August 26, 2020
As a kid, I rode my bike all over the place… and when I was riding around the streets of Kerrisdale, I’d usually go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken on West Blvd. near 45th. I wouldn’t go in… I’d just coast by slowly and inhale the heavenly fumes emanating from within. Rumour has it that they used to (still do?) pipe out the smells to attract people. Whether it was on purpose or not, who knows… either way, it works very well.
The history of that entire chain is interesting. Everyone knows it was Colonel Harland Sanders who created the whole thing, but what most people don’t realize is that The Colonel was 62 years old when he launched that first franchise. He died at age 90, so that last 28 years of his life was quite the wild ride. Not that it wasn’t before that; on top of the usual assortment of early-century jobs (farmhand, dishwasher, painter, blacksmith-assistant, many trainyard jobs), Sanders became a lawyer… and the future of fried chicken as we know it might have been quite different, had his legal career not come to a crashing halt… and that’s a good way to put it. Sanders got into a serious disagreement with his own client… in a courtroom… which led to an actual courtroom brawl. That destroyed Sanders’ reputation, and he ended up moving back home with his mother. Back to work… labourer, life-insurance salesman, ferry-boat operator, lamp manufacturer, tire salesman, service-station manager, hotel operator.
It was in that hotel that he perfected his secret recipe, and from there, as they say, the rest is history.
Managing the entire massive enterprise was too much for Sanders, so he sold the whole thing a few years later, but held on to the Ambassador role we all know so well. He also hung on to all of the Canadian rights, moved to Mississauga, and collected franchise, royalty and appearance fees for the rest of his life.
In the early 90s, Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC. If was of course known as that colloquially, long before that. But they made it official. And the reason they really did that was to remove the word “Fried” from the prominence in the name. That was when “Fried” went from being yummy… to being unhealthy. Nothing else changed; same chicken, same cole slaw, same biscuits and gravy… but hey, we won’t remind you that it’s fried, nor will we remind you that it’s perhaps not as healthy as you may have hoped.
In the last couple of days, KFC has dropped the “finger-lickin' good” slogan. Again, not because the food has changed. It is, still, undoubtedly, finger-lickin' good… but in these days of C19, they’ve decided that’s a poor message to promote. I’m not sure most people need to be told not to lick their fingers, but ok… I can see someone suing KFC for $50 million, claiming they contracted C19 because, you know, they said I could lick my fingers… or something like that.
Maybe they’ll never bring the slogan back. Maybe they’ll never put the word “Fried” back in the name. Sign of the times; but it doesn’t change anything. It’s still Fried and it’s still Finger Lickin' Good… just like it was before C19, and just like it’ll be after.
Optics – which applies to so much these days. The underlying issue hasn’t changed; just the messaging. Don’t fix things that aren’t broken… just fix things that might make it look like they are.
Is this a good time to talk about the messaging behind masks and social-distancing? Probably not. The people who’d tell you masks don’t work and social-distancing is nonsense and it’s all a hoax… well, I suppose they’re the ones who’ll continue to lick their fingers in defiance.
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August 25, 2020
We’ve all heard the joke about the guy who calls in a computer expert to fix some problem. The expert comes in, hits a few keys, problem solved. He then hands the guy a bill for $1,000.
“Outrageous!!”, screams the guy, “How do you justify that?!”
“$1 to hit the keys, $999 to know which keys to hit.”
I was reminded of this joke, dealing with some emails today.
Actually, a somewhat-related story from ages ago… a prof telling me about how when he used to work for some big company back in the 1960s, and they had some fancy, big, expensive IBM adding machines… which were available in three different models… and to simplify things, it was something like the basic model cost $1,000 and ran 1,000 calculations per second. The next model up cost $2,000 and ran 2,000 c/s… and the fanciest model cost $3,000 and ran 3,000 c/s.
Those numbers are off, but you get the idea. And, IBM offered upgrades… if you wanted to go from 1k to 3k, no problem… just pay the difference.
These days, where everything is digital, this is easy to do. Most software can be upgraded online.
