1. Wow, phone banking is exhausting. It's been a long time since I had a job where I'd sit and stare at the clock and the time would just crawl, but this brought it back, vividly. Those two hours felt like a full eight. I'm going to force myself to do this at least twice a month between now and November, to punish myself for being an American.

2. I just learned about making condensed milk ice cream, which is very easy and requires no special equipment (other than a mixer). I made a pandan flavored one and a macapuno. It tastes very, very strongly of condensed milk, and is perhaps overly sweet, so it's not for everyone, but fortunately condensed milk is one of my favorite foods.

3. Did everyone here already watch Dark? I think it's good, but I also think I'm maybe too dumb to watch this show. But I like the fancy wallpaper in all the rooms in Winden, and also Regina's beautifully patterned blouses. I also like how each episode has a music video in the middle, where an English-language pop song plays for several minutes while a super HD camera watches the pores on German people's faces as they stare moodily off in the distance.

Where did you get the panda?

I got the wedding invitation for my nephew's wedding on Labor Day weekend. I was still hoping they would come to their senses and cancel, but I guess that's not going to happen.

The nice thing about weddings is that you can cancel them after they already happened.

The other nice thing is you can just mail a toaster if you don't want to go.

5: Yes, that's our current plan. I'm just worried my mom will decide to come from Israel. That seems crazy to me, and it would also make me feel terrible for not going. I've told her I think it's a terrible idea, and she seems to agree, but I think the semi-quarantine is wearing on her and she is getting lonely.

I bought and set up an Amazon fire stick for my dad's tv, and he thinks I'm a genius. At the beach right now, and it's perfect. 90 degrees, but some cloud cover, a soft breeze, and very few people. Also, I'm flying home 24 hours before the tropical storm is projected to land.

If I may be allowed the pettiest of rants: yesterday we tie-dyed shirts for the kids and ourselves. We left them to sit in ziploc bags till today. I just discovered today that my sister-in-law (the covid-minimizer) decided it was time to take them out, and so she snipped all the rubber bands off, by herself, and stuck them in the dryer to set.

I'm feeling far too irritated about the fact that she snipped the rubber bands off my shirt, and my kids' shirts, thus depriving us of the unfolding moment where you see how the rubberbands left white marks and how your shirt turned out, based on how you tied it.

Like I'm feeling momentarily actually angry about this dumb thing. Clearly this is absurd and probably just underlying pandemic angst. But still. That's the best part!

Yeah, I think the rule is that you have to cut people a lot of slack when they are genuinely trying to help, even if they are fucking morons.

7: Looks like you are a genius.

In our pre-wedding "quarantine" but shit keeps coming up that is eroding it. Other family member and pet health/dental problems for instance. Bazzfazz.

||
Maybe there's a beeter thread but I was just gobsmacked by this. (Have to admit I do not know the context of why it cane up.

Bill Barr to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries on America's botched COVID testing: "The problem with the testing system was a function of President Obama's mishandling of the CDC."M/i>
|>

Guy certainly does know how to play the audience of one game. Fuck him forever.

I've been thinking that the House should impeach Trump again, simply to occupy his mind. While he's obsessing about being impeached, he can't be thinking about other things.

Except urine. He's got minions on YouTube asking for Fauci's urine. There's really nothing he won't try to get his piss fix.

I could be worse. Damned coccyx still hurts a lot. I did receive my made-in-Hebron keffiyeh though, so that's nice.

Also, maybe, just maybe, folx in Tejas shouldn't go around waiving guns at each other all the time?

Fish gotta swim.

8: That is super annoying, but I'm sure that it'd be dismissed as "helping" (per 9), so you'd be seen as petty instead of correct. The only way to beat that would have been to talk up the rubber bands as the exciting part while you were doing it, but that'd have killed the surprise for your kids.

1.1: That was my experience in 2016; time really stretched. Of course, there was also a lot of waiting for more senior but not more technologically competent people to iron out VAN assignments, etc., so there was also a lot of feeling like your time was being wasted before you even got the numbers to call.

1.2: Along those lines, I found a stupid simple recipe that's turned out well. It's 1c heavy cream, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and flavoring of choice (a tablespoon on cinnamon was great!); put them in a contain, shake it for 5 minutes, and place in freezer for a couple hours. Old gelato containers work great for that quantity -- it really does make it easy to make two portions of ice cream to match whatever dessert you'll be serving. [I think I found the basic technique as an aside in a NYT ice cream recipe.]

