No, Thursday's Out....

The Oregon Health Authority gave up on their scheduling system today, for folks hoping to be vaccinated at the big sites. It was the right thing to do, but it was also an admission of defeat, and – at least temporarily – not great news for those who have not scheduled an appointment, or those who thought tomorrow might be their chance to start hitting Refresh every few minutes, as the Cool Kids have been doing for weeks.   I took the shut-down of the scheduling system as an occasion to drink a glass of wine and mangle some quotes: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall not be getting a vaccination appointment!    Or the famous Longfellow quatrain:       Let us then (not) be up and doing (early, to hit Refresh repeatedly) With a heart for any fate, Not achieving, not pursuing, Learn to register and to wait!   (That’s what we are supposed to do. Register, and then wait for them to call us. At random. Over the next few weeks, we ho...

York Plaque, Anonymous, 2021 The artist who made the bust of York that appeared by surprise in Mt Tabor Park has spoken (without letting himself be named) about his inspiration and his process.  For now, he's choosing anonymity because he would like the focus to stay on York, rather than on him.  We do know he's a white man. Bravo, artist, whoever you are. It's a terrific article. Meanwhile, Portland Parks and Recreation has zero plans to remove the bust.  I like my city so much.

It’s been a fun few days of deep discussions, like a protracted Ethics, Psych, and Anthro seminar. I’m having a mental analogy festival, as a result. Everything is much like something else, except not really. I said a while back that the outpouring of information and advice about the vaccine and the variants felt reminiscent of the beginning of the pandemic, when those of us who wanted to understand what was happening were flooded with info that was often contradictory or ill-explained. For instance, this week saw a debate among numbers-people about the CDC saying we’d lost a year of life expectancy thanks to the virus. ( Nuh-uh! More like Five Days! Nuh-uh! You are bad at math! Well, you have bad terminology! Well, it’s a dumb CONCEPT! Nuh-uh !) Or there was the intriguing rabbit-hole discussions about MMR vaccine protection against COVID. It’s not just info and advice that are reminding me of the early days, though; it’s the parade of humans under pressure, humans coping with s...

There are several good news stories this morning, but I want to celebrate the fact that President Biden has decided not to designate Portland as an anarchist jurisdiction any more. Thank you, sir. It was fun, and even a little bit darkly funny for a while, to be demonized by the demonic. But it got old. Instead, Portland is once more classified as a Great Place for Ramen Joints.   Okay, Biden had nothing to do with this latter designation. But still, it’s a sign of the return of earthly pleasures that the ramen article is referenced in the same morning news roundup as the declassification article.  I’ve been pondering, lately, what new things I might do when I can socialize again. This was brought on by yesterday’s decision to volunteer with SOLVE on one of their big Portland cleanup events. I hadn’t gone out on litter patrol before, and it was nice to get my malt bag (donated by local breweries, natch) (no single-use plastic, here!) and my neon vest and my litter grabber...

A bust  of York , the enslaved Black member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, appeared in Mt. Tabor Park over the weekend. Happy Black History Month! It’s really beautiful. It’s up on the pedestal where a statue of Harvey Scott (1838-1910) stood before it was torn down last fall. Here’s the double mystery, which I find pretty enjoyable. Nobody claimed responsibility for tearing down Mr. Scott, or said why. Speculation is that maybe it had to do with his stand on women’s suffrage? (His stand: Nope.) Some other Portland statues were toppled right before Mr. Scott’s was. The folks who pulled those down were not quiet about their complaints, which mainly had to do with racial justice. Anyway, Portland Parks and Rec doesn’t know why Scott came down, and one of his arms was missing, and they had nearly zero budget last year, so they said at the time that they’d put him in storage and work with the Regional Arts and Culture Council about what to put up. (Montage of leaves dropping ...

The ice and snow have melted, so the latest house arrest phase of the pandemic is over, in Portland at least. I took a long walk, partly to work off some cabin fever, and partly to support our local economy, which is my excuse for buying anything from a real human.  News! (News to me. You may know this already.) The Bagdad Theater - which I l have long loved because they do not bother with extraneous H's, it's just BAG and DAD, thank you very much - appears to be open, not just for beer and pizza on the sidewalk, but for a real indoor movie, Nomadland. I believe Nomadland is also on Hulu, but no matter.  I didn't attend - I'm still not going inside most public buildings, and though the door was open, it wasn't four o'clock anyway. It was eleven o' clock in the morning. And the door was open so that the waiter could bring an entire pitcher of beer to a guy sitting alone at one of the outside picnic tables. He was probably recovering from cabin fever too.  Ove...

