COVID Archives - Page 6 of 11 - Ramblin' with Roger

Always: the collective folk wisdom

30% chance of rain

I was taking a bus home from my allergist, the second of two. Someone asked if I were waiting for a particular line, which I was. My CDTA Navigator app said the next bus was coming at 10:04; it was 9:58 at the time.

This person then launched into a tirade. “The buses are always late! They should do something about them!. The buses should come more often!”

The bus rolls up at 10:03, and I got on; there were about six people aboard. Ironically, the other party tried to wheedle their way onto the bus because they had no money for the fare. (N.b.: if they had asked me, I would have paid for them.)

This bugged me, just a little because it’s that unwarranted generalization that the System has failed. In fact, the four buses I took that day were all within four minutes of on-time.

Forecast

It’s like when people say in my presence, “The weather forecast is always wrong.” This is usually followed by “It must be great to get paid for being wrong all of the time.” Occasionally I’ve pushed back against the assertion, but I’ve found that to be not very fruitful. So I generally ignore it.

The accusation is addressed here by a meteorologist. ” Take, for instance, a day with a ’30 percent chance of rain.’ That’s tough to… show in a simple TV 7-day graphic. But it’s possible that a majority of the people stay dry and a small percentage see rain.”

I’ve experienced that quite often. I landed at the Albany airport, where it was sunny and dry. But when I got home, seven miles away, it had clearly rained. Or back in my FantaCo days, it was raining in Albany, but the owner came in from Averill Park, across the river, and he had snow on his roof.

Here’s a geeky article. It states, logically, that the shorter the outlook, say one to three days, the more likelihood, that it’ll be correct.

The COVID vaccine

Kelly noted that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers defended his “alternative” regimen as “immunization” equivalent to being fully vaccinated. But what ticked off the western New Yorker, understandably, is this: “Liberals hated vaccines when 45 was President but as soon as Biden took over they loved them.”

I know lots of liberals who spent months praying – some of them literally – for a vaccine. If it had been available in October 2020 and I were eligible, damn straight I would have gotten inoculated.

Rodgers is in this prism that suggests that liberals like me are always going to dispute whatever good things happened during 45’s term. What I disputed were what 45 seemed to do to minimize his own vaccine accomplishments by touting hydroxychloroquine or other unproven formulations.

Nov. rambling: systemic oppression

Rebecca Jade touring with Dave Koz!

Scientific American: People Who Jump to Conclusions Show Other Kinds of Thinking Errors; Belief in conspiracy theories and overconfidence are two tendencies linked to hasty thinking

Homelessness: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Data Debunks Insidious Myths About Immigration

Freedom Isn’t What It Used To Be

In Re-Analysis, Ivermectin Benefits Disappeared as Trial Quality Increased; Andrew Hill, Ph.D., received death threats

Fox News host who told the audience to get COVID vaccine reads hate mail on the air

Ted Cruz Criticizes Big Bird for Getting Vaccinated and Satire from The Borowitz Report: Oscar the Grouch Cuts Ties with Ted Cruz

The high cost of living in a disabling world

A Brief Overview Of Systemic Oppression – Lynae Vanee

Ahmaud Arbery suspects’ trial defense taps a racist legal legacy

Ed Gainey, who will be Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor and Aftab Purevale, picked as Cincinnati’s first Asian mayor, and Michelle Wu, Boston’s first woman and first person of color elected mayor

Requirements for travel into the U.S.

The Greatest Unsolved Heist in Irish History

A spite fence in Virginia Beach

Walking America part 5: Breezewood

Balance

Self-compassion can help build a more balanced, healthy perspective

Mispronunciation: why you should stop correcting people’s mistakes

How To Get Rid of Lots of Old Books

Now I Know: The Luggage Loophole That Isn’t and How to Brew an Economy and The Swampy Loophole in the Georgia Constitution and The Costume That Was a Trick and The Odd Depths of Preserving Plutonium

Hiker lost for 24 hours ignored calls from rescuers because of an unknown number

Why Avocados Still Exist

Forbidden love. A new comic strip, about corn. Sort of.

