Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Monday, May 11, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Twenty-Seventh - Happy Anniversary
The human mind keeps a very good calendar.
There’s probably a good reason for this, hidden somewhere in the depths of history or biology. People who could keep track of events and patterns tended to survive more or do better than those who couldn’t. We find those patterns comforting even now in a digital age that prizes novelty and defines anything done twice on purpose as a rut. Even our social media platforms know this, which is part of the reason why they keep reminding you of what you posted a year ago, five years ago, a decade ago, even if you’re not who you were then.
It’s why we keep track of birthdays and anniversaries despite the fact that the changes in our lives happen more gradually than that. There’s no big shift from the day before you turn 30 to the day after, but the small changes add up and you look back and see a milestone that perhaps wasn’t obvious at the time.
Today is my parents’ 57th anniversary.
It doesn’t feel any different from yesterday, in some ways, but over time it adds up to something important because it is a measure of a love that exists in the world and that matters.
My dad passed away a few years ago, but my mom is doing well. It’s still their anniversary and it is still a day to celebrate. You should celebrate the good things in this world.
We’re all living apart now, my mom and my brother and me and our respective families – we were even before all the lockdowns started – but miles mean nothing in the larger scheme of things, not really. We know we’re here.
Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.
There’s probably a good reason for this, hidden somewhere in the depths of history or biology. People who could keep track of events and patterns tended to survive more or do better than those who couldn’t. We find those patterns comforting even now in a digital age that prizes novelty and defines anything done twice on purpose as a rut. Even our social media platforms know this, which is part of the reason why they keep reminding you of what you posted a year ago, five years ago, a decade ago, even if you’re not who you were then.
It’s why we keep track of birthdays and anniversaries despite the fact that the changes in our lives happen more gradually than that. There’s no big shift from the day before you turn 30 to the day after, but the small changes add up and you look back and see a milestone that perhaps wasn’t obvious at the time.
Today is my parents’ 57th anniversary.
It doesn’t feel any different from yesterday, in some ways, but over time it adds up to something important because it is a measure of a love that exists in the world and that matters.
My dad passed away a few years ago, but my mom is doing well. It’s still their anniversary and it is still a day to celebrate. You should celebrate the good things in this world.
We’re all living apart now, my mom and my brother and me and our respective families – we were even before all the lockdowns started – but miles mean nothing in the larger scheme of things, not really. We know we’re here.
Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Twenty-Sixth - Notes from Lockdown
1. It’s May 10 here in Baja Canada and it snowed. Not much, granted, but seriously – it should not snow at all in May. That’s just rude.
2. This is especially so given that Kim and I just finished putting in a raised bed garden in the front of the house, now that we’re allowed to put them there, and Kim has a pallet of small green plants in medium-sized green cups waiting to be transferred to the big green world outside. They’ll just have to keep waiting, I suppose.
3. We are making progress on Lauren’s basement-cleaning project. Not as much progress as she would like us to be making, but enough to be noticeable. Part of the problem, of course, is that while some of what is leaving the basement is heading straight for the landfill or the recycling center, much of it is perfectly serviceable if no longer anything we can use and there is nowhere that is taking donations these days. We’re not just going to throw it away. Add all that together and it means that mostly what we are doing is decluttering the basement while encluttering the garage. Eventually we will reach equilibrium.
4. One does make exciting discoveries, however. Lauren and Kim discovered Kim’s wedding dress and it mostly fits Lauren these days.
5. The semester is winding down now, and not a moment too soon. Online classes take a lot more out of you than regular classes – especially if your classes weren’t really designed to be online in the first place and you had to do some hurried retconning to get them where they needed to be. I’m looking forward to a week or so without so many Zoom meetings before the next round starts up again.
6. All those whingers threatening to sue their universities because they had to go to online classes instead of dying from coronavirus caught in a lecture hall are cordially invited to take their horse and find some other form of entertainment.