But how did that work in the real world? As he told me, when they upgraded from 1k to 3k, an IBM mechanic showed up, broke the official IBM seal, used an IBM-specific tool to open the machine… and then moved a belt… from one small pulley to a bigger pulley. It took two minutes.
Exact same machine… like, identical. Just running faster. Functional pricing at its finest.
If you watched that happened and didn’t quite understand the engineering and backstory, you might feel like it’s a complete rip-off… but the truth is the exact opposite. The guys paying the bills just want a faster machine, and they got it (instantly). How it got there doesn’t matter.
The expert that came in and restored that one corrupted operating system file… that suddenly fixed everything… how much was that guy worth?
Real expertise has a cost, whether mechanical or digital. Lifetime accumulation of knowledge and experience is worth what the guy (or company) providing it thinks… not what you think, just because it looks easy. When it comes to real expertise, typically… the easier it looks, the harder it actually is.
Yadda yadda… it often makes sense to listen to experts; it's often more than just a fancy opinion.
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Kemeny Korner – August 24, 2020
Did you know I have an intersection named after me? Don’t look for any official signage… it’s all very informal, but legendary in the history of my school to the extent that it still gets brought up… from an event that was decades ago.
The school, being right next to the UBC Endowment Lands, uses those trails in the forest extensively. Wander or bike those trails during school hours, and you will often run into a group of depressed Saints boys slogging through the muck. They’re beautiful trails, those that make up Pacific Spirit Park… but not when you’re forced to run them in freezing December rain.
On this particular day, in the Spring of 1983, there was some sort of cross-country race for the whole grade. Somehow, I’d managed to get out of running; in hindsight, as miserable as that might’ve been, it would’ve been preferable to what happened…
I was assigned the corner of 29th & Imperial as a spotter, to make sure cars were aware there was a race running by, and to be careful. So I made my way out there before the race, and just walked around, sat around, wasted some time.
If you’re not familiar with that particular intersection, it’s a hairpin turn… at the end of the straightaway of 29th Ave, as it turns into a beautiful short cut through the forest of Imperial Ave, all the way to 16th. If you’re approaching it from the east, it basically looks like you’re approaching a dead-end, but then there’s a sudden sharp turn to the right. If you’re approaching from Imperial, and you’re not expecting it… it goes from an uninterrupted, undivided forest road… to a sharp left turn, back to reality. The signage from both sides is supposed to slow you down to 20km/h. It’s that sharp.
On this particular day, Chevrolet was on campus at UBC, allowing students to take cars out for a test spin. This was long before L and N and whatever restrictions… got a license? Great, good to go.
Some guy at UBC packed his three closest friends into the little Chevy, flew down 16th, turned right on Imperial and kept the speed up… right up to that intersection. Police reports and skids marks and all that imply he hit the hairpin at 80km/h. He tried to make the left turn, but there was no way. He hit the concrete curb thing, flew over it – fully airborne briefly – before slamming head-on into a tree. What’s left of that tree, the dead stump, is still there.
Unfortunately for me, I happened to be sitting on that concrete curb thing… and looked up just in time to save my life, but not in time enough to avoid getting hit. I sprung up and dove to the right, but the car clipped me and sent me flying about 20 feet. I landed with a thud in the forest, and avoided going head-first into a huge boulder by less than a foot.
I wound up with two broken vertebrae and plenty of bruises and cuts… and, as it turns out, two broken back bones is better than just one, because it dissipated the force of me slamming into the ground. It otherwise might have been a broken spinal cord, and a whole different story. Or worse.
This all happened before the race. By the time the guys went running by, it was a full-on accident scene… cops, paramedics, a couple of ambulances. Nobody was hurt as badly as I was… still lying on the ground being tended to when all of grade 10 went running by… many of them looking curiously at the car embedded into the tree… and stopping abruptly when they saw me. I may have set the record for hearing the most “Hey, are you ok?” over the shortest period of time.
Anyway… yes, thanks… I’m ok. After several months of rehab and all that. Painful as hell at the time, but like the pain we’re all going through right now (see, there’s always a way to make it about the pandemic!), I made it through all of that ok…. as hopefully everyone reading this will as well… eventually.