We fed the hungry with ONLY 7-Eleven Rewards points.

R.I.P.

Aaron Feuerstein, known for paying Malden Mills workers even after the factory burned down, has died at 95

The Rise and Fall of Mort Sahl, the Comedian Who Revolutionized Stand-Up

Former VA administrator and US Senator (D-GA) Max Cleland died at home. A savage political attack suggesting that he was “soft on the war on terror” caused him to lose his Senate seat in 2002. A live grenade dropped by a fellow soldier in Vietnam had robbed him of three limbs.

I neglected to acknowledge the death of Diane Westwell, one of our loyal ABC Wednesday contributors, on 20 September 2021. She was a very sweet person.

Greg Hatcher, a founder of Atomic Junk Shop and Brianna’s Nerd-Dad has died

The Weirdest Way The Earth Can Kill You

MUSIC

Nightbirde Sings Psalm 88

Music from The Lord Of The Rings, arranged for solo piano by Leiki Ueda

Coverville 1377: The Beastie Boys and Beasties Episode and 1378: Led Zeppelin IV: 50th Anniversary Album Cover to Cover

The Mighty Rio Grande – This Will Destroy You from the movie Moneyball.

The Ghost Rejoins The Living – Freezepop

Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead

Sara Lee – Liza Minelli

While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear

I’m Looking Through You – MonaLisa Twins

When “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects” Blew The Audience Away With His Voice Guitar

Mozart Doesn’t Make You Smarter

Paul McCartney re: You Gave Me The Answer – ‘The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present’

Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2021 with Richard Elliot, Rick Braun, Jonathan Butler, and Rebecca Jade!

Going to church together, or not

Live! In person!

My wife and I have usually gone to church together over the past 22+ years. But often, we didn’t sit together, as I was usually perched in the choir loft while she was sitting in the congregation. The exception was during the summer when the choir was usually off. She really liked it, but it felt somewhat foreign to me.

Then there was the pandemic. When our service returned on Facebook beginning March 22, 2020, it was us sitting together watching a screen together. And we’d do communion together, either something my wife baked that weekend or a cracker to eat, homemade grape juice, or Nine Pin Cider to drink.

But we would be on separate computers for the adult education class. We had different ZOOM styles in terms of when to be on mute. For me, it was almost always, when I wasn’t speaking. Also, I found that couples on the same ZOOM screen are harder to hear/understand and especially more difficult to see.

On June 20, 2021, we began the in-person church, and we both went through the summer live, except once when we were away.

Risk assessment

So it’s curious that now we’re doing church differently again. We both go to adult ed online. But then I go to church in person, while my wife has decided to go back online. She’s teaching kids, most too young to be fully vaccinated yet, whereas I really don’t see that many people.

I was having a discussion about COVID and risk with a friend. It reminded me of a comment to a recent Weekly Sift article. “When there’s a threat with no end in sight…, we need to also measure risk against the reward… Eating in a restaurant is risky, so I won’t eat inside just any restaurant, but I will eat inside my favorite restaurant. Not because the risk is lower, but because the reward is high (in my case). For other people, it might be that you’ll spend time in a small room for a long time with vaccinated family but not with vaccinated strangers.”

My choir met at church on October 14 for the first time in 19 months, and we sang! All full vaccinated, masked, and distanced – it was difficult to hear the tenors – but we sang. And we didn’t suck! It wasn’t for the service, yet, but maybe we’ll record something in the next month or two to be used.

Rule of thumb: when there is both a remote and face-to-face option, I’ll almost always opt fr the latter. But I never mock other people’s more cautious approach.

All my shots: COVID #3 and more

Tdap

Yes, I’ve got all my shots. In the month of September, I received not one, not two, but THREE vaccines.

1. The influenza shot.- “The best time to get a flu vaccine — which reduces the risk of serious flu-related illness, hospitalization or death — is any time between September and the end of October, the CDC suggests.”

I’ve been getting the shot every year for over a decade, after getting the flu kept me in bed for about a week.

