Still here. The wife cancelled her return flight -- afraid she'd end up sleeping on the floor in Denver -- so I'm still baching for a bit.
KFC to launch plant-based fried chicken made with Beyond Meat nationwide
It's stupid, but this genuinely shocks me.
It's made with the stuff from Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
4: Yeah, I used to think the Beyond in Bed, Bath, and Beyond had something to do with outer space, but then I realized it's probably the living room, dining room, and kitchen.
4. Now I'm envisioning bathmats made of pea protein that ooze red juice when you step on them.
5: No spoilers. I'm still waiting to go to one.
Heebie U just announced internally that we're going remote for the first few weeks. I feel very mixed about this. On the one hand, I'd have so many students who were quarantining and it's certainly easier not to teach over a dual modality. But also I think this is largely futile. This is the tidal wave and we're erecting a little tent up on the beach in preparation. Except no longer that deadly a tidal wave.
ms bill going to a silent retreat next week so we've been talking up a storm this week.
I don't think the idea is to stop the tidal wave, it's to wait it out. Students with mild illnesses can still attend class online, and then with any luck in a month the Omicron wave will be mostly over.
Here we're not even doing that. The trustees here did a bunch of hijinks to reject all the search committees suggestions so they could find a new president who is a "don't look up" type and now we're doing literally nothing about Omicron like they wanted.
Does Heebie U have a plan for feeding the students during the Omicron wave? Or are they going to be fed over zoom too? I really don't understand what everyone's plans are for when the dining hall staff are all out with covid, they're already all understaffed.
10.2: Wasn't there a pretty obvious internal choice? If you're where I think you are, I wish we'd succeeded in stealing her from you a few years back.
"Don't Look Up" was terrible.
We're holding up ok here. I have a question: suppose I wanted to look at some records for a historical murder trial in L.A. County around 1912-- not sure of the exact dates, but the murder took place in April and I think the defendant entered a guilty plea in October. Do any of you know the process for finding something like that? This page makes it seem impossible for the foreseeable future, although if the murderer had been two years quicker on the draw the files would have been moved to the Huntington Library. The judge in the case was future district judge McCormick.
"Don't Look Up" was terrible.
Yeah. I don't regret having watched it, just for the performances of Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance. But Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence were utterly wasted. And it's not too often that Meryl Streep can find absolutely nothing interesting in a character.
Ariana Grande was fun, too. But the movie's ambitions were absurdly out of reach. It wanted to be Dr. Strangelove but instead it was Mars Attacks -- which was a fine movie precisely because of its lack of ambition.
A bit of research reveals that Mars Attacks and Don't Look up have the exact same 55% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Mars Attacks is by far the superior movie.
You can have your blog back now.
12: Indeed there was. I had mixed feelings on the internal candidate, but the one they went with is obviously much much worse. Apparently the search committee had two unanimously approved candidates, her and another one, and the trustees not only didn't want either of those two they didn't like any of the next tier either. It's all weird because multiple trustees were on the search committee. My only theory is that the search committee thought their job was to find the best candidate, and the trustees thought their job was to find a Republican.
I recently rewatched Mars Attacks and Moby is right, it kind of sucked. But I rather enjoyed Don't Look Up.
18: That was certainly the opinion of Rotten Tomatoes, and the audience rating was about the same. An underappreciated bit of cinema, if you ask me.
14, 15: Yes, total waste of a good cast. Also the wrong analogy for climate change, and the science looked like a weird hodge-podge of some details that were spot on (they seem to have had a credible science adviser) and just goofy (they must have ignored her a lot). PI and grad student finding comet while looking for something else, ok maybe, but what happened to the followup by other teams and telescopes? Anyway, how did a marginal MSU PI get time on Subaru? What is that work station doing on the catwalk, and why are the lights on inside the dome while they're observing? Why does there seem to be a whole class there? I'm offended on behalf of people who actually do this work for a living.
Mars Attacks has this one scene where a donut shop gets blown up by the aliens, and there is a giant donut on top of the store. Having all of these elements, the directors failed to include a shot of a giant flaming donut rolling out of the explosion and into the surrounding neighborhood. Cinimatic malpractice.