And be sure to visit Kemeny Korner™ next time you’re in the area!
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August 23, 2020
On one hand, I’d like it if B.C. and Alberta, like they used to, reported numbers over the weekend… it’d help keep things up to date… and I like accuracy. On the other hand, if one or both resorted to that, it’d imply things are getting out of hand enough that it’s important to do so… which means, for now, I guess we’re happy to have to wait for Monday. Even today’s U.S. numbers look suspicious (I’ll correct everything later, or tomorrow).
Even so, unraveling the weekend data into component bits isn’t always easy when, sometimes, single clumped numbers are reported on Mondays. “356 new cases and 5 deaths since Friday.” Great… Where? Who? When? This is like the mechanic saying, “Yeah, we fixed everything… that’ll be $4,500” and you asking “What and why!? What did you do? Where’s the breakdown of the parts and labour??” and they say, “Yeah… well, don’t worry about it… it’s kind of technical and very complicated.”
I do worry about it; even if I don’t understand what they’re talking about… even if it’s complete B.S…. “Yeah, see… the muffler bearing was rubbing up against the flywheel bracket… and your car… it’s a model without an exhaust impeller, so we had to machine not only the suspension elbow and rotary pistons, but also replace the fuel pump linkage.” I’d prefer that nonsense to just a single final obscure total.
Speaking of cars… here’s the story of my first car…
I bought it in 1986. I’d been saving up money over the years, and was actually still a couple of thousand short for what I wanted… when, that Summer — and all the racetrack people here will appreciate this – I hit the Sweep Six. This is the wager at the track where you try to pick the winning horse in six consecutive races. It’s obviously hard to do, and very lucrative when you manage it. The few thousand dollars I picked up for that put me over the top.
I paid cash, exactly $9,200 for that new red Ford Mustang LX, and over the next 12 years, put over 280,000km on it. I could write a book on all the memories that car provided me.
By 1998, it was time for a new car… and I’d been so happy with this one, the next one was also a Mustang… a blue 1998 GT.
The old one sat in my parents’ driveway for a while… my intention was to sell it privately, thinking I could get a lot more for it than the trade-in value that I’d been offered. It sat there for weeks… months… my parents over time wondering when I’d remove it, gently asking when I’d sell it, implying in stronger language that it’s time to get rid of it, and finally telling me to get it the hell out of there already.
One summer morning in 1998, I decided it was a good day to do this: I would drive up Kingsway, which is littered with used-car lots, and simply sell it to the first place that would offer me what I was after. I wanted $2,000 for it (yeah, I know, ha ha).
The first place offered me $500 cash. I was offended and laughed at that. The guy laughed back.
The next place didn’t want it. Nor did the place after that. And after that… place after place, not interested, or ridiculous low-ball offers like $100 or $200.
By then, I’d reached the intersection of Kingsway and Victoria. That’s the intersection where the McDonalds is, but kitty-corner to that, there used to be the best Indian food in town, a restaurant called Rubina Tandoori. I had a sudden idea… for sure I was going to spend a bunch of money there in the future; why not trade the car for some Rubina credit?
So I wandered in there and spoke to guy who greeted me, and explained my offer… $1,000 of Indian food credit for the car. He didn’t know what to think, but he went and got his father, the owner of the place.
Then the three of us went outside, where the two hummed and hawed and inspected the car… they popped the hood, literally kicked the tires, scratched their chins, hummed and hawed some more, but ultimately… decided they didn’t want it. I dropped my offer down to $500 worth of credit but they still didn’t want it. And that was that.
I did U-turn, went back to the first place, and told the guy I’d take $500. Nah, he said… I changed my mind. I don’t want it.
So back on the road I went, past Rubina, heading towards Burnaby and New West, and zero luck. I got all the way to the end, and to say I was upset about how this day had turned out… would be an understatement.
Give up or continue? It was now late afternoon… I decided to give it one more shot, and crossed the bridge into Surrey. I stopped at the first lot I found, and while waiting for someone to attend to me, an older lady who was there looking for a car approached me. She offered me $400 for the car. I’ll take it, I said.
