time. But this was a very bad assumption, because it’s coming to light that a lot of people, for reasons that don’t make sense to me (but that’s not the issue), are choosing to not get vaccinated. These aren’t crazy people screaming and banging pots and pans in the streets. These are, for example, well-trained medical professionals. In California, something like, 20-40% of frontline workers in L.A. county have turned down the vaccine. Head inland a bit to Riverside County, and the number goes up to 50%. This is causing head-scratching confusion in what had been assumed to be a pretty straightforward process.
In some of those hospitals, those refusals were popping up so unexpectedly that the vaccines risked being wasted. Once thawed, there’s only so much time before it’s useless. Accordingly, some nurses were calling up spouses and other family members… come quick, there’s a jab here for you if you want it. This is a violation of federal guidelines, of course… but I’m all for it. That’s far better than chucking them in the garbage. And apparently, there are some so anti-vaxx, that they’ll purposefully destroy the vaccine, given the opportunity… like that hospital employee in Wisconsin who threw 57 vials of Moderna into the garbage.
The unfortunate nature of the feedback loop/echo chamber of social media is that if you were at some point questioning the new vaccine (not from a conspiracy theory point of view, but a legitimate concern… you just wanted to know more about it), after clicking a few things and then perhaps clicking on a few more questionable ones, you suddenly plunged yourself into the “question everything” camp. Accordingly, all you get now is story after … [Continue Reading]
January 4, 2021
Imagine a parallel universe… there’s an earth there too, and everything is pretty similar. They’re going through a C19 pandemic as well, but it’s a little different. On that parallel earth, the virus behaves quite differently. There, it’s very, very contagious. So contagious, in fact, that by the time people realized it even existed, everyone already had it. The good news is that as contagious as it was, it seemed relatively harmless. No big deal.
Except, as time went on, it was realized that the longer it lingered in your body, the worse it got. It’d mutate inside of you and, over time, make you sicker and sicker. The fact it mutated so easily made it difficult to formulate a vaccine… but, great news, there was a simple way to purge this thing; the more you associated with other people, the better the outcomes. It seemed that people breathing all over each other and sharing their exhaust would provide others with the anti-virus tools their bodies needed to heal… and, the more variety you got, the better.
The provincial health orders went out; nobody go to work; instead, congregate with as many people as you can. Big, thick crowds, ideally strangers. Pack the gyms, sweat… and breathe all over each other. Tight spaces with little ventilation are ideal. Spread the goodness around. Party on. Spend as much time with as many different people as you can. It’s for the greater good.
The government begins offering people 2 grand a month to not work, but instead… just socialize. Wealthy people rent out entire venues… clubs downtown, Rogers Arena… even BC Place. Come one, come all – free food and drinks (within reason) as long as you promise to stay at least 3 hours and mingle with as many strangers as you can. Tens of thousands of people show up every night; needless to say, this is embraced by a tremendous amount of people. This year becomes the best and most memorable time of their lives.
For others, though… it becomes a nightmare. For the introverts of the world, being forced to party and mingle – with strangers, no less – is as far out of their comfort zone as it gets. Once in a while… maybe. But every single night?
So… these people start looking for … [Continue Reading]
January 3, 2021
No new B.C. data since last year… and it seems the Alberta data is just some guy guessing over the last few days. Those perfectly round numbers for new cases are, as my teenage children’s parlance would suggest, “pretty sus”. So, we will leave all that till tomorrow when hopefully everything gets updated. Some numbers (vaccination counts in the eastern provinces) actually went down. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.
Tomorrow will bring forth a lot more than numbers, though… south of the border, the currently-sitting president is running out of time and out of options. When it comes to “fight or flight”, Donald Trump is very much a “fight” sort of guy, and the dirtiest sorts of fighters are the ones that are against the ropes with nothing to lose. That’s where the low blows and ear bitings come in.
On Saturday, the president committed an act called “sedition”, defined as “conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.”
Sedition, treason, attempted coup – call it what you like. I guess it started earlier in the week with Republican senator Josh Hawley, the guy who’s leading the charge in trying to get congress to not certify the electoral college vote. This is quite simply an authoritarian hoping to overthrow the results of an election because it didn’t go his way. He will fail, of course, but he should actually face an ethics charge and expulsion; he’s clearly violating his oath of office… you know, the one that talks about supporting and defending democracy. And now a number of GOP members are hopping onto that bandwagon, for a showdown on January 6th.
GOP stands for “Grand Old Party”, but it’s certainly not that anymore… perhaps “Formerly-grand Old Party” is more appropriate. FOP. For what it’s worth, the word “fop” has been around since the middle ages. Its original meaning was, quite simply, a fool of any sort. How appropriate.
On Saturday, Trump… the leader of the FOP… called up Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and spent an hour on the phone with him. Like any exemplary narcissist, Trump tried every angle of persuasion… nice guy, bad guy, compliments, threats.
Raffensperger is a Republican and Trump supporter, so this clearly put him in a weird situation. Some clips of … [Continue Reading]