7. Happy Mother’s Day, for those who have, are, have ever had or been, or may one day have or be mothers! We had a lovely time yesterday when it was about 30F warmer than it is today – we headed up to one of the state parks that is now open and took a walk around for a bit. It’s a nice socially distant way to get out of the house. We saw a bald eagle fly by and a handful of pelicans, we scored a tray of buckeye brownies from a small shop that was open (“Mask up, folks! We’re going in!”) and we had a nice day. Today we’ve managed to do one Zoom call with my side of the family and are working on another with Kim’s side of the family and it is nice to see whomever can make it. And for those who can’t make it, we’ll try again another time.
8. We’re actually extending the holiday out a bit, as we tend to do. We have a “Movable Feast” tradition wherein holidays happen whenever you have time for them. Oliver has been swamped by the last week of his class and was unable to join us yesterday, so we’ll keep the holiday going for another week and by then perhaps the thing I ordered for Kim will have arrived. Never a bad time for a holiday, really.
9. Having completed the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy project, I have now moved on to rereading all of Christopher Moore’s books. In order, because that’s the kind of nerd I am. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should find one of his books and get on that. We need funny these days.
10. Watching the current president and his administration try to deal with this pandemic and its consequences has been very much like watching a pigeon trying to play chess. Neither has any idea what it is doing, and when pressed they both kick pieces over randomly, shit everywhere, and then act like they’ve won. I wonder what it would be like to have responsible adults in charge of the country again.
2. This is especially so given that Kim and I just finished putting in a raised bed garden in the front of the house, now that we’re allowed to put them there, and Kim has a pallet of small green plants in medium-sized green cups waiting to be transferred to the big green world outside. They’ll just have to keep waiting, I suppose.
3. We are making progress on Lauren’s basement-cleaning project. Not as much progress as she would like us to be making, but enough to be noticeable. Part of the problem, of course, is that while some of what is leaving the basement is heading straight for the landfill or the recycling center, much of it is perfectly serviceable if no longer anything we can use and there is nowhere that is taking donations these days. We’re not just going to throw it away. Add all that together and it means that mostly what we are doing is decluttering the basement while encluttering the garage. Eventually we will reach equilibrium.
4. One does make exciting discoveries, however. Lauren and Kim discovered Kim’s wedding dress and it mostly fits Lauren these days.
5. The semester is winding down now, and not a moment too soon. Online classes take a lot more out of you than regular classes – especially if your classes weren’t really designed to be online in the first place and you had to do some hurried retconning to get them where they needed to be. I’m looking forward to a week or so without so many Zoom meetings before the next round starts up again.
6. All those whingers threatening to sue their universities because they had to go to online classes instead of dying from coronavirus caught in a lecture hall are cordially invited to take their horse and find some other form of entertainment.
7. Happy Mother’s Day, for those who have, are, have ever had or been, or may one day have or be mothers! We had a lovely time yesterday when it was about 30F warmer than it is today – we headed up to one of the state parks that is now open and took a walk around for a bit. It’s a nice socially distant way to get out of the house. We saw a bald eagle fly by and a handful of pelicans, we scored a tray of buckeye brownies from a small shop that was open (“Mask up, folks! We’re going in!”) and we had a nice day. Today we’ve managed to do one Zoom call with my side of the family and are working on another with Kim’s side of the family and it is nice to see whomever can make it. And for those who can’t make it, we’ll try again another time.
8. We’re actually extending the holiday out a bit, as we tend to do. We have a “Movable Feast” tradition wherein holidays happen whenever you have time for them. Oliver has been swamped by the last week of his class and was unable to join us yesterday, so we’ll keep the holiday going for another week and by then perhaps the thing I ordered for Kim will have arrived. Never a bad time for a holiday, really.
9. Having completed the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy project, I have now moved on to rereading all of Christopher Moore’s books. In order, because that’s the kind of nerd I am. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should find one of his books and get on that. We need funny these days.
10. Watching the current president and his administration try to deal with this pandemic and its consequences has been very much like watching a pigeon trying to play chess. Neither has any idea what it is doing, and when pressed they both kick pieces over randomly, shit everywhere, and then act like they’ve won. I wonder what it would be like to have responsible adults in charge of the country again.
