No, Thursday's Out....

In the 1918 pandemic, people hoarded Vicks VapoRub, spread conspiracy theories and touted quack cures. They refused to follow health guidelines. In pandemics before and since, folk remedies sprang up. Some people were hyper-vigilant (“monitors”); others minimized or ignored the danger (“blunters”). I just finished The Psychology of Pandemics , by Steven Taylor, which came out in October, 2019 - so RIGHT before the pan hit the fan. You’d think it was written today, but he never mentions Zoom. I recommend it, if you like that sort of thing, as I do. It’s comforting to see that we didn’t invent any of the individual or societal nuttiness we’ve endured, and it’s calming to note that people who display “reactance” (not listening to authority, not protecting others, not getting vaccinated) have always been with us. Affirming what seems pretty clear by now, Taylor reports that there is no known public-health strategy that will successfully change the beliefs or behaviors of the group of...

3a) The Journal of Unemployment Studies is listed on AbeBooks, a site that specializes in "used, rare, or out-of-print" books.  The Journal of Unemployment Studies is not out-of-print, because Lulu titles are Print on Demand, so more can be printed at any time. You could say it's rare, I suppose.  There are two copies on Abe, one in "Very Good" condition in the US, and one "Brand New" in the UK. The US edition, listed by Goodwill in Hillsboro, OR, costs $10.95, not bad. The UK edition, at Revaluation Books in Exeter, costs an eye-popping $23.10.  Don't buy that UK copy. You can get it brand new on Amazon US, for $14.95, and it will arrive Saturday. Or if you are in the UK, it's only £9.90, and it will arrive Friday. Or I can send you a copy, free. I didn’t mention the AbeBooks situation before, because I have Feelings, (comma), Mixed about it. I’m ruminating. Consider how you might feel: Discovering that your ex- put those gorgeous, monogra...

It had been a long time since I'd thought about The Journal of Unemployment Studies, I got inspired to go on a scouting mission to see what else had happened to it over the years.  And lo! The Journal of Unemployment Studies is on WorldCat! That’s because it has been added to the collection of the Urbana Free Library. Somebody even catalogued it: Career change – case studies. Unemployment. I am so proud. I’m in a library. It is not in the Library of Congress. I didn’t think it would be. Had to check, though. There is a Nook version available from Barnes & Noble. I have no memory of agreeing to this. It has two ISBNs, one I don’t recognize at all. I have no Nook, but I assume it’s readable, that being Nook-i-fied didn’t mess with the formatting. I doubt anyone has ever downloaded it. B&N has sent me no checks. My book is out on GoogleBooks, something else I never agreed to, but I’m not arguing. Because they can, they generously provide a word cloud for it. Just lookin...

I did. Once! Learned a lot! Funny story: During the Great Recession, I spent 19 months job hunting, and blogging about it, My blog would not have been subtitled  Great Tips For Finding Your Dream Job . It was more: My Interview With A Guy Who Has a Porn-Distribution Warehouse . It was meant to be wry dispatches from a long hard slog. My friend Gary told me I would need to meet 200 people in order to find my next job (he was right: 204 before I landed a part-time temp job, 211 before I landed a full-time job). I wrote about those people.    Once the natural end came (a job!), I decided to convert the blog to a book, and send a copy to the people who had helped me on the job-hunt trail, as a thank-you.   Actually, my new boss-to-be was … intense, and he had me sign a contract that said if I created anything at all, ANYTHING, while I was working for him - if I so much as wrote a song that went platinum, though the job he hired me for was not songwriting, bu...

I polished up my red boots. I was striding down Hawthorne, gleaming away, and a nice young Black woman stopped me and admired the boots. I suggested she admire the polishing job as well, and as a benediction upon parting, she said, “Get it, Queen!” This is why I mentioned that she was young and Black. “Queen,” from one of my sixty-year-old white girlfriends, however cheery, would have been put on, performative, slightly jokey. It wouldn’t have been precisely like the years when I’d wince, hearing the white teenage sons of my friends greet each other with, “Yo, dawg, what up?” But it would have been a bit like that. Fakey, funny, layered, self-conscious…. something.   About a year ago, I somehow joined a Facebook group dedicated to (and I quote) Empowered Women Empowering Women Supporting a Woman . It was, I believe, inspired by Kamala Harris becoming VP, but it now has more than half a million members, and it is mostly selfies (plus numerous pictures of adorable granddaughters...

I really like kayaking – I’ve asked for a kayak rental adventure to celebrate my birthday, or Mother’s Day, on more than one occasion – but I have never considered that there was any connection between kayaking and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But what do I know of MLK’s hobbies, real or aspirational? Exactl - nothing. Still, I just never thought there was a connection there. I mention this because my Inbox was full of messages from worthy organizations this morning, all exhorting me to donate money, or perform some honorable activity, in honor of MLK Day. My eyes got all squinty and I said NO, I am Drawing the Line Right Here, when I saw a message from the kayak rental place. No, I said. Do not hector me today! You guys stick to your lane. This is just me and my sense of the ridiculous. Because I may have been stretching it, too. I went out with SOLVE (and a pal, hooray!) this morning, to pick up litter in what was billed as an MLK Day effort, and I was laughing at m...

We are getting a new furnace tomorrow, because it is Time. That means we need to move everything surrounding the old furnace, and that meant I had to go through The Barrel. The Barrel came from my Grandma Onda. The Barrel is substantial, and it had long formed a base for a big wooden shelf piled with stuff. I knew it was under there, and had to be gone through, but there was no rush, and no incentive. Somehow, I already knew there would be little or nothing of value in there, though if you had asked what WAS in there, I couldn’t have told you. It was like an unwelcome Assignment. Rick thinks I once made a pass at going through it, and then stalled out because I wanted to consider what to do with some of the stuff in there. That sounds reasonable, and it’s a much kinder story than saying I was just too lazy to finish going through it. It has been there for years. When I was little, Grandma Onda would offer me things, and if I couldn't take them with me right away, she'd ...

The dog and I were headed to the bakery and then the park the other day, when I saw one of my unhoused neighbors walking down the middle of the road with a blue recycling bin. I have called these folks “shopping cart neighbors,” but I immediately appreciated this guy’s really good idea – not walking down the middle of Division (terrible idea), but upgrading to a blue recycling bin instead of a shopping cart.  The bins are lightweight, and waterproof, and they don’t have those four jangly wheels, (one always jammed), and the blue ones are meant for paper and plastic and such, not compost, so they would not be smelly. I don’t want him to make off with my blue bin, of course, but I admired his ingenuity. The bakery was out of the rolls we always buy. I am so regular in my buying of those rolls that when they see me, the folks behind the counter just put two of them in a bag. We all like this bit of familiarity, and they kindly give me sympathetic head shakes when I get there too late....