My only theory is that the search committee thought their job was to find the best candidate, and the trustees thought their job was to find a Republican.
Bad enough when that stuff happens in the usual suspect states, but worse yet to see it spreading.
I mean if you look at the other public university here, the situation could be worse.
23: That's fair. Don't Look Up would also have been improved by a flaming donut.
22: I'm not bothered by the lack of "realism." I don't think the point of Dr. Strangelove was verisimilitude.
25: Yeah, that's worse. My vague impression was that he was turning out less worse than one might expect, but that's still bad at best, and my vague impression from 4000 miles away could be completely wrong in the first place.
But I am disappointed, I thought we were a little more insulated from that kind of direct partisan stuff. Generally because it's a one-party state with very little risk of control switching (unlike say NC or WI) they're a little more tolerant with letting us be the unique left-of-center pillar of the state. Maybe we'd have more leeway if we'd won a national championship more recently.
27: Yeah, I mean he's not the absolute worst, but he's been bad. I actually kinda like our current governor relative to the past few, he's about as good as Republicans get.
We're searching for a new provost, and I'm concerned. The provost before our current one was only in the job for a few years, but was completely terrible. I very much do not want a replay.
I mean this alone would be disqualifying: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/12/purdue-professors-criticize-writing-partnership-chegg
26.2: Dr. Strangelove works in part because it really was true that a handful of people could wreck the world in a matter of hours through a combination of craziness and mistakes. A comet strike doesn't work as an allegory for climate change because we're no longer really arguing about whether it's happening but there's no One Big Thing that needs to be done to fix it.
When I was watching it I thought it was an allegory for fucking up the pandemic, it took me a while to catch on that it was an allegory for fucking up the climate.
32: Yeah. But the thing that Strangelove captured isn't just the possibility of accidents or craziness, but that there were genuine plans for global destruction made by smart, "sane" people who had given the matter a lot of thought.
34: It does work better as a Covid thing. With climate change, you're not talking about the possibility of a catastrophe that is imminent and personal.
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun. But Mama! That's where the fun is!
I just passed a covid test. I guess it is just a cold.
Or it is covid but your viral load is low. You should probably keep testing every few hours to be sure.
39
The nice thing is if after you test and get back in line, you can get tested every 5 hours that way.
There was an exchange here a while back about blues being kind of backward looking.
Marisa Anderson-- not at all straight blues, kind of a jazzy Robert Pete Williams. Not nostalgic.
It was just a home test. But I did swab my throat.
I know home tests aren't very good, but I don't see people except the people I live with and the guys who carry washing machines up stairs. If anyone gets symptoms, we'd probably get a better test.
Well the PCR test I took on arrival back here was negative (or rather the day after, it was a pain in the ass getting one and I was exhausted getting in Saturday around 7 am, I didn't think they allowed screaming children on business class). So Sunday I meet a friend at the bar for a few beers, a couple hours in his daughter calls reporting symptoms consistent with Omicron. I told my friend to treat her as if she's got COVID and get her tested. He did and she's positive. He's getting a test today but it looks like I'm going to have to isolate for...how long? A week? I have no symptoms so far. It's going to suck being in this weekend (my birthday is tomorrow) but I might have done that anyway since cases have been skyrocketing over here. I wish I could get an at-home test.
We don't have Walmart's here. I suppose I could try a Carrefour.
I never did have a positive home test. I'll be taking a last one tomorrow before I break quarantine.
Wife and son had unequivocal positive tests. Wife has had a nagging case that doesn't seem to want to go away.
44: Happy Covid Birthday, Barry!
I usually avoid Walmart on political and aesthetic grounds, but nobody else had tests. So I made the best of it (by saying "the Walmart") and bought the tests.
My friend and his other daughter walked out of the testing center because it was, as he put it, "rife." Just great. How long should I isolate myself after my potential exposure?
After exposure it takes 3-4 days for a positive LTF. Then, if you get the positive, the recommendation here is another seven days if you test negative on days 6 and 7. Though they are shedding precautions so fast that they may have dropped the requirement for the second clear test.