“Well, I only have $200 cash with me, but I can give you some post-dated cheques.”
“Sure”, I said… “No problem.” Ha ha.
Conveniently, she had all the necessary papers to sign over the car… so we filled it all out, right there on the hood of the car, signed everything… and that was that. I sold my car for $200 in cash, $200 in cheques, and a ride to the SkyTrain.
But the story doesn’t quite end there.
First of all, the cheques all bounced, and I was unsuccessful in tracking her down… so I guess I actually sold the car for $200. But that’s not all.
About a year later, I got a frantic call from an insurance agent in Surrey. Apparently, this woman was trying to renew the insurance on the car… but couldn’t, because the car was still in my name. Whatever paperwork we’d done didn’t properly transfer the car to her, and she’d somehow been driving my car, with NO insurance, for a year. I hightailed it over there and signed what was needed.
Many great memories with that car… and I still have the license plates, hanging on the wall in my garage: SWEPT 6
Look, I managed to write a whole update without mentioning Trump… and barely mentioning the pandemic. Sometimes, it’s nice to set aside the present day and dig up some good old memories. There are plenty to choose from. And there are also plenty of new ones, waiting to be made.
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August 22, 2020
No BC numbers, no AB numbers… no rain, no worries. No update… and no real time to write one anyway, because here’s where I am right now. ????????????????????
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August 21, 2020
It would make sense, once in a while, to update what’s going on in the rest of the country… not just the “Big 4”.
BC, AB, ON and QC collectively make up 97% of the known C19 cases in Canada… and 99% of the deaths (yes, surprising)… but there are another 6 provinces and 3 territories to account for, so let’s see what’s been going on…
Saskatchewan has had around 1,600 cases and 22 deaths. They were holding things pretty flat, but things have taken a bit of a sharper turn upwards since mid-July. Their recent new-cases-per-day number is in the low teens.
Manitoba has had a total of 830 cases and 12 deaths. After an initial spike in April which was effectively squashed, things were quiet until recently, where the daily new-case counts have suddenly gone from zeroes and single digits to 30+.
Newfoundland had their big spike in April as well, but have squashed it into oblivion. They’ve recorded only 3 deaths, and have seen a total of less than 10 new cases since July, all of which are resolved. Two cases in August and zero presently active.
Turning to the Maritimes, Nova Scotia’s big April spike tailed off in May and it’s been quiet ever since. Very few new cases… less than 10 in August, and only 5 active. They’ve recorded 64 deaths in total.
New Brunswick has had 188 cases, most of them in April. They’ve recorded 2 deaths, and presently have 8 active cases… from around 20 positive tests in August.
PEI has seen very few cases (44) overall… and zero deaths. Although having seen no new cases since early July, they managed to find 8 in August, 4 of which are still active.
The Yukon is looking very good, especially given the flow of Americans to/from Alaska. They’ve only had 15 cases since day one, all of them recovered, and zero deaths. From May to today, less than 5 positive tests, zero active cases.
The Northwest Territories has seen 5 cases… all from back in March and April. No deaths, and zeros across the board since then.
And finally… the appropriately named Nunavut… because as far as C19 is concerned, they’ve had… none of it. Not single case, ever. And by the way, not because they’re not checking… they’ve administered over 2,000 tests… which may not sound like a lot, until you remember that their population is only 40,000.
And if that’s not enough Canadian content for you… the Whitecaps are playing Toronto F.C. at 5pm and the Canucks are playing The Blues at 6:45pm. And, of course, the weather… cloudy, sunny periods, chance of rain… ahh, just like the old days. Beauty, eh.
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August 20, 2020
Kind of a blah day with the weather, and also a blah day with the numbers. Nothing too encouraging… and nothing too different than what we’ve seen recently.
For what it’s worth, sometimes “Blah” is ok. Blah weather in this case means some much-needed rain. Blah numbers mean at least things aren’t spiraling out of control.
