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Five years of COVID

Am I sick?

I always mark March 13 as the anniversary of COVID-19 because that date in 2020 was when it started to feel real to me—five years of COVID-19. Of course, the disease started in the fall of 2019, but it seemed remote. Oh, it’s in other countries; it’s in Washington state, on the other side of the country.  

In 2023, I noted its third anniversary at some detail, which included getting the first two vaccines in March 2021, and my family’s bout with the disease in August 2022. But I didn’t mention some of the other issues, such as Real Countries fight COVID.

I’m reminded how every visit outside at the time was a negotiation, often with myself. The Spectrum theater in Albany opened in 2021, though people were distanced and masked. I’m pretty sure I went by myself initially. I decided it was still worth going to the movies because -damn! – I’d seen so many plays and movies and meetings online on little screens in 2020. It was making me terribly melancholy. The small screens made my life feel small.

Booster

I received my most recent COVID and influenza shots in August and September 2024. According to the CDC website, which is being “modified to comply with… Executive Orders,” “Everyone ages 6 months and older should get the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine. This includes people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine, people who have had COVID-19, and people with long COVID.” These are some factors for folks to “more likely to get very sick with COVID-19.”

Additionally, in the Weekly US Influenza Surveillance Report: “Seasonal influenza activity remains elevated and continues to increase across the country.” 

Every time I get a sore throat, I wonder, “Am I sick? Do I have COVID?” I still have enough unexpired tests, especially with the extended expiration dates, to test periodically. 

Am I worried about the CDC, FDA and other medical entities being compromised by… certain parties? Yes, yes, I am.  

NYT: How COVID remade America, starting with it turned us into hyperindividualists.

NYT:  Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear

Gallup: How COVID Changed the Workplace

Truthout: Don’t Forget the History of COVID in Prison—An Interview With Victoria Law. The pandemic exposed the cruelty of prison in new ways. It was a lost opportunity to move away from mass incarceration.

This picture is 75 years old

March 12, 1950

This picture is 75 years old.

I looked through all of the pictures of my parents, Les and Gertrude (Trudy), on their wedding anniversary, March 12th, that I have posted on this blog. Interestingly, from 2005, when I started the blog, to 2011, the year my mom died, I didn’t post any. Since my dad had died in 2000, I didn’t even think to mention their anniversary.

After she died, though, I felt liberated to write whatever about them. And it also recontextualized how I saw them as a couple. My sisters and I often have ZOOM conversations on Sunday afternoons, which started during COVID, and early on, a lot of conversations were about their dynamics individually and as a couple.

Still, I often used a group photo, as I did here on March 12. It’s probably because I think it’s a hoot; it looks like a bunch of wary relatives.

Changing it up

But to my knowledge, I’ve never used this photo. My sister Marcia, the keeper of the pictures, posted it on Facebook eight years ago, and then sister Leslie reposted it recently. I have no idea who took it. If I were a betting man, it would probably be one of my maternal grandmother Williams’ brothers, Ed or Ernie Yates.

This picture is in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, near 13 Maple Street, on March 12, 1950. I was always grateful that they decided to get married in a year ending with a zero; it made the math much more straightforward. So I can remember the family drama on March 12, 1995, for instance, a story for another time.

My father looks happy in this photo. But my mother is more contemplative, wondering what she’s gotten herself into, which is a reasonable concern. Or maybe she’s just looking at someone, maybe a younger cousin. I use the terms “mother” and “father” loosely because I wasn’t born until five days shy of three years later.

My parents were married 50 years and two days shy of five months.

Movie review: The Brutalist

Adrien Brody

The Brutalist was the last of the Best Picture films still playing at the Spectrum Theatre that I had not seen. So, I attended the 12:15 matinee with eight others during the week before the Oscars. (There was no way I would see a three-and-a-half-hour movie at 6:50 p.m.) 

I really liked the opening and closing credits, which had the stationary text with the camera’s focus moving.

The first part was “The Enigma of Arrival,” a fictional account of a Hungarian immigrant named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who comes to the United States.  He stays with a cousin from back home (Alessandro Nivola) who has Americanized himself. That works for a while until a seeming debacle.

Ultimately, though, he gets a commission from American tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers Tóth’s genius. His beloved wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) finally joins him, unlike when he last saw her. 

I appreciated the intense portrayal of the immigrant experience, including their credentials from their previous country that were not applicable in the US. The movie showed how people can be marginalized and fall into traps of drugs and other problems because of their difficult situations.

Let’s take a break

Then there was a 15-minute intermission. I haven’t been to a movie with an intermission since Reds in 1981, and like that film, I thought the first half of the movie was far more substantial than the second. 

Even some critics who liked the film, 93% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, noted that “The Hardcore of Beauty 1953–1960” was a lesser part. “If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II”. Russ Simmons of Kansas City radio station: “The film’s second half meanders and leaves us with dangling plot threads.”

A negative review by Brian Viner (Daily Mail UK): “There are many impressive things about this film, not least the acting, but for me it too often loses its narrative grip in the second act, veering off on tangents that feel unnecessary, distracting and self-indulgent.” Audiences were 80% positive. 

