No, Thursday's Out....

It's the last day of June. and we've got our first fire in the Columbia Gorge, about 14 acres near Rowena, mostly contained already, hooray.   OPB, reporting this news, drew a timely little link to our other conflagration, in an article  with the suggestive title:  Wildfire Starts Are Up In Washington. COVID-19 Could Be To Blame. I'll save you the read, and report that the "could be" is about how people with time on their hands (thanks to staying home and staying safe from the virus), have been doing yard work, and then making piles of yard debris, and then setting those piles on fire, and the sparks have been blowing, and so forth.  Is there an agreed-upon name for the motion of smacking oneself on the forehead with the heel of one's hand? Is that called a forehead smack? In any case, I think it's a shame that what with social distancing and even reqular etiquette, we can't occasionally deal others a gentle forehead smack. But we can't. Yesterday,...

This topic is grim and also mysterious, and I’ve been watching the numbers for several weeks, but hesitating to post about it. The chart on Excess Deaths comes from deep within the Oregon Health Authority website, a link within the text-heavy weekly report.  The blue line shows the average number of deaths over the past five years, for each week of the year. (On the site, you can switch to a three-year average, if you prefer.) The gold line represents deaths for each week of 2020. (It ends a few weeks back, because there is always a lag of a few weeks in death stats, as you know if you’ve ever waited to receive a death certificate.)  In the middle of March, when the pandemic hit (see the red line), 2020 deaths went above the average 5-year number, and with the rare exception, they have stayed there. We have had more deaths since mid-March than usual, several hundred all in all.   In fact, in the second week of June (the last week shown), there were 104 more deaths ...

Constant readers will recall that my mom got a big Economic Impact Payment , despite having been dead since 2018. And also that we returned it with a snarky note, because the tax lady said we had to. (She did not insist on the snark, but I added it for free.) Foolishly, I called that second chapter "Full Groundhog Achieved!" But now I'm betting I was wrong about FULL groundhog. I just bet there is another scene about to play out. Because the IRS and the Government Accountability Office just figured out that all in all, they sent $1.4B to dead people. WOO HOO.  How much do you want to bet that they send me a letter asking me to return the money? Even though I did already? How much?  I did take pictures of the snarky letter and the voided check. Where did I put them, you ask? Such a good question. Today's soundtrack:  Return to Sender.  Thanks, Elvis....

I was thinking back to the earliest days of the pandemic in Oregon, and what we were worried about, and I realized:  We never ran out of toilet paper. I mean, WE never did, and I am guesssing you didn't either. Safeway ran out, when there was the big hoarding scare, and I believe the hardware store ran out (they are tiny and usually carry about a dozen rolls, tops), but there was always toilet paper somewhere - 7-11, or a friend had an extra roll, or something.  I personally know of only one human who admitted to running out of toilet paper, and I know of her bcause she got on NextDoor and threw a fit about it, (she is elderly and doesn't drive, and for some reason her equally elderly husband was biking around in the snow trying to find a store with toilet paper - it was back in March) and within an hour, she was back on NextDoor thanking all her neighbors for coming through. She lives in my funny little area of town, and she is one of those people who gets on NextDoor and thr...

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 ...

If you scroll down just about halfway on the New York Times site that tracks daily statistics on Coronavirus in the US, you will find the bold heading Hundreds of thousands of cases traced to clusters . If you then click on the “See more” box at the bottom of the first set of stats, you can scroll all the way through the places where clusters of at least 50 cases have centered. But if you don’t want to do all that, I’ll give you an abbreviated tour: The top ten clusters happened at eight correctional institutions, and 2 meat packing plants. The Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, has had 2439 cases, for the highest concentration so far; Tyson Foods in Iowa, number 10 as of today, has had 1031. The next ten centers comprise two more food facilities, the USS Guam, and another seven prisons. That gets us down to 786 cases at a Tyson plant in Nebraska. The next ten: seven prisons, three food plants. It goes on like that until the first nursing home (rehab center, long term car...

I’m re-pondering my original March brainstorm - that we were all freaking out because there were Five Competing Imperatives. I think one of the three has since blown up and morphed and needs revising:   1) We need herd immunity 2) We need to flatten the curve 3) We need to protect the vulnerable 4) We need to keep the (international, national, and) local economy going 5) We need tools (stats, tests, vaccines, etc.) I am interested in looking back at all five, but I’ve been thinking about #3 in particular, and (honestly, not trying to force everything into my schema, but I think this does fit) how #3 was already big long before the pandemic. Right?  I mean, among those who are interested in equity and justice and fairness and the opposite of xenophobia, homophobia, racism, all the ugly things, #3 has been on high alert forever, but SO much more so under the unceasing attacks-upon-the-vulnerable that have been unleashed by our current administration for the past almo...