And for me, just a day of long meetings and phone calls… which I can summarize lucidly and succinctly with one word: Blah.
Maybe tomorrow’s weather will be better. Maybe tomorrow’s numbers will be more encouraging. And almost certainly, tomorrow’s post will be a little less…. Blah.
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August 19, 2020
When I was a little kid, we took a family trip to Britannia Beach and did the tour of the mine… which I highly recommend. Every aspect of that Britannia Mine is impressive. These days the museum has been re-done (they did extensive upgrades just before the 2010 Olympics)… and there is plenty to see and do.
One thing you could do back then (and still can today) is pan for gold.
They had a little fake river set up, and you’d take your pan and sift through the sand, and maybe find something. Indeed, you’d always find something because it was a tourist trap and they wanted you to leave happy… so for $5, you’d probably walk away with 50 cents worth of gold flakes that they’d salted the sand with.
For what it’s worth, panning for gold is a very Zen thing to do. Whenever I find myself on the banks of a river, I wish I had a pan with me. I really should throw one in the car, just in case. I’m unlikely to ever actually find anything, but… you know, it’s the journey, not the destination.
So… those many years ago, once I’d finished panning, the guy in charge fished out the few specks of gold I’d found and put them in a little clear plastic vial… full of water, and my little gold.
My father – the mining engineer – always had with him a couple of little gold nuggets that he had taped inside his wallet. Just something cool to carry around. One of them was perhaps half the size of a penny, and he took it out and put it in the vial. “There, that looks better”, he said.
The guy running the panning station was pretty amused, and they had a good laugh and talked gold for a bit… and, as they were talking, a busload of Japanese tourists showed up. They began looking around, and one came over to see what we were up to. The guy explained the whole panning-for-gold thing… and then my dad showed him the vial.
This tourist looked at the vial with great astonishment, and yelled out something in Japanese… which brought over more people, all of them looking at the vial with excitement. And then… they all wanted to pan for gold. There was only space (and pans) for maybe 10 people, but now there was a whole line up. My dad (and, for sure, the guy running it) were greatly amused.
So many metaphors and sayings you could attach to this little story. Certainly, the first one that comes to mind is… not everything that glitters is gold. The irony, of course, is that in this case, it literally was gold… but still, not the gold you’d expect. Pay attention to where the gold comes from. Pay attention to what you’re being shown. Be careful what you believe. I’m pretty sure none of those Japanese tourists walked away with anything close to what I had in my little vial. I wonder how many of them felt hoodwinked.
Yes, it’s election season down south, and there will be a lot of glittery golden messages being thrown around. They’ll look and sound so big and shiny and impressive. My American friends… and I realize the vast majority of people reading this are actually Canadian, but to those it reaches… like those Japanese tourists who probably didn’t go back to try a second time…don’t get hoodwinked. Once was enough.
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January 2, 2021
Somewhere downstairs in the storage room, there’s a box with a lot of old papers. Among them, a few select school papers I chose to keep, for one reason or another. Among the surprisingly good ones (8 or 9 out of 10), there is one with nothing on it but a big, fat, red zero.
I wrote that paper in grade 9, for Social Studies. I’d been sick for a few days, and a friend had called me up to let me know what I’d missed. A paper had been assigned, due Monday… with a weird topic, but ok… I’d missed several classes and didn’t really know what was going on. The topic was something like “Discuss the potential implications of youth in Asia in Canada.”
Odd… but, I’d recently done a big project on Japan, and knew all about Japanese schoolgirls and their influence on the world, how marketing companies in Japan were catering to their wishes and how the world was watching that, etc. This was the early 80s, and “Made in Japan” was a lot more common than “Made in China”. I had plenty of material, and I wrote what I thought was an excellent paper.
The teacher was a super-cool guy, Mr. Turner… who years later went off and founded a very successful outdoor school. On this day, he handed back all of the papers except mine. “See me after class” was all I heard.
So, I stuck around after… and he was usually very chill, but for once he was actually mad. “What the hell is this?”, he asked, as he threw the paper in my direction. He thought I was making a stupid joke, but the truth is, up to that point, I’d never heard the word “euthanasia”.