Some of us are phone banking for the first time ever tomorrow. Maybe let the delusion of relevance last until then.

Got tested Friday, as I said. Got to Vermont Sunday afternoon and kept to ourselves fairly well until we got the test results this morning. Negative. There are a very small number of vectors we had between the test and getting here, so I think we're reasonably safe. Still not going to go nuts, of course.

1.3: Already watched. Loved Season 1. Thought Season 2 was unnecessary but ultimately good. Hated Season 3.

Cat is dying. Pandemic is making all of the dealing with that even more fraught and wrenching.

Starting to get really irrationally (I think) angry at people doing much of anything; currently thinking that Thanksgiving and Christmas travel is off the table. Also staring down the barrel of a year of half-asses homeschooling.

I think I sound depressed. Probably not wrong. Hand to cancel the therapist to go to the vet.

My son has his airline ticket (no direct flights from NYC to Bytown, thanks to COVID19 measures, so: NYC to Toronto to Ottawa), and will be coming up here on 13 August.

Here's me, at the Ottawa airport on the 13th of August, brandishing his cert. of Canadian citizenship ["You get that lad his papers," a Canada customs official once scolded me, when my son was about 6 years old, and that customs official was exactly right], and ready to provide more than ample documentation, just to get that boyo up into Canada.

Listen to this INSANE shit that I just heard. So, Texas is doing both antigen and PCR tests for Covid. The way it was explained to me is that antigen is cheap, quick, with higher false negative. PCR is very backlogged, slower even in the best of times, but lower false negatives. But crucially, a positive antigen test is still truly positive.

Anyway: the state is (apparently) classifying antigen results as "presumed positive" and thus not counting them towards total case counts. And possibly even worse, they're counting the antigen tests towards the denominator of the positivity rate, but of course not towards the numerator.

So both measures are artificially depressed, and we have no idea by how much. WTFFFFF

That's only a problem if you value human life over college football.

That's unbelievably stupid- a positive antigen test means you have viral particles so are almost certainly infectious, while PCR you can be positive post-infectious. That's aside from your description of the positive rate of antigen tests by definition always being zero.

It's crazy. All of a sudden I'm anxious that our apparent beginnings of a decline is just completely fabricated, and we're going to be lulled into opening up schools, etc, and we won't be able to detect it if the numbers go up again.

Hospitalizations are down in Texas and I would think that would be much harder to rig in that way.

I knew that they'd removed 3000 cases from Bexar cases retroactively, but I hadn't understood why.

I'm thinking this could affect hospitalization count as well: a person comes in with severe symptoms. You give them a quick antigen test. If it's negative, you give them the PCR test. But if the antigen test is positive, they'd be a hospitalized "presumed positive" but not actually confirmed.

It could even affect the death counts in the same way.

That could be a problem.

In fact, here's an article about it:

Collin County Judge Chris Hill worried if the state began reporting "probable" cases--either separately or, worse, intermixed with confirmed case totals--the public would be unduly alarmed by a perceived "spike" in cases and lose trust in data coming from the government.

"That doesn't help us from a public standpoint to put out numbers that the public are going to distrust," Hill said at that meeting.

Hill said adding probables to the mix would also stress local health department resources by inflating the number of people being monitored--a key factor as the county considered whether to continue tracking COVID patients locally or hand off the responsibility to the state.

That sucks, hg. I'm sorry we're living in a world where we can't trust our elected officials to tell the truth about such basic things.

I'm currently trying to navigate the reality of being-stuck-living-with-an-ex-after-a-breakup, which is far from ideal. I just keep reminding myself that nothing lasts forever.

In happier news, I just found out that a librarian friend of mine who runs a nonprofit organization got a grant to collaborate with the amazing nonprofit Texas After Violence Project. I am a huge fan of both orgs and am thrilled to hear some truly outstanding news from Texas. Woo-hoo TAVP!

Sorry about the breakup.

Thanks. It was my decision, which makes it marginally better, I guess. But it's still basically awful in the way all breakups are awful. Combined with not wanting to evict him into a pandemic but also really really really wanting him out. Sigh.

Oh jeez, that's a tough spot to be in. Any established timeline for how soon he can move out?

28: Not sure where you are getting those mnumbers, I believe texas is one of the states Covid-Tracking has flagged as having "unstable" hospitalization numbers while they switch to the new reporting system.

This was several days back (may be corrected by now).

But two weeks after the rules began, it's clear that technical requirements associated with the new guidelines have caused major problems. Some of the states facing the largest COVID-19 outbreaks--such as California, Texas, and South Carolina--have warned that they are not reporting accurate hospital information due to the switchover.

