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August 6, 2020
I’m back in Vancouver for a bit… just in time for some Vancouver weather, it seems. As accurate as weather reporting has gotten over the last several years, if all else fails… here’s your local weather forecast: Cloudy, sunny periods, chance of rain. You can’t go too wrong with that.
Where you *can* go wrong is a different sort of forecast: Pandemic, irresponsible gatherings, chance of spreading. We presently have over 400 people in quarantine and a significant number of new cases, all due to one party… and it’s quite possible that at that party, it was just one person who had it. I know it’s impossible, but if every single person isolated properly and responsibly for two weeks, this virus would be wiped out, locally at least. Of course, that’d require properly sealed borders, not leaking Americans traveling to and from Alaska (wink wink) and all of the flights arriving from all over the place with people who refuse to properly isolate.
Summary – it’s still up to us to keep doing what we’ve been doing so successfully up to now, because if we don’t… well, maybe it’s time for Dr. Henry to get a little more harsh. Heading into September on an upswing of cases is bad, for numerous reasons. If one person can infect 40 and affect 400, consider the implications when the weather turns bad and we’re all forced inside. As per yesterday, no Deus ex Machina is going to resolve this. We’re on our own.
Word of the day…
Rückkehrunruhe (noun): The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
Indeed, being immersed in the present-day of city life and Vancouver weather will do that to you. It’s still summer, right?
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August 5, 2020
The plot device known as “deus ex machina” was invented by the Greeks, ages ago. It literally translates to “god from the machine”, where back in ancient Greek theatre, the actors playing the role would be hanging from ropes, or some sort of machine, sweeping in to save the day, in whatever context was needed.
From a literary/artistic point of view, this has its detractors… for obvious reasons. It has the potential to wreck an otherwise excellent story with a convenient miracle to undo the entire struggle that led to that point. William Golding was criticized for this in “Lord of the Flies”… after building up an incredible narrative with intriguing and insightful and though-provoking ideas… suddenly, in a just a few pages, a ship arrives, rescues the boys, The End.
It’s not always that blunt, but you get the idea… and it fit well with the narratives of Greek Tragedies (and comedies)… and since then, it’s appeared all over the place. H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds”… big, powerful aliens have the technology to travel across the universe with a battle fleet ready to destroy earth… until they themselves are destroyed by bacteria. Actually, almost identically, Will Smith’s aliens in “Independence Day” – and a computer virus.
You get the idea; it’s when something appears out of nowhere, just in the nick of time… to save the day, like divine intervention.
There are a few versions of this these days to consider. One, of course, is Donald Trump’s hope that this is what will resolve the giant mess his country finds itself in, much of which is his responsibility. Numerous times, he’s stated how it’ll just go away, like a miracle, burn itself out, vanish overnight, whatever. Unfortunately for him, the real world doesn’t operate that way; even the ancient Greeks knew that.
More recently, Trump did an interview with Jonathan Swan on HBO, and the entire thing is now available on YouTube. It is an astonishing 40 minutes of incoherent, delusional nonsense. And great kudos to Mr. Swan who, unlike pretty-much every other reporter, didn’t acquiesce to Donald Trump’s bullshit. He called him on it, repeatedly… though, as expected, when DT has no answer, he deflects away, onto the next incoherent, irrelevant point. The end result of it was asking yourself… what … [Continue Reading]
August 4, 2020
Little update… but, unfortunately, big numbers. The cliff-hanger episode didn’t resolve too well… and although the increases were somewhat expected, it doesn’t bode well for the near future… since today’s numbers are a trailing 2-week-or-so indicator of what’s been going on. And it’s not like behavior has improved in the last two weeks, so it wouldn’t be realistic to expect things to improve magically.
“Play safe to stay safe”, says Dr. Henry… yet it’s those private parties and get-togethers that seem to be the places where things spread quickly.
Let’s try to remember what got us to this good place, before we all slide backwards… back to square one. That would really suck.
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August 3, 2020
The season-ending cliff-hanger was started by the show Dallas, with their famous “Who shot J.R.?” thing that had everyone talking in the summer of 1980. No TV series had ever done that, but it’s now become the norm… because when they resolved the mystery the following season, more than 350 million people tuned in, from, all around the world. It was the highest-rated television episode in U.S. history. The Turkish parliament suspended a session so the legislators could run home in time to watch. Bookies were publishing odds as to who did it… and it was a long list, headed by some likely suspects, but rounded out by a lot of other irrelevant and/or impossible people. Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was on the list at 10,000-1, even though he had nothing to do with the show. Ultimately, J.R.’s sister-in-law/mistress Kristin (4-1) was the guilty one, a fact finally revealed on the fourth episode of the subsequent season. Those producers knew what they were doing.
This long-weekend feels like a bit of a cliff-hanger. On our last episode, Friday, 50 new cases in B.C… and heading into a long weekend… and, since then, no updates in B.C and no update today in Ontario… so, this will all remain a cliff-hanger until tomorrow, when all the storylines get resolved. For now, the national number is totally wrong.
It occurs to me… those shows, back then… on network television, complete with commercial breaks… they’d want to keep you tuned in right to the end, so there’d often be a mini-cliffhanger before the last set of commercials. Remember that… where they’d try to sell you some useless thing, but they made it look and sound so good… Call now! Supplies are limited! Operators are Standing By!
For the moment, we’re all Standing By. Just not too close to each other.
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August 2, 2020
Island living… island schedule… the fact that this post is on time is quite an achievement.
Another incredible achievement was today’s return of those two SpaceX astronauts who spent 2 months on the ISS, and who splashed down safely back to earth this morning.
This pandemic sort of has us all on “island time”… certainly, it felt like March had about 79 days in it, and I’m sure that more than once, we all woke up wondering what day it was. Whatever, “island time”.
I wrote about those astronauts (among other things) the day they blasted off, May 30th… I just went back and read what I wrote, and it’s pretty good – if you didn’t read it the first time around, here’s a convenient link:
https://kemeny.ca/2020/05/30/day-75-may-30-2020/
But what’s interesting… as per “island time”… it feels like I wrote that 6 months ago. So much has happened since.
And one of the things that’s happened is the slow and steady increase in daily new cases in B.C… back on May 30th, that whole week was just single-digit increases every day.
We have data up to Friday, and those last three days… the last W T F were… +39, +29, +50. WTF indeed.
Let’s try get back to earth… safely, like those astronauts. As rough as the ride may have been… and from 27,600 km/h on the ISS, down to 26 km/h when they hit the water on splashdown… as bumpy as the ride may have been, they made it.
It takes thousands of hours of training for them, and many others, to achieve that… and a lot of it was listening to instructions and following them.
Here’s 10 seconds of training that’ll help get us all to a safe splashdown; socially distance and wear a mask. It’s not rocket science.
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