But immediately after exposure you're not infectious, so that is when to stock up on tests, food, etc.
Happy Birthday!
I thought Don't Look UP was brilliant. I couldn't care which disaster it was supposed to be an analogy for: what was spot on was the reaction and the suppression. The ghastly TV couple and the oafishly "professional" chief of staff.
does it deal with the reality that plenty of people *are* in fact acting but the main problem is that there are veto actors, with faces and names, mostly in the US Senate? I am very bored of being blamed for other people's vetoes.
They are not identifiable, but I don't think that matters, because the point is surely that if Mitch McConnnell or Mankin weren't trying to block climate action (or Charles Moore in this country) others would step up to take their places. So long as there are votes in denial, and money to be made from it, there will always be politicians to position themselves as denialists.
I just heard my voice recorded. I know people sound different to others than they do to themselves, but are there steps one can take to improve it? Like, it sounded particularly nasal, and I'd like to work on that, because I think I think I sound too "young" in a way that might affect me professionally.
58: I actually got a voice coach hoping to work on this same concern of mine, but it turned out to be more like speech coaching so I didn't come away with specific help. My dad apparently got a better voice partly due to singing lessons (though he also smoked for a long time), so that's another possibility.
Also on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhijHvHu1J0
Hey, there's no COVID post on the front page! (Not that that's a huge issue.)
It seems like London hospitalizations may have hit their peak, at about half the peak of last winter.
NMM to Peter Bogdanovich, writer, director, actor, scholar, friend of Orson Welles.
You could always go with the old Elizabeth Holmes voice
In other news my friend whose daughter has COVID has tested negative so I'm in the clear. Though with cases skyrocketing here I think I may stay away from the bars for the next few weeks.
re: 58
I worked in a call centre for a while and, because money was involved, they put us through some voice training. It wasn't anything particularly clever, though. It involved a lot of recording oneself both alone and working with a partner and then listening to it back and working on: slowing down, breathing naturally, thinking about lowering your voice placement to create a deeper more natural/resonant sounding voice, etc.
I record audio* for work, and give a lot of presentations at conferences, some of which are on Youtube. I always find that the voice I hear on the recordings sounds less like the voice in my head than I'd like.** I suspect there is some subtle professional benefit I could gain from working on it a bit, especially when I'm pitching work to potential clients.
* often enough that I'm thinking of getting a proper broadcast quality microphone, even just to use on Zoom calls with clients, to add a bit of surreptitious polish to my virtual presence.
** although, as an aside, those videos where I'm talking at a conference sound much more like _me_ than the ones I record at home, where I'm working from a script and the whole thing sounds much less natural.
re: 60
The ONS was claiming, as of a day or two, that anywhere up to 1 in 10 people in London have COVID right now. But yeah, I've seen reports pointing to an apparent inflection point in the hospitalisation rate and that it's dropping again.
65: The total new cases recorded for London in the two weeks through 4 Jan. is 335k, so adding unrecorded cases, that seems highly plausible. Case rate started dropping off sooner of course, has not surpassed a pre-Christmas peak.
Today is the traditional last day of Christmas.
64: So roughly, I think that the other people sounded about the same as they normally do. I also noticed my nervous laugh which I need to try to work on.
re: 68
Yeah, but you are hearing them as a third party, in both cases. I imagine quite a few of them also were surprised by how they sounded recorded?
IIRC the reaction to a certain Mary merry marry audio clip suggests that ttaM should make NO changes to his voice.
a weird hodge-podge of some details that were spot on (they seem to have had a credible science adviser) and just goofy (they must have ignored her a lot)
This is a very funny and, I'm sure, apt characterization.