I just googled "Texas covid hospitalization" and looked at the first link.

It was new hospitalizations, not total.

Also, I did read it, just looked at the graph.

37: Texas Tribune definitely makes it look like hospitalizations are decreasing.

36: No, that's the whole issue at this point. He has a variety of (mostly legitimate) reasons that he won't/can't move out yet. But his retail job means that I can't hug or touch or socialize with my family (except outdoors with a mask) nor have my nieces and nephews come over to cook or have a sleepover and give their parents a break. And my dad can't come here to live if his independent-living facility gets an outbreak. So I'm pretty torn up about that.

My therapist is great, fortunately. And I decided to pay out of pocket for a few couples counseling sessions (with a different counselor so no bias toward me) just to try to hash out his moving-out process, since we weren't getting anywhere trying to talk to each other.

Could you keep getting cats until he leaves?

I don't know; is it necessary that I like cats for this plan to work?

I'm glad you're all checking in and I hope you all get the local hugs and support you need. Nathan and Witt deserve triple hugs (in a responsible way, of course). I am so happy that JPJ's kid is finally going to be heading north to a better-governed country. I'm sure that's a relief. The Texas shenanigans are disturbing.

I remain pissed off that so many of us have sacrificed so much and the national government has done less than nothing with the time we bought. COVID-19 is going to be the 3rd leading cause of death in the US this year. I have been catching up on medical appointments this month. I've most been impressed by the precautions in the offices. I have one more tomorrow with gastroenterology to consult about my gallbladder pain that's ramped up this year. Since I haven't a gallbladder it's probably stones forming in the bile ducts. I actually hope it is that because an ERCP procedure can fix that (again).

That's rough, Witt. Sympathies.

Sorry about the cat and other troubles, Nathan.

Cry, cry, mask debate, cry.

47 that's hilarious

re the Texas hospitalization rate: triage/screening committees are sending people home to die if they would take up space that someone with a better chance of survival might need - seems like this would be a factor in the number of hospitalized patients.

49: I think that is one specific county in the Rio Grande Valley so probably not affecting the overall rate in any significant way.

I find myself struggling with how to balance well-founded suspicions of Trump Admin/Republican state leaders with generally sound "do not mistake for malice ..." positioning. In all things, but particularly with regard to this fucking pandemic (in part 'cuz you know the impulse at the top is to Hurricane sharpie every last bit of it.*) If you want details here is the COVID Tracking project's discussion of general issues with hospitalization data since the switch. A lot of it is just confusion as the switch happens. Interestingly:

Whatever the causes--which likely vary across states--the result has been that the current COVID-19 hospitalization data from states that was highly stable a few weeks ago is currently fragmented, and appears to be a significant undercount. In an unexpected twist, however, the hospital data made available by the HHS from the dataset they collect from hospitals differs from the states' own reporting: for most states, the HHS hospitalization data is substantially higher than the same data as reported by the states. [JPS - And not just a littler 24% higher over the period in question.] In Florida and Texas, HHS is reporting many more patients hospitalized with COVID-19 than the states report, with significant day-to-day fluctuation.

Which raises a more general point that I saw some health-related person make recently. Aside form the specific quibbles about the numbers they pointed out how much overall information CDC and HHS made available during previous issues like Ebola** and Swine Flu with sometimes daily informative in-depth specialized briefings in addition to the more general briefings for the general public, And now you get the grudging minimum along with the insane lies of the Trump politicos.

*[Hurricane Sharpie] I just finished reading a book on the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (~8,000 dead as the entire island was overtopped with storm surge) and was surprised to learn that after the event the director of the US Weather Bureau basically hurricane sharpied the lead up to the hurricane striking land claiming falsely that the Bureau had given warnings that it had not. And the US guys got it wrong in part because in the wake of the Spanish-American war they were in the middle of an effort to discredit Cuban forecasters who they thought were overly alarmist but in this case at least had been much more on the mark.

**That's the motherfucking Ebola "crisis" for which the Obama admin got pilloried by the motherfucking press*** in concert with Republican shitheels leading up to the 2014 midterms. See here. Exhibit eleventy-fucking-seven on why we can't have nice things.