There was a moment of great confusion… then laughter… and he let me go home and re-write it… but the jokes kept coming… for years. He also taught grade 12 Geology… so three years later, on a test where I wrote an answer to a question about plate tectonics, he commented something like “the magma gets it moving but the youth in Japan keep it going!” Yeah, LOL. Cheers, Tim… wherever you are.
All that being said, there’s plenty to learn from Japan. Their handling of this pandemic has been exemplary, … [Continue Reading]
January 1, 2021
The usual New Year’s Eve tradition is to ski all day and, near the end, head to the top of Blackcomb, have a few drinks, and hang out with a bunch of friends at the Crystal Hut. We stay up there as long as they’ll let us. Eventually, they nicely kick us out.
It’s often a pretty big group… anywhere from 8 to 20 people, depending who shows up… and we make our way down the mountain relatively slowly, certainly if there are little kids in the group. If the weather gets bad and people just want to get the hell out of there, the group splits up. Otherwise, everyone gets to the bottom at roughly the same time… all of us among the very last off the mountain for the year. It’s a cool tradition… one I certainly hope to be part of again next year, because it certainly didn’t happen this time. No Blackcomb, no Whistler. No après-ski BBQ with friends and family. Next year.
Instead, it was a quiet and very pleasant evening at home…. where we Zoomed with friends and family from around the world, had a great dinner and watched a movie. The “What should we watch?” discussion was very brief… one of the kids said, “Hey, there’s this movie… it was made by the “Black Mirror” people and Samuel L. Jackson is in it and…” – say no more. We’re watching it.
The movie is called “Death to 2020” and I suggest you watch it without reading too much about it. It’s a movie, and there are actors in it – not just SLJ, but also Hugh Grant, Lisa Kudrow, and many other familiar faces – and all of the above do a magnificent job bridging the gap between fact and fiction. It was that sort of year; sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference.
Indeed, who better than the Black Mirror people to put together something to explain 2020… in the form of a comedy, no less.
“President Donald Trump did not attend his $1,000-a-ticket New Year’s Party at Mar-a-Lago, choosing to leave Florida early and head back to Washington to strategize his efforts to flip the election results – an election which he lost by more than 7,000,000 popular votes and in which there was no … [Continue Reading]
December 31, 2020
We’re all pretty-much done with 2020, in every sense… and if you go by the multitude of emails I’ve gotten in the last 24 hours, “Time is running out!”… so, now what.
Next year offers a promise of “back to normal”, and it means very different things to different people. I’m not sure there’s a familiar “normal” to go back to, because so much has changed.
Even without the pandemic, there’s all the healing that’ll be necessary after the Trump presidency… but that’s a whole other discussion. On paper, that presidency ends January 20th, but the unfortunate truth is that its effects will carry on for decades.
Conversely, the pandemic will have no fixed date of “It’s over!!” but by this time next year, it largely will be, at least around here.
Restaurants, travel, getting together with friends… all of that… it’s coming back. Briefly, it’ll come back with a vengeance… a miniature roaring-20s. Then, that’ll get old (and expensive), and things will drift back to yesteryear.
But those aren’t the things that’ll really signify normalcy. For me, it’ll be the moment I realize I need a specific part from my favourite electronics shop… and I go over there, walk in, get what I need, drive home… and not give a moment’s thought to hand sanitizer, a mask or whether I’m wearing the right clothes to be waiting outside for 30 minutes, peering through the windows while people nonchalantly browse the aisles, clueless or not caring about the fact that the shop has a three-person limit. One day, it’ll be like the good old days, and when I don’t even realize it – that’s when it’s really over.
Yeah, all things considered, I’d actually rather go over there and get it myself… as opposed to click-click-click on Amazon, wait at least a day, and then see the colossal waste of plastic and cardboard and whatever other resources were needed to get this little part to me. Call it old-school… but I think we’re all pining for a little old-school. It’s what’ll be on our minds as we celebrate tonight – “Remember last year?” – yes, I certainly do. And look forward to exactly that exactly a year from now, and every year thereafter.