I haven't watched the movie. The initial reactions matched my prejudices (that a Sirota movie would be execrable, that I really don't care what comedians have to say about politics anymore), then many, many people I know IRL raved about it, and not just people I would have assumed. I was prepared to think it was actually good, but the Eric Levitz piece in New York Mag a day or two ago seems to really nail my underlying objection. To quote Lemieux's link post
The biggest problem with the movie is that it's basically an exemplification of that inane talking point about how 100 companies are the source of 70% of carbon emissions, as if it wouldn't affect anybody else's life if fossil fuel production just shut down tomorrow. Stopping a comet, if the technology exists, doesn't require meaningful sacrifice from anybody. At least given existing technology, climate change isn't like that.I'm a native optimist, and I've come around to being much less misanthropic than my younger self, but I have zero patience for people who believe (or worse, assert) that people would do the right thing absent a handful of bad actors. It's not that I think a better world isn't possible, it's that I don't think the only thing stopping a better world is capitalism (or any other bogeyman).
It's like we've cycled from the Great Man theory of history, through more sophisticated thinking, to the Terrible Man theory.
my moot court partner 1l year had the most amazing deep resonant radio guy voice. yay! except that the room for the competition was warm & stuffy, we went last for the evening, & his voice lulled the "judges" into happy, profound somnolence. & he'd only prepared a limited quantity of remarks, bc they *always* interrupt with questions ... so he slowed down, not wanting to run out of materials ... causing the audience to sink deeper into torpor ... he slowed down even more ... etc.! omg it was amazingly stressful & absolutely hilarious 😂. we ended up winning our round bc one of our opponents completely lost her shit.
There's a guy I work with sometimes--he's based at a US company that's nominally our competitor in certain spaces, but they are much bigger fish than we are, and we collaborate a fair bit on public service things--who has the most hilariously deep radio voice, too. His voice is huge. It's completely at odds with his appearance, too, which is fairly standard issue youthful looking slight/skinny IT guy
i used to be a colleague of the sibling of an actual radio guy. sibling of also had amazing radio guy voice and was also v v short maybe it's a thing???
My voice always sounds congested to me. I wish I had more vocal fry.
also heaven is when a colleague just returned from son's 3 day wedding in india sends you the link to the 4.5+ hour wedding video! fabulous.
This made me laugh so much. Just amazing.
78: sincere! cherished colleague & also i know the bride (charming), plus it includes guys in fancy outfits dancing around to live drums together after dark & wearing sunglasses so classic i love it!
79: it follows this gem https://twitter.com/ayeletw/status/1478093962858532866?t=qtB0M4KYntwoJzb9m01sYw&s=19
i mean the *choice* to defend oates on the basis that she should be affirded respect, when it is an absolute certainty oates will follow up with ... predictable content. wow!
79:. This is hilarious, but I decided to try to make a qualified defense of JCO. Norman Mailer was married to his last wife for 27 years. Maybe JCO was friends with them during that time, and so saw Norman as a good husband.
I did a little more research and found out that Norman cheated continually on his beautiful much younger last wife. She was shocked when she found out, especially because the women he cheated with were older and not attractive. "Sometimes, I like to be the pretty one" he explained.
So, in conclusion, Norman Mailer was not a good husband, even if you were lucky enough not to be stabbed by him.
80.1: Thanks.
I get Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal confused and am always surprised that Joyce Carol Oates is someone my parents' age and not a contemporary of Emily Dickinson or something.
I like how at least half of "elder wisdom" is just-so stories from people who decided they could stop growing or learning anything new. See also.
Yeah. You'd do better asking Joyce Carol Oates to introduce you to an asshole writer just off a fifth marriage.
I mean, it's not bad advice but it's advice for people who have money to keep it.
People are playing Leonard Cohen, as they do, and I was struck by the lyric "And everybody knows that the Plague is coming. Everybody knows that it's moving fast."
Which is probably an AIDS reference, but still catches the vibe.
58: Yes, if you care about it enough, big changes are possible with some work and some time. I know about this stuff through the lens of changing my voice to sound more like a cis woman's, and while things are still iffy some days, after 6-8 months of practice I no longer have to worry about passing on the phone, or short conversations at the grocery store, or whatever. Most transfeminine people can manage a pretty thorough shift without vocal cord surgery, given enough time, and what you'd be trying to do is a related but less extreme transformation.