***Wolf "dickhead" Blitzer: ""Ebola has certainly eroded the confidence in the way the Obama administration and medical professionals have handled it."
Frank "dickless" Bruni: "ravaging Americans' already tenuous faith in the competence of our government and its bureaucracies."
"I think that's a very dangerous thing for President Obama, the sense that his administration is not competent to protect the American people," warned USA Today's Susan Rice. [Not the Susan Rice who has been viciously maligned by the same Republicans and the amalgamated feckless subcunts of the US political press but who should not be Biden;'s VP pick.]

If this keeps going on, you'd think eventually the medical profession will just start telling people to go fuck themselves. Not the dying, but the elected officials opening stuff.

50: A feature of the Trumpian Interlude of the more conventional ongoing Republican democracy-destroying jihad has been the tendency by many of us (certainly me at times) to rather understandably go to the worst/most sensationalistic interpretation so the actual awful bare truth in the end seems not so bad. (Russia/pee tape is a prime example but many others.)

Bazz-fazz.

42. You are very kind, sympathies on a tough situation. Does he have any legal claim to the space? how do the finances of prepaying 30 days at an Airbnb for mr wont and a few new locks compare with the cost of therapy?

"We're all going to die anyway, so what's a couple of decades here and there compared to the 3rd quarter profits of fast casual dining."

Adding my voice to the condolences for Nathan and Witt, though I'm not sure whether to give even more to md 20/400 or pretend I didn't read it and will never think about gallbladder pain for those without gallbladders. But okay, fine, I hope they're able to resolve it fully and easily and also selfishly hope that I never have to deal with that.

I'm still/again having breathing problems, occasional wheezing, and a wet cough and blah blah blah. Resting a whole day helps some but who has time to do that? (I have been doing it anyway, but it makes everything else harder.) I am starting to wonder if part of the lung trouble is because my scoliosis has been getting worse, so I think I'm going to ask the doctor to look into that rather than just treat this as bronchitis again next time I go in. I'm ignoring that today because my brother will be helping Odile and me empty the apartment of one of Odile's classmates, whom I drove to the airport at the beginning of this so he could fly home to a country that has since eradicated community spread. Because of that and because it's not clear the library will be open, he decided to stay there and unenroll for a year rather than waste dissertation funding when he might not be able to get research done, which makes sense. But we are the ones who'd been given his keys, so we need to make sure other students buy and take his furniture and that everything is cleared out by the end of the month. I think we'll make it, plus then we get to keep his huge stash of baking supplies. If I'd had any idea there was so much flour, I would have raided his space months ago.

Nia and Mara are doing an online camp two hours a day, but they're in the same group and have been refusing to cooperate or even be there when both are scheduled together. Mara skipped Tuesday (when she and Selah had stomach problems anyway) and Nia refused to join yesterday. This is annoying and I'm trying to figure out how much to fight it, but they'll be with my parents today and maybe that will push them both to actually just show up and participate on the zoom. That's still the total of our opening to other people, though they're outside with neighborhood kids a bit and I let Mara see her dad outside yesterday. Meanwhile Lee has Selah seeing at least two other families (down from three, I guess) and the details are freaking Odile out to the point where she thought she might want to move back to her apartment to avoid potential contagion. For now she's staying put, but I guess we'll see what happens. I got annoyed with Lee for lying to me about it and she got annoyed with me for saying I was annoyed in the comments of my friend's fb post without realizing the friend was still friends with Lee there. I feel a bit bad about that, but it brought some other things out into the open (related to significant money Lee owes me and doesn't intend to pay because she thinks her individual choices matter more than the promissory note she filed with the court) and I guess that's a good thing. She's looking into jobs that would move her away from here, which would be wonderful. We'll see, though. I'm never sure I'm going to be able to manage being a full-time parent of however many kids and managing a relationship, but that's mostly me being unkind to myself. It just feels like I'm constantly letting everyone down, but I guess the alternative is letting everyone bleed me dry. I'm not in therapy anymore because my therapist retired and I think I'm having normal quarantine depression and nothing worse, but I also feel guilty about not doing that. Just everything feels like too much to handle, but of course there's no alternative and so I do it anyway. Blech.

the state is (apparently) classifying antigen results as "presumed positive" and thus not counting them towards total case counts

How would classifying something as positive reduce the number of positives? Am I missing something?

"Presumed" as opposed to really real.

An NPR article on the unusual way that the company (based in Pittsburgh) was awarded the contract for the new HHS tracking system.

Lots of irregularities (shocking I know) plus the abrupt rollout in the middle of a pandemic.