So, for 2020, that’s a wrap. This hackneyed phrase we throw around every year … [Continue Reading]
December 30, 2020
Completely unrelated to everything… just a random thought.
While stereotypes often exist for a reason – there’s usually some fundamental tiny grain of truth to them and/or some origin that can be pointed to – I don’t really understand this “Karen” meme.
The name Karen has now come to imply the proto-typical entitled white woman with an attitude… the “I’d like to speak to the manager” Karen or the call-the-cops-on-someone-Black-for-no-reason Karen or, more recently, Coronavirus Karen who proudly won’t wear a mask in public, is anti-vaxx, and might even cough on you if you get too close.
With respect to the Karens (and Karins) I’ve known throughout my life (I counted 9), all of them have been (and continue to be) kind, caring, empathic and thoughtful people. Like, exceptionally so. Statistically, at least one of those nine should be this stereotypical “Karen”… but no, not in my case. On the flip side, I know exactly 4 people with a different same name who are all, coincidentally, awful people – for their own, individual reasons. That’s also statistically off the charts.
This got me thinking, and I went off hunting for the origins of this whole Karen thing… but there’s no real answer; only speculation. It might be from a bit comedian Dane Cook did in 2005. It might be from a scene in “Mean Girls”. It might be from some Reddit thread where a guy continually complained about his ex-wife Karen, to the extent entire new SubReddits were created for the specific content.
Just like attaching “-gate” to something implies scandal… locally, we’ve had Bingogate, Ferrygate, Robogate, Tunagate… Chrétien had his Shawinigate… the world has created hundreds of -gates over the years… all spawned after Nixon’s Watergate scandal… now we have lots of different Karens.
There was an actual hurricane named Karen in 2019. There was an actual woman in Australia named Karen recorded trying to tear down her neighbour’s Aboriginal Flag. Other than that, it’s just a label:
Permit Karen who called police on her Black neighbours installing a patio.
Whitefish Karen, arrested after intentionally coughing on people after being told to wear a mask.
Kroger Karen, who stood in front of a Black woman’s car to block her from leaving a Detroit grocery store parking lot while … [Continue Reading]
December 29, 2020
It was nice to finally get some numbers to back-fill all the missing data; it’s been a while since it’s all looked complete, especially B.C. The last update we had around here before today’s was Dec 24th. The B.C. numbers look good, dropping down like that; it looks good on paper… but it likely implies less testing these days. If you’re planning to break the rules and get together with family, it’s probably better to stick your head in the sand. That’s better than going and getting a positive test and then knowingly violating the mandatory 14-day quarantine. It’s simply better to take the risk and hope for the best… and it’s that agnorant askholish behaviour that will unfortunately turn these numbers around in the coming days.
In the meantime, I’ve taken the opportunity to clean things up a bit, and add a very important row of data. You’ll notice the gray-shaded area up top… it’s now a bit clearer to read… a summary of totals for each region, with columns for: per million, percentage and delta (change since yesterday)… for cases, deaths, and… now, also… vaccinations.
That’ll be an interesting row of data to follow, especially the “% pop” number. In fact, it’s such an important number, I’ve highlighted it. Depending who you ask, you’ll get a different answer with respect to what’s needed for herd immunity. 50%? 70%? 90%? At what point are enough people vaccinated that we can stop worrying about it?
We have lots of time to discuss it, because we’re still far away. The U.S. has vaccinated 0.64% of its population; Canada is only at 0.19%. Broken down a bit more, B.C. itself is at 0.23% for our 5 million people. For comparison, Quebec leads the nation at 0.26% while Ontario has managed only 0.12%.
The one thing all of Canada has in common is that all of those numbers round to zero; it’s still very early, obviously… but whereas in the past we’ve all been rooting for numbers to go down (we still are, for all those numbers below the gray area…), at least now we can cheer for a number to go up… hopefully exponentially. Unfortunately, the only numbers likely to grow quickly in the next two weeks are those bad ones below… but that’s short-term. … [Continue Reading]