What you're perceiving as a nasal quality is probably less about fundamental pitch and more about the spectrum of overtones based on where resonance is focused in your vocal tract, which in turn is a function of larynx/tongue/palate position and breath control.
The person I worked with was a speech-language pathologist referred by my GP. There are also tons of people doing freelance coaching over Zoom, who have their YouTube instructional videos and so on. The people I know about are mostly concerned with transfeminine voice, but someone who knows how to do that stuff would also probably be able to give you some tips.
I like how at least half of "elder wisdom" is just-so stories from people who decided they could stop growing or learning anything new.
How did you happen to meet my dad?
87: I gag very easily, and I think the shape of my jaw really affects things. I used to be more of a mouth breather before my septoplasty.
79: Re: JCO.
After the 2016 election I was chuffed to have JCO retweet one of my NYTimes rage tweets (got me a lot of likes/retweets... ah sweet engagement!). But since then I've noticed she has a lot of pretty odd takes.
In conclusion, we all suck at many things, some of them in public.
90:. I think it's awesome that she apparently tweets any thought that pops into her head, and doesn't appear to mind when she goes viral as a laughingstock.
91, 92: ISTM that there's a huge chunk of Twitter that cannot understand that some people genuinely don't care about getting ratio'd, not due to arrogance, but due to genuinely not worrying about what strangers think of your dashed-off thought. It's not exactly shitposting--not what JCO does--but it's unconcern with the significance, because there isn't any.
Some people probably don't know what "ratio'd" means.
It's the ratio of your tweets to Norman Mailer's alimony payments.
||NMM to Sydney Poitier. That's one that might someone might actually need to know.|>
95: Ok, I will play the part of Unfogged's Ambassor to Twitter. "Ratio'd" means a tweet has many more comments than likes. The notorious JCO tweet has 566 likes and 1.1K commments. Since commenting requires more effort than liking you would expect to have more comments than likes, so for an opinion-tweet to get many more comments than likes, presumably it has to really infuriate people.
95: Ok, I will play the part of Unfogged's Ambassor to Twitter. "Ratio'd" means a tweet has many more comments than likes. The notorious JCO tweet has 566 likes and 1.1K commments. Since commenting requires more effort than liking you would expect to have more comments than likes, so for an opinion-tweet to get many more comments than likes, presumably it has to really infuriate people.
I also did not know what ratio'd meant. So I thank you.
101, 102, no it's Nate Silver (going by one of his recent tweets.)
I love the final item in the thread which is Chris Cillizza--who was born to be ratioed--disagreeing with the concept.
*Part of my trifecta of the worst prominent "both sides" media folks:
For savvy folks and cosmopolitans and clueless Manhattanites** : Peter Baker
For the common unwashed TV viewer: Chuck Todd
For idiots: Chris Cililzza
**Am I subtweeting a family member? Maybe.
104 is right on.
I should say that I think, on average, the ratio speaks true. I just think it's also OK that some people don't care because they don't care about Twitter as such, they just think it's fun. Cillizza's full of shit because he's very much tweeting sincerely and self-importantly, and absolutely considers himself a peer of people who don't get ratio'd nearly as often.
I just watched two episodes of Ted Lasso, and, does it get significantly better? It's so boring. What am I missing?
It doesn't change much. If you're not into it at the beginning it probably isn't for you.
I think 107 is correct. AB didn't like the first episode, then became convinced that perhaps she had missed something*, and we've now watched the whole thing 1.5 times. I think it's very much the case that the pilot can underwhelm, but it's rolling pretty well in episode 2.
Although I just checked, and episode 3 is maybe my favorite in the whole series. So maybe give it another 30 minutes.
*zero interest in sports, quite misandrist these days.
It took Mr. Robot 3 episodes to get into Ted Lasso, but then he really loved it.
I guess I'll keep watching. I need to take a break from Korean serial killer dramas, they're starting to mess up my blood pressure.
