I have a lovely, awesome niece who has gone fully over to the Dark Side. Almost certainly voted for Trump, worships Evil Jesus (not the Nice Jesus that people here believe in), and posts anti-vax stuff on Facebook. Very sad.
I just got the first part of a two-part shingles vaccine and, even though my arm is annoyingly red and sore, am looking forward to getting the second dose to finish it. And now my sister (emphatically not in health care) says I should get a measles booster. I think we're virulently pro-vax.
It splits families.
RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He's Tragically Wrong About Vaccines.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/08/robert-kennedy-jr-measles-vaccines-226798
I once had a vague intention of assembling something coherent about polio but I guess Jessica Biel's ass is as good as it'll ever get, so.
I have no idea who this person is. She's famous for being a sex bomb or something? She's different from both Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Beals? And Jessica Rabbit? Can the straight men explain this one to me?
No straight man would confuse Jessica Biel with Jennifer Beals (10 years earlier) or Jessica Chastain (10 years later). We do confuse her with Jessica Alba and Jennifer Garner.
It seems like obsessive moms are feeling like it's their DUTY now to choose which vaccines to get. To curate their child's vaccine experience, with the unique knowledge they have of their child's immune system. Why can't people in just ONE avenue of life admit that they should probably defer to the judgment of professionals?
Funny that Jessica Chastain is actually significantly older than Alba and Biel. It took a while for her to become famous.
Also she has red hair. That is a distinct catergory.
The link in 5 is really much too generous to the clerics. Nigeria, Pakistan. Note the dates.
In 2005, Esquire named her the "Sexiest Woman Alive" in a six-part series, with each month revealing a different body part and clue to the woman's identity
I'm researching Ms. Biel. Her wikipedia entry also says her mother was (is?) a spiritual healer, so she comes upon the woo-woo tendencies honestly.
Found this in a few minutes of looking. Since California instituted its "only medical exemptions for vaccines" law, the number of medical exemptions quadrupled. Blame crackpot doctors, and the people who wrote the bill back in 2016. Not much sympathy for Biel or her dearest friends here.
12 They should limit medical exemptions to those given by a pediatrician.
My daughter tells me that there have been cases of mumps on her campus. I find this completely absurd.
There were measles cases when I was in college. This was before they found some weakness with the vaccine protocol.
13: The thing Biel is protesting against is SB 276.
This bill would instead require the State Department of Public Health, by July 1, 2020, to develop and make available for use by licensed physicians and surgeons a statewide standardized medical exemption request form, which, commencing January 1, 2021, would be the only medical exemption documentation that a governing authority may accept. The bill would require the State Public Health Officer or the public health officer's designee to approve or deny a medical exemption request, upon determining that the request provides sufficient medical evidence that the immunization is contraindicated or that a specific precaution regarding a particular immunization exists, based on guidelines of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)... The bill would authorize the State Public Health Officer or a local public health officer to revoke a medical exemption if the State Public Health Officer or local public health officer determines that the medical exemption is fraudulent or inconsistent with applicable CDC guidelines...
IANADoctor, lawyer, or Californian, I've glossed over a lot in the blockquote, and we may want to quibble with some details, but overall it seems to get at the important stuff.
With mumps in Philadelphia and measles in NYC, I'm contacting my doctor to get an MMR booster. I have a new nephew coming in a month and I don't want to endanger him.
You could endanger him the local way, with Whiz.
Anyway, I had to get a MMR booster to go to college.
I wonder if I ever got a mumps vaccine. It seems to me that when I was a kid, mumps was just one of the diseases you were supposed to get, like chickenpox. I did get chickenpox, but not the mumps.
peep@20: the MMR (mumps/measles/rubella) vaccine has been in-use since 1971 (apparently). I was born in 1965, came to America in 1969, and I've had it, probably whatever boosters were indicated at whatever time by whatever standard protocols (b/c my parents were not idiots in this regard). I knew a guy though, who didn't get the mumps vaccine. He got it in 1981, and it "dropped on him". No idea if it caused him reproductive problems, b/c hey, I got the heck outta Texas, never looked back.