Originally shown as a non-competitive bid, officials now say it was but used a process generally used for i newer innovative stuff, not bread and butter things like basic tracking databases.
Also:

"Federal acquisition regulations and statutes prohibit us from providing information about other submissions," an HHS spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that the BAA was released in August 2019, and that the agency promoted it on social media, in newsletters, and in emails.But NPR reached out to more than 20 of TeleTracking's competitors in the fields of hospital workflow management and infection control data and was unable to find a single company that said it had bid on this contract.

||

NMM to Herman Cain. That Tulsa rally gave him the COVID that killed him.

|>

Next time I'm in the Omaha airport, I'll pour out a beer on a personal-sized pizza for him.

||
NMM to Lee Teng-hui.
|>

Famous Iowa State alum.

Damn. I keep wishing that high level Republicans would get COVID and it would kill them, but I didn't particularly direct that at Herman Cain.

59: I was thinking yesterday that I'd feel a little sad if Cain didn't make it. A lengthy hospitalization seemed sufficient for him -- maybe he'd learn something from it.

This thought came to me in the context of my realization that I can't work up the slightest concern for what happens to Gohmert.

That was, like, a wondering and thoughtful "damn", not an 'I rue Cain's death' '"damn". I don't have any strong feeling about Cain's death, except that is amazing to see fealty to the president directly kill someone. Death's by the Trump admin are usually a little more distant and indirect.

Sympathy for Nathan and Witt; both of those sound difficult and everything is more complicated and more emotionally taxing right now.

Cain was 74. Gohmert is 66. The real bump in risk seems to take place at about age 60 or 65.

That age, cancer survivor, hanging around with the performative non-mask crowd. That's really piling on the risk.

Trump couldn't find time for John Lewis's funeral. I wonder if he'll show up for Cain.

He can't. His whole thing is 'power of positive thought'. When he says all those ridiculous things about 'zero cases soon', he is trying to will them into being. His whole method relies on the strength of his own thought control. Going to a funeral and acknowledging reality might let the bad thoughts in, and then his good thoughts can't manifest.

He skipped Lewis's funeral because he didn't care. But he can't go to a COVID funeral, because that'll break his manifesting.

If he starts going to the funerals of everyone who died trying to help him get reelected, he won't have time to campaign and will need to delay the election.

65: I wrote 64 before reading 63, so I wasn't intentionally accusing you of excess sympathy or anything.

70: The truth is that I'd be more offended if he showed up at Lewis's funeral. Trump just can't catch a break with me.

I wrote 65 before seeing 64; it just crossed my mind that the "damn" might be ambiguous and I didn't want people to think I was sympathetic. I am impressed by the people who can maintain their empathy and compassion for opponents, but I am not one of them. I realized early on that I am not cut out for the reach-across-the-divide type of political response. I belong on the rally-my-own-team side of the resistance.

'Salute, suit up, and march on.'

DJT can't appear at an event where WJC speaks. (Or BHO).

Much less Rev. Lawson.

Quote from the Cain web site:

Romans 2:6-7 says: "God 'will repay each person according to what they have done.'

Oddly, in context, this is not an admonition to engage in social distancing and wear a goddam mask.

Covid-19 is self-evidently God's repayment to Boomers in general.

Trump is the punishment for the rest of us.

78: It's actually the slightly older generation that is getting slammed, but all manner of dimwitted fuckheads can't resist that "joke.: So well done.

And holy crap BHO is good.

I wish I lived in country where every single person who thought we needed a Trump to follow BHO would listen with embarrassment. I wish was part of a species like that.

I just learned that a friend and colleague died unexpectedly last night (no word on how, but one imagines it was something along the lines of a heart attack). We served together on our scholarly organization's governing council for at least 15 years. Unbelievable. She was just about to turn 50.

81.1: Recall how the mainstream media often went deep on the "teleprompter" trope?

I should be uplifted but instead seem to have nothing but incandescent rage left in me.

Robot, my condolences.
Stormcrow, fuck you.
The generation is generally defined as people born from 1946 and 1964
1946-64 +65 is 2011-29. We're exactly in the middle of that period, and there's at least another year to go. And I wasn't really joking.

I know you weren't "really" joking you gormless fuck.

If you look more closely at the actual mortality rates by age you would see that they really accelerate past age 75.
Insults aside, I did find a table of % of deaths due to covid by age (rather than COVID mortality) somewhat interesting in a way I had not thought of in thatit moves slowly up reaching 9-10% at about age 65 and is flat from there. Across the whole population it is about 9% (just a reflection of the way the overall death rates rise by age, but not a patter that had occurred to me.)