Hey, anyone else super-stressed about schools and omicron? The moral-hazard part of this is wearing on me greatly. Our district closed Friday as an emergency measure (under the Californian rubric of "smoke days") but is planning to reopen Tuesday, with all students and staff expected to test negative before returning. We managed to get a small shipment of KF-94 kid masks late Wednesday (more coming Tuesday afternoon), and I shared them with Elke's bff's family, but I can't imagine the schools will impose a filtration mandate on the kids until supplies become less scarce. The news about hospital systems is just horrific, and while it's always better here, as a baseline it shouldn't be as bad anywhere as it is here. I am in the awful position of hoping the schools stay closed, or at least switch back to the hybrid system they used in the spring.
I get why everyone is mad at Biden and the CDC, but it just feels like screaming into the wind to me. I can't put energy into it, and I can keep energy from leaking into it, apparently. I'm not really mad at anyone, just stressed.
I currently either have Covid or I have the worst allergies of my life. The thing that's tipping it towards allergies is that I'm having severely itchy, watery eyes, and things like this state unequivocably that that means allergies, not Covid. But jesus I felt miserable overnight.
Also it is prime Cedar Fever time, which is the one allergy I get hard.
113: The watery eyes were what reassured me I didn't have covid last week. The at-home test was negative, but I know those miss a fair bit.
112: Over half of the classes in my kid's school were online last week (which was a short week anyway) and will be this week. That includes my kid's class. No word yet further in the future than Friday. We've got a pod set up with two other families at the school and a nanny.
I can't help comparing it to last year. That was much more organized and professional overall. For a few days or even weeks at a time in between random incidents, this is fine. If it winds up being ongoing, I'm going to lobby for something more like last year or just going back to school if it becomes an option.
I had another email from the school this morning, asking me to get xelA a PCR test, as another close contact has COVID. I think that's about the 6th or 7th of those emails in the past 2 months. In this case, it is genuinely a close contact, as the kid in question is one of his two best friends.
There's zero chance, as far as I can tell, that English schools will go back to any kid of remote learning. Covid rates in London have been enormous over the past couple of weeks; some estimates have it as 1 in 10 people, within certain age groups, although I think that's tailing off. I'm not even sure they should go back to remote learning, if I'm honest.
I think keeping K-12 going is the right decision at this point. But with the expectation that no one is going to actually learn anything until the Omicron wave passes. If a bunch of students and teachers are out just combine classrooms and watch a movie or whatever.
At the college level I think online until Omicron passes makes a lot of sense. At the college level I think 3 weeks of online is better than 2 weeks of in person and 1 week of class happening in person without you. The point of online is to let people still go to class while they have a mild covid case.
It's a mess here right now.
Hospitalizations are going up, and HCWs are stressed. They will probably be less severe stays, but they are still inpatient, and healthcare workers are getting infected, so staff is reduced. Some beds have had to close, because they do not want to divert all the outpatient staff to inpatient like they did in the first wave.
There are also people with other conditions like COPD who are vaccinated but not boosted, whose chronic conditions are being destabilized by infection. This would happen with other respiratory illnesses too, but the numbers of cases means that the volume of patients have gone up.
Access to outpatient therapies is limited b/c 2 monoclonal antibody treatments had t9 be pulled. They are trying to use remdesivir, but that requires infusions, and the staffing shortages make it harder, so they want to stand up clinic for this. Still, People are beyond exhausted.
re: 118
I have no skin in the game, with college level education, but that seems like a fairly sensible position to take.
118: The things that really bugs me in the k-12 space is the lack of willingness to pony up for extra summer instruction. There were parents who felt that their kids hadn't learned enough to advance grade level last year, but they were being denied the opportunity to stay back. I honestly think that temporarily these schools should go k-13 with the option to skip the last year for the high-achieving unfogged types who can't wait to get out of high school.
I did discover that the school district keeps an updated-daily tally of cases at each school; Elke's school is doing considerably better than the others, so that makes me feel a bit better about them returning tomorrow. (Our neighborhood school actually has 3x as many cases among students: still a low number, but a contrast.) I guess we'll see!
Disturbing that after London COVID rates peaked around 30k/day before Christmas, they aren't going down nearly as quickly as they went up - more plateaued around 22k.