There has been some noise lately that the MMR vaccine protocol changed in 1989 (requiring two shots) and people who were vaccinated before that may not be adequately protected. I went and had a measles antibody titer done, and sure enough, I was low, so I just got a booster shot recently.
This came up today because I was scheduled to give blood, but the MMR shot has a 4-week deferral period. Oops.
My post @21: by "he got it in 1981" I meant of course "he got the mumps in 1981", not "he got the vaccine in 1981". Sorry.
|| Moby likes to bring up the "Death Kroger" in Columbus. Last night there was a shooting in the parking lot of the Kroger at the corner of High & Broadway. That's actually a very nice Kroger.
https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190612/man-shot-in-parking-lot-of-kroger-store-in-clintonville
||
Beil and Garner both have homes in Montana. Garner hosted a fundraiser in Bzn for HRC in 16: maybe also for Kathleen Williams in 18, I don't know.
My daughter and her fellow aren't anti-vax, exactly, but they didn't think the timetable and combinations that are recommended were strictly necessary, and so, with their pediatrician, worked out different timetable and combinations for my granddaughter. To some distress hereabouts, but it seems to have worked out.
6. If you really want to waste some time, you can search posts/comments from a different decade and see a bunch of references to Ms. Biel's posterior. In a different century, cultural anthropologists will develop theories on the evolution of human behavior in the early 21st century based on the transition from talking about Ms. Biel's ass to talking about Heebie's ass.
Just rats in a maze.
28. Exactly. Unfogged archives will be fruitful for them. Then they'll come up with theories about unfogged and swimming.
Hip snapping and pisterior mapping.
It seems like obsessive moms are feeling like it's their DUTY now to choose which vaccines to get. To curate their child's vaccine experience, with the unique knowledge they have of their child's immune system. Why can't people in just ONE avenue of life admit that they should probably defer to the judgment of professionals?
Vaguely related to an interesting grar article at the Atlantic: The Worst Patients in the World
You Americans with your unwalled cities and your expensive health care.
You America and your militaristic basketball team names are no match for dinosaur-named teams.
They're running a TV commercial for a political candidate where "American-style health care" is mentioned in the same tones American political ads use for "death panels" or something.
I wonder if I got an MMR booster before college. I definitely had a rubella titre a couple of years ago. I think I had a work-based measles and mumps titre in 2014. That's when i found out that I had no varicella immunity despit getting vaccinated 10 years before. I kind of wonder if the student health services gave me the wrong vaccine. I was vaccinated again 5 years ago, and got a titre in 2017 showing that I had responded properly.
26: There's a whole taxonomy of Safeways in the DC area. The one I used to live close to is the Spanish Safeway; the one over near Georgetown is the Social Safeway; the one near Dupont had/has perpetual stocking problems, so it's the Soviet Safeway; stores located in neighborhoods thought to be dangerous are either the Scary Safeway or the Unsafeway; the one near (in?) the Watergate is the Senior Safeway; the one that used to be more or less hidden by a hill and a parking garage in Alexandria was the Secret Safeway. Or maybe that one was the Subterranean Safeway and the one on 20th St NW was the Secret Safeway.
Anyway. As you were.
You America and your militaristic basketball team names are no match for dinosaur-named teams.
Like the Atlanta Hawks and the New Orleans Pelicans.
English football teams are sadly unimaginative, either being just a town name (Liverpool), a town name plus the word "Athletic", or a town name plus a noun indicating aimless travel (Queens Park Rangers, Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers).
The Scottish league is a bit better, with team names that generally sound like types of potato: Heart of Midlothian, Queen of the South, Hibernian, Partick Thistle, St. Mirren, and so on.
Wales, of course, has Total Network Solutions FC for when you need a team who can compete with other Welsh-league semi pros AND optimize the spanning tree between your Ethernet switches.
Whereas formerly Soviet teams display great energy but little forward movement.
English football teams are sadly unimaginative
Youth teams are much more inventive. Our local leagues over the past few years have included Lions, Tigers, Terriers, Foxes, and Eagles; Warriors, Crusaders, Spartans, and Aztecs; and Spitfires and Blasters, among others.