Afterwards, another patron asked me what I thought of the film.  I said I liked it but didn’t love it. He had been in situations where he was an artist with a patron, and he saw first-hand how the patron could try to take over the artist’s whole life, which he related to immensely. I can see that.

There are other days…

A  Stranger In The Room

Some days, you feel assertive and directed. We’re going to fight against the forces of ignorance and evil. The tide will turn if we spend enough time informing people about what’s happening.

There are other days when you feel exhausted. I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a poster, not the one above, but a picture with dialogue from the movie A Face In The Crowd with Andy Griffith. It’s an excellent film, by the way, and you should see it. I didn’t know until I started Googling that there was a 2024 London production story involving Elvis Costello.

“Stop me if you think you have heard this one before: A man gains television fame on the strength of his purported connection to everyday Americans and their resentment of elites, and before long he converts that fame into political influence in a right-wing presidential campaign…”

Of course, we’ve been here before: January 20, 2017, and the months preceding and following. Not incidentally, TCM aired A Face in the Crowd on rump’s first Inauguration Day. In 2015, CNN asked if the film predicted his rise.

Version 2

This time, it’s more complicated because so much stuff is coming. Here’s a list of the Executive Orders. Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness contains a certain amount of gonzo entertainment. Is he going to have a whole bunch of trees chopped down? More or less. 

What’s going on at Social Security? Even career officials are unclear, but expect “‘DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,’ the acting SSA commissioner, Lelan Dudek, told senior staff” and others.

Are the tariffs on or off? It depends on the day of the week. The tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China would cost the typical US household over $1,200 annually. But they become functionally a tax on the poor, with the people with the least income disproportionally harmed, but the top 20% are faring well.

DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings. “Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts. It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.” On this last topic, I’ve read online, “Oh, private forecasters will provide this for us!” And where do you think they are getting the bulk of their data?

Meanwhile, FOTUS and Juvie Vance Pulled an Old Hollywood Trick on Zelensky. “By letting his vice president instigate the Oval Office blowup with the Ukrainian leader, [he] resorted to a time-worn industry technique veteran screenwriter calls ‘A  Stranger In The Room.'”

It’s not the individual acts but the tsunami of actions that are impossible to track. The answer is yes when people ask whether we could run our government more efficiently. But this isn’t efficient; this is taking a hacksaw to it.

And yet

This story from Axios gave me a modicum of hope. 

In a chaotic and unpredictable world, the federal government normally acts as a stabilizing force. Under Trump, it has become the primary driver of the chaos.

The big picture: Across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada — two of America’s three largest trading partners — have been on and then off and then on and then off. Colombia knows the feeling.

The Hamilton cancellation at the Kennedy Center, after FOTUS put himself in charge, is getting under his supporters’ skins. Some companies are NOT backing off from DEI initiatives. (Hegseth was ridiculed as Enola Gay photos were swept up in DEI purge over the word ‘gay’.)

The pushback is starting against these mean-spirited and incompetent people doing, quoting Canada’s Trudeau quoting the Wall Street Journal, “very dumb things.” Those protests at town halls, especially with Republican members of Congress, are having an effect. A  House Democrat is planning a ‘Bad DOGE Act’. Even GOP senators are telling Musk that DOGE actions will require their votes. This means Congress is waking up to the fact that they, per Article I of the Constitution, actually have a say in the process, that it is not an imperial presidency. 

Sunday Stealing — Countdown from 5

1100 Wordle games

The Sunday Stealing this week is Countdown from 5.

FIVE people who mean the world to you.

  1. My daughter is studying abroad in South Africa for a semester. On Friday, my birthday, I talked to her for about two hours on WhatsApp, during which she talked about all sorts of adventures she’s experiencing.

2. My two sisters called me on Friday.

3. One of my oldest friends, whom I have only known since kindergarten, called me on Friday.

4. The 200 odd – and they are odd! -people who either messaged me on Facebook or commented on my blog on Thursday through today to wish me a happy birthday

5. My wife took me to dinner on Friday at a nice restaurant only a block from our house. By the way, it was extraordinarily windy! As we were leaving, we saw our old buddies Ruth and David. When I reach the end of the year’s survey, it will ask, “What did you do on your birthday?” I will merely point to this post.

FOUR things you fear.

  1.  Global warming, climate change, or whatever term you wish to use, less for me and more for my daughter and my nieces

2. Many people cannot discern the difference between rumor, misinformation, disinformation, and verifiable facts; it is usually possible to do so.

3. The inequitable distribution of wealth and access to food and basic medical care allow diseases that should be eradicated to exist. Hear John Green read the first chapter of Everything Is Tuberculosis, his seventh book. Read Working-Class Americans Live Seven Fewer Years Than The Rich. 

4. The disintegration of democracy in the United States and Europe

Hayes, Andrews, Williams, Bell, Richards

THREE words to describe how you feel right now.

  1. Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic

2. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

3. Happy, Happy, Happy

TWO things you’re excited about.

  1. The project

2.

I completed another 100 Wordle games early Saturday morning, with zero ones, 10 twos, 41 threes, 41 fours, eight fives, zero sixes, and, most importantly, zero sevens, taking an average of 3.47 turns. 

ONE thing you’d like to say to someone.

  1. I Love Everybody, especially you.

Blast off! 

“Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.”

Ramblin' with Roger
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