June 23, 2020: I'll Just Leave These Pictures Here -

There is an outfit called Civiqs that does online polling, and if you like charts 'n graphs, you want to head over to their website and see their methodology and whatnot, and play with all of their data.

But for today, I'll just leave a couple of pictures-worth-a-thousand-words, showing how concerned respondents have been about a coronavirus outbreak in their area, over the past three months. Here are Republicans, suffering a bit of concern in March and April, and then moving on:

And here are Democrats, starting off in a medium state of concern, and then stratifying for a long, long time:

The red line in these charts is for "extremely concerned," and the blue is for "not concerned at all."  

I think the chart makers committed to unfortunate color choices. Since we've assigned the color red to Republican states for the past many election cycles, the charts would have been better with red equalling not concerned, and blue equalling concerned. But how were they to know?

The fun of the Civiqs site is that you can run this little graph for each state individually. You can run it for only men or only women, or you can pick an age group, or a race, or an education level. 

I just ran it for Oregon, once for Republicans and once for Democrats.  Oregon Republicans are even MORE unconcerned than all Republicans nationally, which might make sense given our small number of cases - or just our general orneriness out here. Oregon Democrats have a pretty even split between "extremely" and "moderately" concerned.  I also ran it for Arizona, where Democratic men are even more concerned than Democratic women, and Republican men are even less concerned than Republican women. Sisterhood is powerful. Or something. 

You can spend all day on this if you aren't careful.

In other news, and in the spirit of "sometimes people who aren't American are also a teeny bit inexplicable," I think it was awfully nice of the Barcelona Opera, or maybe it's nice of the nurseries who donated, to give a concert for a theater full of plants and then to donate those plants to healthcare workers, to celebrate Spain's reopening. 

(Okay, if I were one of those plants, I would have chosen some other entertainment. But mine is not to carp, and we all offer what we have to give.)

But I am tickled by this phrase in one paragraph:  

"The plants came from local nurseries and will be donated along with a certificate from the artist to 2,292 health care professionals, specifically at the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona."

From which artist? From Giacomo Puccini? Because that's the string quartet they were playing for the plants - Puccini's "Crisantemi," which translates as "Chrysanthemums."