Generally, the more middle-class the home area, the less likely the team was to live up to its namesake. Tatsu's team used to beat the W***ham Wolves, based in a very nice village a few miles away, by at least 10-nil every match; they would more accurately have been the W***ham Wimps.
Jessica Chastain is a tender goddess and I won't have you filthy reprobates bandying the lady's name.
43: I can't help feeling that the most important thing about the Crusaders, the Aztecs and the Spartans is that all three of them were completely defeated, to the point where only their ruins remain.
formerly Soviet teams display great energy but little forward movement.
They're in a state of permanent revolution.
Glasgow Rangers are informally known as the Huns, who have a rather better military record. No one's quite sure why, but I found while looking it up that Dundee United are known as the Arabs, because during a particularly cold winter they made the pitch playable by de-icing it with a massive industrial hot air blower and then dumping a lot of sand on top.
W***ham
This seems like inadequate Google-proofing, though I suppose it may bring some people from East London here.
Could be Waltham, Wareham, Whitham, Wrexham, Wickham or West Ham. Or Wytham if Ume isn't very good at counting. Or Witney if she isn't very good at spelling. Or Dunkeld if she is just lying through her teeth.
I think place name names make more sense. Why gesture vaguely toward someone else's communal militarism when you're trying to build your own?
CRUSADING FOR FASTER RESPONSE TIMES SINCE 1109
A similar process, unfortunately, has happened to the regiments. Really weird ones like The Black Watch, The Royal Green Jackets, The Sherwood Foresters and The Inns of Court Yeomanry have been done away with to be replaced with boring geographical names like the Royal Regiment of Scotland, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Mercian Regiment and so on.
Realistically, how many yeomen can the Inns of Court possibly support? They just have those little lawns in the courtyards.
Or Wytham if Ume isn't very good at counting. Or Witney if she isn't very good at spelling. Or Dunkeld if she is just lying through her teeth.
How well you know me. There's more than three letters missing from W[something]ham; I just got bored of typing asterisks.
Have adequate efforts been made to determine the contribution of the Umespawn and their devastating cosmopolitan teammates to the ressentiment that yielded Brexit?
Is this some sort of slur? I'll totally fight you if you're intending this as an insult.
Maybe? Did you support the Cameron-May decimation of higher education?
45 reminds me that (a) a black headed gal makes a freight train jump the track; (b) a long tall gal makes a preacher ball the jack; (c) a blonde headed woman makes a good man leave the town; while (d) a red-headed woman makes a boy slap his papa down. It's just science.
I don't think redheads were common in Thebes.
59: if you mean Thebes in Egypt, Pharaoh Rameses II was a redhead.
Redhead music? Just skip to 3 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=132&v=1bEznEYCh5k
Note to 22nd century cultural anthropologists: I was never really W C Handy's friend.
Someone, and I won't name names because as you all know I'm a very peaceful guy, is a bit slow on his classical references.
||
Paradise Lost: read/no-read?
|>
65: You'd enjoy it if you're the sort of person that enjoys that sort of thing, I guess? I read it in college, or major parts of it; it's been a while. I don't regret it but wouldn't read it for fun.
65. Listen. https://ia800503.us.archive.org/7/items/paradise_lost_08083_librivox/paradiselost_01_milton_64kb.mp3
A is A, I guess? I did it in college, or major parts of it; it's been a while. I don't regret it but wouldn't do it for fun.
It's a BINARY, lw! No listening!
I read it in college, or major parts of it; it's been a while. I don't regret it but wouldn't read it for fun.
I read shorter sections in college but otherwise that was my experience. The thing that helped me figure out how to read it was to start paying conscious attention to where individual sentences began and ended. When I first tried to read it I would get completely lost keeping track of what was happening, and I realized that was because there'd be three or four lines that were a clause within a sentence, and if I didn't keep track of that I'd miss that it was all just a hypothetical scenario or a metaphor . . .
https://librivox.org/paradise-lost-by-john-milton/
65-72 Shouldn't that be in the latest thread?