Monday, May 4, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Twenty-Fifth - Simple Math
Okay folks. Let’s do some math.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that 98% of Americans are not idiots. This may be optimistic. But for the most part people tend to be fairly reasonable and aware of things, especially where their own survival is concerned. We’re evolutionarily programmed to be at least that smart. And most people are just fine.
You will note that 98% covers an awful lot of Americans. There is no single race, party, creed, gender, orientation, or sports fandom that even approaches that number. Most of us across the board are simply not idiots.
But that’s “most.” Not “all.” There is in point of fact an irreducible percentage of idiots among us and that’s just how it is. Let’s be charitable about the number and guess low and stick with the 2% figure.
As of today, there are about 330,000,000 Americans, and more coming every day.
Two percent of three hundred thirty million is 6,600,000.
This means that even at the most optimistic estimate, there are more than six and a half million idiots in the United States.
That’s more than the entire population of Denmark. If every single person in Denmark was a blithering idiot incapable of feeding themselves without inflicting fatal spoon injuries on the cat and burning down half the block, we’d still have more idiots than that. And fewer cats.
It’s more than the entire population of Finland, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, or Croatia. It’s more than all of Jamaica and Uruguay combined. It’s three times the population of Slovenia and four times the population of Bahrain. It’s half the population of Belgium.
It’s a LOT of idiots.
The problem with idiots is that their impact is logarithmic. Below a certain point they’re barely noticeable – they’re a danger to themselves but well within the tolerances that Nature demands for progress. Somebody has to be at the bottom of the curve, after all. This is why other countries are generally behaving as responsible adults here in the middle of the pandemic. Their idiots haven’t crossed the line and reached critical mass yet, so they can be safely shunted aside and squashed down by the non-idiot 98% of the population. But once the number of idiots does cross that line they become a serious problem and then everyone, idiot or not, is – as the old saying goes – fucked unto the Lord.
There’s an old riddle about algae that double in number every day and take 100 days to completely cover a pond. How many days does it take to cover half of the pond?
Most people automatically answer 50, but like many popular ideas that is both simplistic and wrong. Remember, it doubles every day. Half the pond won’t be covered until the 99th day. And honestly, until you get to day 93 or so, you won’t even notice it.
Plagues work that way too.
And so do idiots.
The United States is awash in a critical mass of idiots right now, millions of them, all of them loudly protesting for their right to die gasping for air while they drown in their own lungs and waving their pathetic little penis extenders in the air while they do so. Some of them are also waving the Flag of Southern Treason as if that’s going to earn them the respect of anyone with more than six functioning brain cells, and just because they’re Extra Special Snowflakes there are even a few of them are actually waving around the flag of an enemy nation that the United States and the Allies ground into dust in 1945. Remember that? We gave medals to the Americans who did that and we called those Americans the Greatest Generation. People should remember that.
Folks, the only reason any American should be carrying a Nazi flag is if that American captured it in battle.
Now, if these idiots were the only ones who would suffer I’d be tempted to let them have their wish. Might raise the general level of intelligence and morality around the place. Not the most humane thing, granted, but part of being an adult is having the right to make stupid decisions about your own future and this absolutely qualifies.
The problem, of course, is that by their dimwitted, self-centered, immoral, and grotesquely immature actions those idiots are actively harming the rest of us, and that’s where that right to be stupid ends. They’re threatening the non-idiot 98% of Americans - a figure that includes nurses, doctors, essential workers, children, and anyone smart enough to understand that deadly diseases don’t give a damn about politics, that the economy is made of people and not dollars, and that there is a significant difference between “unconstitutional” and “inconvenienced.” These idiots have reached critical mass and there are no grownups in the federal government left to swat them down like the misbehaving toddlers they are.
Hell, the post turtle in the Oval Office is one of them.
Unless and until the idiots are herded back into their protected spaces and given crayons and paper enough to keep them occupied for the next few months, the pandemic will continue to spiral out of control and we will look back on the current projections of half a million dead with longing that we might have gotten away that lightly if only the idiots hadn’t reached critical mass.
Most Americans aren’t idiots.
Almost all of them are not idiots, in fact.