2. The Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) shot. As I noted here, I had stepped on a nail in 2000 in my then-new backyard and got my first shot probably in decades. I got another one in 2010. As my old pal, Diane suggested, “Sometime (around 2000) pertussis was re-instituted in the ‘adult’ Td…” Pertussis is also known as whooping cough.

But I didn’t get the shot in 2020 because my doctor, who I had seen only once that year, for my physical in September, didn’t want to subject me to two sore arms. This year, I was given a choice; two sore arms now, or come back later. I opted for the former. And it wasn’t bad at all.

Booster

3. A third “booster” dose of the Pzifer vaccine

I had briefly struggled with whether I, as an entitled American who can readily receive the shot, should get a third dose. Much of the world hasn’t been able to get any vaccine.

The conversation in my head sounded rather like when I was a little kid and told to eat the beets (canned beets were AWFUL). Some parents, I don’t think mine, would say, “Eat these because there are people in China who are starving.” And the kids’ retort would suggest that they’d gladly send their veggies to Peking.

Of course, that wasn’t and isn’t physically possible. The current administration is dedicated to buying and sending vaccines abroad. But as this CBS News story about Lesotho notes, “Battling COVID in Africa takes more than vaccines. It takes ‘flying doctors,’ and even they need help.” If I thought my third shot was taking away someone else’s first shot, I would have gladly forgone it.

Musing

Ultimately, I decided to get the extra dose because of the news that the Pfizer vaccine, which I had received in March, appears to be less effective over time than the Moderna. And I’m over 65 and overweight, plus over 700,000 Americans have died of the disease, so that’s an affirmative.

I received my first two doses at a CVS about a mile from my house. This time, I went on the CVS website and found I could walk to my local pharmacy 0.3 of a mile away. They wanted a little more info this time, such as both my Medicare and my Rx insurance numbers, and telling of my reaction to the previous shots. But the process was not onerous.

No reaction to the third shot, other than a little soreness at the injection site, same as the second dose.

Optimism: is it always good?

After I had written about my melancholy/depression, I allowed that my default position about events is not optimism, but pessimism. My friend Cee had heard the benefits of optimism.

And indeed, if you Google “Is optimism good?” the first thing one might find is this quote from Kids’ Health: ” Optimism Is Healthy. It turns out that an optimistic attitude helps us be happier, more successful, and healthier. Optimism can protect against depression — even for people who are at risk for it. An optimistic outlook makes people more resistant to stress. Optimism may even help people live longer.”

So it’s settled. Wait a minute. The next article is a 2015 piece from the Washington Post stating that “Researchers have found a really good reason not to be an optimist.” It references an NIH study.

That Wapo article: “Optimism isn’t merely unhelpful at times—it can be demonstrably counterproductive. Telling someone ‘you can do it’ when they actually can’t doesn’t change the outcome, and it makes them more likely to exert time and effort on a fruitless task. There might be no clearer example than the fact that optimists spend more time looking for Waldo, but are no more likely to find him.” But the piece allows that pessimism is not curative either.

Ben Franklin

I had mentioned to Cee that I had long been attracted by a portrayal of Ben Franklin, on, of all things Bwitched. His character [said]… that “he always going through life expecting negative outcomes so that when something positive happened, he would be pleasantly surprised. It was a punchline that was supposed to be funny – the canned laughter told me that – but, to me, it made SENSE… ‘Perhaps I’m an optimistic pessimist — prepare for the worst, but when the very worst doesn’t happen, I’m pleasantly surprised.’”

I’m more vulnerable when I’m optimistic. I’m thinking of someone in a particular position who despised the action of a perpetrator, and rightly so. When they were in the same situation as the previous villain, I was optimistic that they, remembering how crummy they felt, would act differently. Nope, they performed the same damn way. As bad as the mess was, it was my optimism that bit me in the butt.

This is why, for instance, I’m not disappointed in politicians anymore. If they end up being better than expected, I’m pleased. But if they have feet of clay, well, what did I expect? I suppose this sounds cynical, but it tends to regulate my highs and lows, which in the main, works for me.

So the fact that I was optimistic that we’d be out of this damn pandemic by now is why I crashed emotionally a bit. This commercial really spoke to me.