Except sometimes the lights from the stadium reflect off the water tanks on the roof next door. But only if I open the window and stick my head out.
Read. it's wonderful. But Nick's warning for Latinate syntax is important. Read slowly.
We will try to avoid spoilers.
Cambridge versus the surrounding villages, almost every match send to have been Eloi Vs Morlocks. Though who got to play which part did vary.
Hosts to provide refreshments?
Here is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgement to digest and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature or from story, from ancient fable or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts. An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination.
It has been therefore said without an indecent hyperbole by one of his encomiasts, that in reading Paradise Lost we read a book of universal knowledge.
But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
The second line of Paradise Lost is good authority against pedants who think that "whose" can't have an inanimate antecedent.
The most persuasive endorsement ever fielded.
As I mentioned many many years ago, I have the Anton Lesser version of PL on my ipod. I am still thrilled when a 3 or 5 minute excerpt of it pops up in a shuffle.
It was meant to be heard aloud, and I suppose Milton had it read back to him all the time as it was being written. Listening is, in this instance, the more authentic experience.
This, by William Empson, is another favorite bit of Milton criticism.
To be sure, Adam does not feel shame about sex, which the text of Genesis would be enough to forbid; but he feels the nobler shame described by Lewis, because he tells the angel that she can make him feel ill the wrong when he disagrees with her. On being upbraided for this breach of hierarchy, and told that "Love hath his seat in "Reason, and is judicious," he says in effect 'Come now, what do you know about this? Have you got any sex?' and Milton to his eternal credit makes the angel blush. Raphael explains that the angelic act of love is by total interpenetration (VIII. 62,0), a thing which human authors have regretted that they cannot achieve.
Having gone totally blind in 1652, Milton wrote Paradise Lost entirely through dictation with the help of amanuenses and friends
ill the wrong -> in the wrong, come on OCR
OCR is hard when you're BLIND. Asshole.
Ok, who says nay, besides Dr Johnson?
Horses, sometimes cows, chickens don't cause they don't know how.
Chickens are the most positive of all the farm animals.
Raphael explains that the angelic act of love is by total interpenetration (VIII. 62,0), a thing which human authors have regretted that they cannot achieve.
Unless you both eat a fuckton of psilocybin mushrooms before.
Upstate New York is kind of depressing, even after all the French speakers.
I thought the Simpsons mockery of it was a little cruel- too on the nose.
I missed the upstate New York episode.
SP appears to be unclear on the concept.
I'm just saying there's plenty to mock between the unemployment, obesity, and urban decay without getting into the opioids and alcoholism.
I was born in upstate New York but have almost no memory of it because my parents had had enough of it by the time I was two. They both worked for GE, my dad as an engineer optimizing some boring aspect of washing machines and my mom at an administrative job in Valves and Miscellaneous Parts. On her icy bus commute, a guy with a cognitive disability became infatuated with her and every day would offer her hot dog buns out of a large bucket that he carried with him.
In 1981 we all moved to Tucson and encountered a different set of problems.
I remember refusing to move to Tucson.
Maybe if she had accepted the unsolicited hotdog buns she would have progressed to unsolicited actual hotdogs.
Upstate New York is kind of depressing
It really is. The region has yet to recover from the recession of 2008-2009, but I suppose the causes of the economic malaise go much deeper, much further back in time.
I think I've commented before about the town (small city) of Gloversville, NY, which is just south of the Adirondacks? A really nice little place, with lots of beautiful, Victorian/Edwardian-era houses, with great woodwork (all gingerbread trim and etc), and lovely brickwork, and generous porches. Many of them now in sad decline, in a state of, apparently, near-permanent disrepair. There used to be money, and a circulation of goods and services (and therefore of people), in Gloversville, but no longer. It's one of those towns that global capitalism forgot, that was left behind by the forces of global capital.
Gloversville used to make, well, gloves, but other leather goods too. It's now cheaper to make those goods elsewhere. Those jobs are never coming back to Gloversville, which is, yeah, really depressing.
They could take off the "G" and try rebranding.
102 just made me laugh out loud.
