No, Thursday's Out....

The reasons Grape Nuts are in short supply are two: Supply chain constraints, and higher demand. Also, the machinery used to create Grape Nuts is specialized, and the company can't just tool up immediately.  Well, duh. There's a whole article here, sent to me by what Dave Barry always calls an "alert reader," but you don't need to read it, because it tells you nothing you didn't know already from reading this news-breaking blog several days ago, i.e., Grape Nuts are out til spring some time and they are neither grapes nor nuts. One friend's husband asked him to tell me about alternatives to Grape Nuts, and I said thank you, but in truth, I still have my box of Grape Nuts. They aren't a daily thing with me, more a once-in-a-long-while thing. My box is months old, but of course, Grape Nuts cannot stale, being stale at birth. I could, apparently, sell it for $60, but it's been opened. I'm just going to let it sit there, in case all other foodstuff...

Behold a display of "TOOL PENS" from my local hardware store: The saws are for sawing things, or making music. The pipe wrench is for wrenching pipes, or banging on things (not recommended). The unicorns are for detecting a maiden's virginity. I assume. Not sure. That's the only sense in which I can imagine using a unicorn as a tool. 

I just watched the first briefing from the new COVID-response team: Zients, Fauci, Walensky, Slavitt, and Nunez-Smith. If you watched, or even if you didn’t, you may know that there were a bunch of technical glitches with the sound and sometimes with the video. But despite that, the whole event was wonderful – serious, knowledgeable, competent, caring people doing their best to explain our situation and to answer questions honestly. The feeling - growing every day over this past week - that the grownups are back was heart-expanding. (I’m not giving a link, and I don’t actually recommend you watch today’s briefing, unless you are very good at tuning out bad audio, echo, reverb, etc. But you might want to watch one in the future, if this is your cup of tea.) I’m also buoyed every time I hear of another friend, relative, or acquaintance getting vaccinated. It occurred to me today that in my mind’s eye, I apparently have a map, something like those beautiful images of the nation at night. ...

My slippers wore out three months early. My yearly pair usually lasts until the weather warms up.  (It’s a ritual: I get a new pair on sale in the spring, when Slippers Season is ending, and I put them away in a big tub, along with all my cold weather stuff. I have a tiny closet. Tax Day through October: warm weather stuff, including flip flops around the house; rest of the year, cold weather stuff, and slippers). So I buy a new pair and immediately put them away, and then when I pull the big tub out of the attic to do the biannual* swap,   it’s like finding five bucks in a winter coat pocket. Look! New slippers! I completely forgot I had new slippers!! But, of course, this year I have worn my slippers during most waking hours, causing them to give out early. Fine. Shoe expenditures have been nil, so this can just be a two-sets-of-slippers pandemic. But no. They are sold out. Not just Zappo’s, but the makers. They are completely out. They are backordered more than two ...

Very, very early in the last administration, the White House "Contact Us" page vanished. I had used it a couple of times to contact the President (or, okay, to contact whoever has to read those emails), and then it went away.  But it's back! I just sent a message, a bundle of Congratulations plus Here's Something I Would Like You to Do, Please. That was so much fun! After the "Contact Us" link disappeared, I took to writing letters, thereby keeping the Post Office healthy (I didn't know the PO would soon be attacked). But sending off an email has its charms. Try it! You'll see! Four years ago, the "Contact Us" page also had a place you could submit or sign petitions. It was a hoot, and also, probably, pretty pointless. Some petitions had thousands of signatures (to what end?), and some had one. Some of the least-popular were duplicates - you got the feeling that there were three lonely souls out there who really needed to meet each other. ...

The Oregon Health Authority is sharing stats on  vaccinations administered , tabulated by various demographic categories. The extremely large fraction of “Other” in Race, and of “Unknown” in Ethnicity suggest (to me) that the folks trying to enter that data into the system (and the system is reportedly also still pretty flaky), or maybe the folks trying to gather that data, have somewhat thrown in the towel. If so, I can't say I blame them. In any case, the numbers on the site right now, in the Race and Ethnicity categories, are too strange to waste any time on. On Age, though, they haven’t used “Unknown” or “Other,” but are sticking to regular old numbers. Here’s the chart of what Oregon has reported, on vaccinations by age, as of Friday. Since the official roll-out in Oregon began with healthcare and home care folks, the fact that the three biggest categories are from ages 30 to 59 makes perfect sense. Ostensibly, the next group to go will be teachers, starting Monday, Januar...

A male friend posted yesterday that (in his opinion), no matter how woke they might be, American men probably did not grasp quite how American women were feeling about Kamala Harris being the first woman elected to national executive office. It brought me up a bit short. I mean, there’s the obvious problem of Categories That Are Too Large, as if all American women are feeling the same way, when we know there are some who are not excited about Democrats, or about Harris in particular, or…. I could go on here for a long time. We know some American women are racist, misogynist, anti-lawyer, anti-prosecutor, anti-Californian…. I’m not being flip. I’m saying that “American women” are not a bloc of feelings. (Alex Wong, Getty Images) And I was also thinking (spoiler: obvious thoughts coming!) that even amongst women who were rejoicing, white women don’t quite grasp how Black women are feeling, and those of us who aren’t of Southeast Asian ancestry likely don’t quite grasp the feelings of t...