But the simple math says there are enough idiots even so that this may not save us.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that 98% of Americans are not idiots. This may be optimistic. But for the most part people tend to be fairly reasonable and aware of things, especially where their own survival is concerned. We’re evolutionarily programmed to be at least that smart. And most people are just fine.
You will note that 98% covers an awful lot of Americans. There is no single race, party, creed, gender, orientation, or sports fandom that even approaches that number. Most of us across the board are simply not idiots.
But that’s “most.” Not “all.” There is in point of fact an irreducible percentage of idiots among us and that’s just how it is. Let’s be charitable about the number and guess low and stick with the 2% figure.
As of today, there are about 330,000,000 Americans, and more coming every day.
Two percent of three hundred thirty million is 6,600,000.
This means that even at the most optimistic estimate, there are more than six and a half million idiots in the United States.
That’s more than the entire population of Denmark. If every single person in Denmark was a blithering idiot incapable of feeding themselves without inflicting fatal spoon injuries on the cat and burning down half the block, we’d still have more idiots than that. And fewer cats.
It’s more than the entire population of Finland, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, or Croatia. It’s more than all of Jamaica and Uruguay combined. It’s three times the population of Slovenia and four times the population of Bahrain. It’s half the population of Belgium.
It’s a LOT of idiots.
The problem with idiots is that their impact is logarithmic. Below a certain point they’re barely noticeable – they’re a danger to themselves but well within the tolerances that Nature demands for progress. Somebody has to be at the bottom of the curve, after all. This is why other countries are generally behaving as responsible adults here in the middle of the pandemic. Their idiots haven’t crossed the line and reached critical mass yet, so they can be safely shunted aside and squashed down by the non-idiot 98% of the population. But once the number of idiots does cross that line they become a serious problem and then everyone, idiot or not, is – as the old saying goes – fucked unto the Lord.
There’s an old riddle about algae that double in number every day and take 100 days to completely cover a pond. How many days does it take to cover half of the pond?
Most people automatically answer 50, but like many popular ideas that is both simplistic and wrong. Remember, it doubles every day. Half the pond won’t be covered until the 99th day. And honestly, until you get to day 93 or so, you won’t even notice it.
Plagues work that way too.
And so do idiots.
The United States is awash in a critical mass of idiots right now, millions of them, all of them loudly protesting for their right to die gasping for air while they drown in their own lungs and waving their pathetic little penis extenders in the air while they do so. Some of them are also waving the Flag of Southern Treason as if that’s going to earn them the respect of anyone with more than six functioning brain cells, and just because they’re Extra Special Snowflakes there are even a few of them are actually waving around the flag of an enemy nation that the United States and the Allies ground into dust in 1945. Remember that? We gave medals to the Americans who did that and we called those Americans the Greatest Generation. People should remember that.
Folks, the only reason any American should be carrying a Nazi flag is if that American captured it in battle.
Now, if these idiots were the only ones who would suffer I’d be tempted to let them have their wish. Might raise the general level of intelligence and morality around the place. Not the most humane thing, granted, but part of being an adult is having the right to make stupid decisions about your own future and this absolutely qualifies.
The problem, of course, is that by their dimwitted, self-centered, immoral, and grotesquely immature actions those idiots are actively harming the rest of us, and that’s where that right to be stupid ends. They’re threatening the non-idiot 98% of Americans - a figure that includes nurses, doctors, essential workers, children, and anyone smart enough to understand that deadly diseases don’t give a damn about politics, that the economy is made of people and not dollars, and that there is a significant difference between “unconstitutional” and “inconvenienced.” These idiots have reached critical mass and there are no grownups in the federal government left to swat them down like the misbehaving toddlers they are.
Hell, the post turtle in the Oval Office is one of them.
Unless and until the idiots are herded back into their protected spaces and given crayons and paper enough to keep them occupied for the next few months, the pandemic will continue to spiral out of control and we will look back on the current projections of half a million dead with longing that we might have gotten away that lightly if only the idiots hadn’t reached critical mass.
Most Americans aren’t idiots.
Almost all of them are not idiots, in fact.
But the simple math says there are enough idiots even so that this may not save us.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Twenty-Fourth - So Long and Thanks for All the Memes
Revised to say "Mostly funny."
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