That's basically what Lovelock, Nevada decided to do, but I haven't seen signs of global capital taking the bait. The Amazon warehouse is in Fernley.
I didn't know it used to be called Glovelock.
101: Gloversville was Richard Russo's hometown and fictionalized* as "Mohawk" in two of his early novels (one of which, The Risk Pool, I regard as his best). They both are set during the 60s and the ongoing economic slide sets context for the stories. His mother also worked at GE, and per a memoir of his moved with him to ... Arizona where he went to college (but Phoenix, he went to ASU).
*Nobody's Fool which was made into a very good movie with Paul Newman was set in "North Bath" which was primarily based on Ballston Spa (about 40 miles to the east).
I have a Pokemon from Bath, Ontario.
A one-man Overground Railroad.
You people have made me think about how a town named Glove Compartment might rebrand itself. The possibilities are obvious and awful.
Speaking of branding issues.
who succeeded Prince Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein of Jordan as the U.N.'s human rights czar
And also, have you people drunk coffee Coke? I think it's the first non-Coke Coke that isn't disgusting. It also mixes nicely with whisky. In case you were wondering.
Like in theory it would be good move because the condom and glove industries are presumably complementary and agglomerative. But realistically someday those factories will move to Burundi or somewhere and then you don't have a sex tourism industry because who wants to get their freak on when they're downwind of a latex refinery.
112: I don't think we have it here. The new flavor they're marketing is orange vanilla. When I use one of those make-your-own 1001 coke flavor machines, that's pretty much what I'd make already, so I'm enjoying it.
Vanilla coke did nothing for me. A sad failure, for which apologies are owed to the people of Mauritius.
Gloversville was also the American hometown of Samuela Goldwyn, founder of MGM Studios (he actually grew up in Poland and arrived there as a young adult). The "picturesque American town" look from early twentieth century movies was influenced by his recollections of Gloversville. Among other things, Goldwyn wanted Christmas scenes to be snowy, highly atypical in the majority of the U.S. (let alone Hollywood!) but commonplace in Gloversville.
At what point is it unethical to respond to a lengthy and utterly trivial vacation letter from a close blood relation with something like "Receipt achnowledged. - MC"? Asking for a friend.
I guess McCarthy was right about the queers running Hollywood.
Christmas scenes to be snowy, highly atypical in the majority of the U.S. (let alone Hollywood!) but commonplace in Gloversville.
And, presumably, Poland? Or do they get continental drought along with the cold.
I think they use something including at least some fraction of real coffee, because there's this sediment at the bottom of the bottles that won't rinse out without hot water. I know this because, as an enlightened topless expat Asian, I rinse out garbage for recycling.
All the canonical Christmases are staged by Jewish people.
119: Probably better to say something like "Glad you had a great trip."
Especially the German ones, with the tree and the cake.
The cake thing was something we never did when I was a child. It was always cookies. Since I like cake better, after I found out it was an option, we switched to cakes that look like trees.
|| Wasn't there a bear subthread somewhere? Anyway, the cinnamon yearling that's been visiting our next-door neighbors the last few days just got a welcome we all hope will prove to be memorable. My dog is on high alert to make it so. |>
Which bits of the US can expect reliably snowy Christmases? I assume the Midwest, the plains states, the Rockies...
"Reliably snowy Christmases" is kind of vague. If it means something like 90% or higher odds of having enough snow on the ground on Christmas that you can't see the grass of a normal lawn, large portions of the Midwest are not included. In Pittsburgh, there's really no time of the year you can count on having sustained snow cover and December isn't a a month with much snow, even of the kind that melts away.
That was me, because I'm all about the science.
The local micro-climates visible on that map are amazing. Stevi, Thompson Falls, Eureka. The west shore of Flathead Lake. Was this a factor, in addition to the topography, in the selection of Ulm as the place for a pishkun?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Peoples_Buffalo_Jump_State_Park)
On the Atlantic coast, snow is quite common from D.C. North, but rarely much accumulation before Christmas. Even the ridiculously cold and snowy city of Boston usually waits until January. Gulf Stream effect. Upstate New York gets its snow from the Great Lakes, which cool down earlier in the Winter.
