No, Thursday's Out....

  Frank Cotham in The New Yorker, May 10, 2021.

A few weeks ago, the very first morning I was street-legal vaccinated, I went to the Portland Art Museum, because I could. I had reserved my slot weeks earlier: timed entry, limited admission, masks required.  It was nearly empty; I saw one other patron, and the occasional security guard. During most of my visit, I was alone in each gallery, and it felt dreamlike. (….So, I was in the Art Museum, but all by myself, except sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of a guard, or I’d hear footsteps in the distance ….) There were no special exhibits yet, just the permanent collection, and I visited my favorite pieces as if they were old acquaintances. I’ve always loved Milton Avery’s painting, Bathers, Coney Island, 1934 . I love the big, blobby bodies, and the black water, and the muted colors, almost a sepia beach scene. My own East Coast ancestors were based in Brookline, a neighborhood of Boston, but I’m fairly sure they were much like the Coney Island crew. Hello, ancestral types! I also go...

The rain! The sunshine! The roses! The radishes! Everything is exuberant right now. I was striding down the street yesterday, just in time to meet a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and I was grinning (though I wasn’t really aware of that, because I was thinking about six different things: nice day, look at that azalea, what do I want to remember to tell my friend…?) when a portly older guy in a big rig rolled his window down and shouted, “You look GOOD without your mask!” I shouted back, “You do, TOO!” because it seemed like the right response, under the circumstances. As he drove away, I looked to see if his rig had weird bumper stickers, but it was sticker-free. I have made the executive decision to classify the entire interchange as not about masks, but about high spirits. He was just being friendly, shouting encouragement at a grinning white-haired lady who was booking it down the sidewalk. Or it was clunky flirtatiousness, and he was out of practice, as we all are. My ancient...

Two weeks ago, we took a celebratory Vaccination Vacation, looping through Western Oregon. We drove from Portland to Eugene, out to Florence and down to Gold Beach (on the Rogue), cross-country from Bandon through Coquille to Roseburg and up to Steamboat Inn (on the North Umpqua), back through Portland and then out to Manzanita. It was nine days in all, and a total blast. Trip Report: everybody was genial, everybody was following the mask mandates or the COVID restrictions. The only pushback we encountered wasn’t so much pushback as dogged questioning, from an older woman in a lavender WISCONSIN sweatshirt, who wanted us to explain why we were wearing masks outside. As it turns out, she was about ten days ahead of the CDC. Well done, WISCONSIN.   At the beginning of the trip, Eugene still had an inside dining ban, so we ate dinner outside. It rained. We had no table umbrella. The waiter brought us fleece blankets – not waterproof, but impressively absorbent! The next table was a t...

This morning, somebody posted on NextDoor that they had been Baaaa’ed, when they went out with a mask on. (Baaaa'ed as in the sound of a sheep. As in a follower of the herd. High-class wit, here.) Twice. Baaa’ed by two different people. So of course I started wondering what I would do if I were Baaa’ed. On the one hand, I was convinced that masks weren’t needed outdoors, and on the other, mask-wearing is a Portland fashion. I figured if I were Baaa’ed, I’d be annoyed, but I might also laugh. And then! This afternoon! Breaking News! The CDC said fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear a mask outdoors or indoors (though we should still follow the law, and respect the rules of businesses we entered, and healthcare didn’t count, and …..) I went out for a long, celebratory walk. Progress!   And I was waylaid by two young sisters (masked), who had set up a card table to sell their old plastic trinkets for ten cents apiece. Eager to support the local economy as I am, I still...

(You have until the bottom of this post to guess what that last language in the list is. I guessed wrong.) We have an election happening May 18, and I hadn’t gotten to the Voter’s Pamphlet yet. (Yes, I know, the last “safe” day to mail was yesterday, but I’m a drop box person.) Voting was on my "soon" list, but my interest was piqued – hard - this morning, when a friend posted that local elections matter, and school district elections matter, because every politician started somewhere, maybe even at the Education Service District, and some things need to be nipped in the bud. Ooh, a true observation - and what could she possibly be referring to? I sat right down to the Voter’s Pamphlet, with my tea, and yes, she was right. There were buds I wanted to nip.  Case in point, the candidate who left a rich and wide-ranging statement asserting that racism really isn’t a thing, that the schools are teaching inaccurate history (and also cannot teach reading or arithmetic any more)...

Debunking is a special art form, and this piece by David Leonhardt on A Misleading CDC Number is a fine piece of debunking.   Bottom line:  The CDC has said there is a less than 10% chance of catching COVID outdoors, when it’s a less than 1% chance, possibly a .1% chance.  How can this be? It’s because different places and different governments defined “outdoors” differently, and Singapore defined all construction as “outdoors” even if it was actually construction indoors, and … basically, there you go. Read the article if you want more. It contains this succinct comparison: “Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.” Leonhardt wrote to the CDC asking them to justify saying “less than 10 per cent,” and got a bureaucratic response from an unnamed official there: “10 percent is a conserv...

In two particularly creative events, The Dalles and Eugene staged mass vaccination shindigs for their towns. In The Dalles, they chose a Friday Night Lights theme at a local high school; in Eugene, it was Drag Queens & Vaccines. We were even IN Eugene while this event was going on, but we didn’t go, because we are fully vaccinated and fully marinated already. We are more than happy to be out and about, and no longer waiting for the full effect, but we ARE missing those parties. In a small, related story, a couple I know went to get their shots at a grocery store pharmacy, and decided to use their privilege to test the system. The store protocol asked for several things that Oregon law says a vaccination site can’t ask for: ID, insurance, and social security number. Our friends politely explained that the store protocol was wrong, and the store employees said they had no code in their system for people without those things. Our friends gently waited them out, and they Googled the la...

This label hits me in the quibbling bone, every time. It’s the “100% Ocean Bound Plastic” phrase. I might be satisfied with “Recycled Plastic,” but the “ocean bound” assertion, no. First, I doubt – and I have not called the Windex people to ask, so I am doubting out of sheer cynicism – that they waylay garbage as it is being loaded onto a barge for ocean-dumping, and they pick through it, and they grab out all the right type of plastic, and then they turn that into Windex bottles. If they said, “We go out to the giant Pacific Garbage Patch and retrieve plastic,” sure, I’d believe that. (I’m kidding.) Second, I think “Ocean-Bound” needs a hyphen. I said I was quibbling. What did you expect? Third, and this was the issue that originally snagged my attention, the timeline here is super-ambiguous. I believe they want us to think they rescued some ocean-bound plastic, as in my first quibble, and repurposed it into Windex bottles. However! That “ocean bound” phrase raises the question: w...