My alma mater offers alumni excursions to faraway lands, none of which trips I have ever taken, because they cost a bundle. In addition to the usual lodging, meals and transportation, each trip is led by a faculty member who holds forth on something academically relevant – a music professor talks about Mozart in Salzburg, or what have you. I pine for one trip: a boat excursion with a zoology prof, to the Galapagos. But it is way beyond my reach, just a fantasy. There is much to be said for fantasies. Anyway, actual excursions are not on offer this year, natch. Instead, next month, the university is offering the first in a series of virtual excursions, this one featuring a Zoom lecture every day, ten days in all, five different worthy lecturers. The virtual trip is to Italy, and costs less than a thousand dollars (barely), and can be augmented with two hours of Italian every morning, for not too terribly much more. I’m not signing up, even though it costs a fraction of a real trip, ...

Way back on Thanksgiving, 2016, only a few weeks after that depressing election, I was afraid our annual big dinner would turn into a political gloom-fest. I wasn't afraid of our guests locking horns, because our table was going to be entirely peopled with like-minded folks; I was just afraid we'd all sink into despair and ranting.  I didn't want to spend the afternoon in my own back yard, avoiding all my friends and relations, nor did I want to spend it weeping with them about what the next four years might bring. We only host one party a year, and I wanted to enjoy it. So I decided I needed some sort of Plan B, if things went dark. I bought some nice Thank You cards, and I addressed them to various public figures who had done good things, behaved honorably, or fought the good fight, folks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And I put stamps on all of them, and I put them in a bag, and I put in a couple dozen pens, and I decided if people started ranting, I was going to leap up and ...

Way back in the beginning of the pandemic, I had a list of Five Competing Imperatives, and the fifth one was: We need tools.   That category was always a grab bag. At first, "tools" were things like hand sanitizer, masks, PPE and accurate COVID tests; a decent national database monitoring cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; ventilators; and a system (and people) dedicated to contact tracing. Then "tools" became things like techniques (e.g., proning) and treatments to lessen severity. Now, at last, we have the ultimate tools: effective vaccines.  We just don’t have as many of them (and as many people and places to administer them) as we need. But that should happen by the end of the summer. Meanwhile, it's winter, and people are trying to keep their chins up while they wait their turn at a shot. In Portland, we're having one of our signature ice storms, though NOAA suggests this one may be "one of the largest ice events in recent memory." (There...

This morning, I was invited to break up with plastics.   That’s what the email said. They even went on, with an extended romance/Valentine’s Day theme: Roses are red, violets are blue, we're done with single-use plastic and you should be too. This Valentine's Day, we're working to convince Oregon to break up with single-use plastics. Let's face it: Our relationship with plastics is toxic. Plastic lasts forever, which sounds romantic until you consider…. For some reason, I felt like my judgmental little brother had come to visit me at college, met my boyfriend, and said, “You can do better.” Maybe that was because the email used the "break up" metaphor.  Mostly I was annoyed and defensive, though there was also a smidgeon of admitting I probably should do it – break up with plastics, that is. Still, one more assignment, and I do resent assignments. I will put it on the someday list, for now. In the Before, I went to visit a friend who, after dinner, p...

Oregon Republican Knute Buehler, who lost the governor's race to Kate Brown in 2018, announced that he was leaving the GOP, and becoming an Independent, after the Oregon Republican Party declared the January 6th insurrection a "false flag" operation. Buehler said that he doesn't  "know what the Republican Party stands for." Hard to blame him for distancing himself from that crew. And at the same time, Rose City Antifa, which was founded in 2007, sent a  note to local media explaining what they stand for and against, and offering to help news outlets with research or reporting at any time. Partly, they wanted to distance themselves from recent Portland protests that have resulted in vandalism.    RCA wrote that while many protestors " may consider themselves antifascists in ideology, we narrowly define antifascism as actions taken to oppose the insurgent right-wing. Under this definition, protests that are not involved in direct opposition to far-right...

The garden is going full steam. Also the mud. It’s February. Some things continue despite the change of administration:  Randy Rainbow lambastedMarjorie Taylor Greene, proof that he can thrive even with Trump out of office. It wasn’t his most hilarious work, but she is pretty disturbing, so a lack of hilarity was appropriate. What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, which has been a mainstay of my podcast life for the past few years, brought out a new episode about Incitement , proof they can thrive for a while yet. Sigh. It will be nice when they no longer have topics to explore. The hosts seemed a bit worn out, though the episode was a gem - but aren’t we all pretty worn? My friend’s sourdough starter, which had been with her for the whole pandemic, went off, producing a loaf of oh-that-can’t-be-right orange bread, and she got a little bit tearful. One of my Trivia teammates couldn’t come to the weekly online contest, and I got a little bit tearful. And yet! I find in myself ...

At the top of today’s New York Times “briefing,” David Leonhardt offers “ Good Vaccine News ,” in which he talks about the concept of vaccine “efficacy.” The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have higher efficacy ratings than the other three that have been tested (Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca). The traditional definition of efficacy, however, measures the absence of disease. We might instead focus for a minute on how well all five vaccines prevent severe disease and death. Here is the best bit: Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five [vaccines] in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot. To put that in perspective, it helps to think about what Covid has done so far to a representative group of 75,000 American adults: It has killed roughly 150 of them and sent several hundred more to the hospital. The vacci...