On the Atlantic coast, snow is quite common from D.C. North, but rarely much accumulation before Christmas. Even the ridiculously cold and snowy city of Boston usually waits until January. Gulf Stream effect. Upstate New York gets its snow from the Great Lakes, which cool down earlier in the Winter.
The west shore of Flathead Lake.
East shore is better, because cherry farms. Was just up there a few weeks ago. Going to the Sun Road wasn't open yet past Avalanche Creek, but still a nice little outing. Lake McDonald in the morning...
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByyVSDnAX3f/
I remember getting a bunch of cherries in Montana when I was younger. I suppose that's where I was. They were the best cherries I have ever had.
119: my ex would respond to emails from me she didn't want to actually respond to substantively with "rec'd" so I guess I'm saying I don't recommend it.
132: thanks! That's less than I thought - I always think of eg New York having colder winters than the UK. But I suppose that cold winters don't necessarily mean white Christmases.
(slap)
RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle
This site has the US map I have been more familiar with. Colors different so hard to compare and it is based on 1988-2005 data (and not clear if it is chance of 'measurable snow on the ground" like the one in 132 or chance of snow *falling* (the text seems to indicate the former and the link to the original NOAA link no longer works*.
The site also has maps for Canada and Europe.
*They update the official "normals" every decade to the period of the prior thirty years; seeing the evolution of White Christmas maps over the decades would be interesting.
the ridiculously cold and snowy city of Boston
Boston itself typically gets less snow than places even 10-20 miles inland, due to being right on the ocean. The whole eastern part of MA tends to veer almost randomly among rain, freezing rain, wet snow, actual dryish snow, and glacial apocalypse. Last (or maybe it was 2017?) we had one big, rather wet snow in November, then nothing until March, when we had several heavy, deep snowfalls. Sometimes we hit 70F in January. This extra variability comes to us courtesy of global warming: it didn't used to be like this, even in my lifetime.
136: Upstate New York gets its snow from the Great Lakes, which cool down earlier in the Winter.
Let me offer a somewhat different take on the observed snowfall patterns. The volume of water in the Great Lakes is insufficient to moderate the temperatures of the entire region* so air temperatures fall quickly with reduced insolation in latter part of fall (so standard Continental climate). The lakes do cool down faster than the ocean but there is still a significant lag period when the lakes are much warmer than the air which leads directly to the lake effect snows. You can see the relative front-loading in snowiness compared to NYC in the following (especially in Buffalo which is in the lee of Lake Erie which is shallower and cools/freezes faster than Ontario which has more effect on Rochester).
(snowfall in.) Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. Mar.
Buffalo 7.9 27.4 25.3 17.7 12.9
Rochester 7.3 21.8 28.2 21.5 16.3
NYC 0.3 4.8 7.0 8.8 3.6
*There is some very local temperature moderation near the shorelines. Most significant results is to extend the growing season within the first few miles of the shore.
Shout out to whoever enabled the <pre> tag.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/AETmcEnXRC/polio_the_final_battle
Good long piece from the BBC about Jessica Biel's mates in Pakistan...
149: Didn't we fuck that up by having US intelligence people posing as public health people distributing vaccines a while back? I've forgotten the details, but there was some horrible story along those lines.
150: supposedly they ran a Hep A immunisation campaign to collect blood samples in order to find bin Laden family members.
It didn't help, but the Taliban was campaigning against vaccination in Pakistan since at least 2007 because they thought (or at least told people) it was a Western plot to sterilise Muslims, and/or vaccines were made with pig fat (you know, like musket cartridges). Note that this is what the mullah they interviewed thought before he did a bit of research. Some apparently also think it's a cover for Christian missionaries; some are just refusing to do it unless they get paid.
152: but the BBC piece adds value!
I had an office mate from Pakistan once. He was talking about how Hep A was just the kind of thing that you get from time to time.
Also about how his brother told him to bring back great big piles of porn from America so that the brother could use it to pay off favors. This was before the internet was so common.
He should have put stickers on all the porn saying to wash your hands after using, especially before preparing food.