Nathan, sorry about your kitty, and you've clearly been under so much unremitting stress with parenting and so on that I'm sure your hedonic reservoirs are drained to the dregs. The best cure is hedonism and I hope you can find some safely... Witt, sorry about the difficulties. You also deserve hedonism therapy.

I have a slightly out of date Siberian fires update... huh, actually that was only about a week ago, further evidence that this week has been nine weeks long. Anyway, it's absolutely fucking terrible:

Since the start of 2020, it's estimated that fires have burnt through 20 million hectares (49 million acres) of the Russian landscape, which is an area bigger than Greece, and about 10.9 million hectares (27 million acres) of forest, according to Greenpeace International. For context, the global extent of tree loss in 2019 was 11.9 million hectares. That means fires this year have affected an area of forest in Russia nearly equivalent to the planet's tree loss last year even though it's only mid-July.

Also, more than 25% of Bangladesh is underwater. Was I talking about hedonism before? Weird.

We've been getting smoke here from the Siberian fires. It's not a super-noticeable thing and hasn't been getting much discussion in the media, but on sunny days it's definitely been hazy.

We almost got through July without smoke, but no, not quite. There's a growing fire on the CSKT (so it's not on inciweb) northwest of us.

Teo's eyes have a mist from the smoke of a distant fire.

87: So Sarah Palin, *can* see Russia from her house.

I don't have any strong feeling about Cain's death, except that is amazing to see fealty to the president directly kill someone

I feel bad for him, but I'm also just plain shocked to see this play out so directly.

J and Nathan, I'm so sorry.

Don't be fooled by the literalists, Mossy. It's 1942-1960.

Trump's funeral, when he eventually has one, will be a quiet affair, since no one will admit to having known him.

I overlooked 82 before posting. Condolences to JR, and sorry for the loss to your field, too.

Sigh. So my friend that everything bad happens to is now dealing with her 8 year old sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. They had a telehealth session with a therapist who wanted to report this to CPS, which was bullshit, and the CPS worker and her supervisor both said so. Infuriating. And on top of all that, it turns out my sister, the one with the bad liver, has had misdiagnosed calciphylaxis for the last couple months (they thought it was just a bedsore) so that's really not good. She's lost well over 100 lbs, and now looks very frail indeed. This year just keeps getting worse.

I'm sorry to hear that. I'll keep them and you in my thoughts.

Covid-19 is self-evidently God's repayment to Boomers in general.

LOL, God hates when Boomers live in a low-income household that also contains a younger person who has to go work retail or in a restaurant 40 hours a week.

So Sarah Palin, *can* see Russia from her house.

I don't think the smoke has made it as far as Phoenix, no.

She moved? (Oh, I guess some time ago. but it appears she recently sold her house there but not sure where she is living.)

So sorry to hear so much struggle. I'm having a hard time thinking that August is going to be better than July on pretty much any front.

98: Yeah, she hasn't really been a presence in Alaska for a long time now.

100: Although I think her husband filed for divorce in Anchorage last year. Maybe he is still up there.

I think he is, yeah. And other members of the family. They pop up in the local news from time to time for drunken brawls and so forth.

Brawls happen.

Up at 2 am for a trip up north to the beach with Pola and two other friends.

104: Say no to 103.

Herman Cain? Seriously? Fuck it, I guess I'll be the asshole here and speak ill of the dead. Of the 670,000 people who have died of COVID-19, the millionaire Trump supporter anti-mask advocate is probably the one I feel the least sorry for. A poor idiot who hasn't misled anyone can have my sympathy instead.

If I regret this in the morning, I'll blame it on the margaritas, but I doubt I will.

He's just famous for Omaha.

Best beach yet, sandy and deep enough you don't have to wade out half a mile or more for the water to reach past your knees.

Locally it's known as "French Beach" and I have no idea why. Nearby there is "Azerbaijani Beach," go figure. Anyway we're planning on going back on Tuesday.

Speaking of Alaska, an interesting map of the place from 1957.

the millionaire Trump supporter anti-mask advocate is probably the one I feel the least sorry for. A poor idiot who hasn't misled anyone can have my sympathy instead.

If it's any consolation, in his death he probably clarified things for a few people.

the millionaire Trump supporter anti-mask advocate is probably the one I feel the least sorry for. A poor idiot who hasn't misled anyone can have my sympathy instead.

The thing that pulls me up short from giving into the full schadenfreude here is that Cain was one of only a few prominent Black Trumpers and we all know who this virus is primarily killing.