118.1: agree best to keep k-12 in person if/when possible but this - "If a bunch of students and teachers are out just combine classrooms and watch a movie or whatever." - under current conditions is likely to result in efficient transmission. we are just in a shitty, shitty situation with zero good options & indoor restaurants-bars still open ... depressing!
What went wrong with vaccinations in London? % of 12+ with full course: UK 83%; London 62%; NYC 84% by my calculation.
OK, possibly London is specially undercounted.
121: Over the summer and early in the fall of 2021 it might have seemed reasonable to assume that things would be "normal" by now on the covid front, or were close to it, or would be there soon enough. Sure, there were still masks and still a lot of people not eligible for vaccines yet, but still, things seemed to be moving in the right direction, right? In that mood I would have been prepared to shrug off the disruption as a "lost year". Less than a year and a half, at least. Everyone's learning and development would be affected more or less equally and reasonable people should be able to acknowledge that and deal with it.
But trends early in the fall didn't continue and now we're facing omicron. At this rate we'll have more than two years of covid. That's harder to justify shrugging off. I don't have any answers, and it feels like no other sane people do either.
127: I'm not justifying at all. I want the kids to get extra support. Also, they should be talking about adapting school. Maybe lunch outside, going later in the summer. It would require a huge Federal investment, but I'm not sure that we can go back to 2019, and we need sustainable adaptations.
Our current school situation:
Last week they stayed closed 2 extra days after break and told everyone to bring kids to one of four sites to get tested on Monday, but they didn't provide transportation and a parent had to accompany kids to the tests. Waits in 30 degree weather ranged from 1 to 2.5 hours. They did test pools of 10 and also took individual follow-up swabs so they could immediately test the positive pools. ~3200 students and staff tested, and ~half the pools were positive, so between 160 and 1600 people positive. Then they didn't finish the individual tests by Wednesday, so those 160 to 1600 people all just went to school anyway. They said they would get the individual results during the day and as soon as anyone was flagged they would be quarantined at school and you had to come get them immediately. Then Thursday they announced that all the tests were ruined due to some undisclosed issue and they sent the National Guard to schools where there were positive pools to follow up with rapid tests.
For some reason all the testing around here is being done by a spinoff company from the local VC real estate services company. Until the above disaster I think they were doing a good job but maybe I just wasn't aware of issues. My suspicion of the follow-up sample test problem is that they registered everything by hand- at the Monday testing they wrote the names of each kid in a pool on a sheet of paper, and wrote kids' names on the individual follow-up tubes. No barcodes or anything. So I think they had to manually sort through 3200 hand-written tubes to try to find the follow-up samples.
In our neighboring city, positive rates on last week's pools were so high that they reduced the pool size to 2. Why not just do individual tests, you may wonder? Apparently our wonderful Republican governor's education secretary issued testing guidelines stating that you must start with a pool sample first before doing individual followup, either as rapid test or the second swab method described above, so they just went to the smallest pool possible to comply. He also decreed that remote instruction shall not count towards the state mandated 180 days of school so when schools close they don't bother trying to go back to remote. I remember a lot of talk about how snow days were a thing of the past, they'd just do remote, but that's no longer operative. Apparently a lot of schools also lost track of all the individual devices they'd given out- somehow we went from Chromebooks for every student last year back to carts of computers that are wheeled between classrooms, so they can't even go back to remote if they wanted to.
123: A similar thing happened with Delta. In India it went way up and then quickly fell, but in the UK instead going way back down it just plateaued. I still don't really understand why.
Wow. We suddenly seem like less of a mess than I'd thought. Our district just offers optional testing on Fridays and calls it a day.
You'd be hard pressed to call Friday anything else.
I'm willing to call it for SP unless someone can top 129 with an even more fucked up story of school chaos.
I kind of suspect that we'll have in-person school this week, case spikes, and then two weeks of ad hoc Zoom school, but maybe not? (To be clear, the low case rate in 122 was a tiny silver lining on a generally dark cloud, not "oh well if my kid's okay then I care about no one else." But tbh my feelings seem disordered, and I don't mean to use statements of feeling as moral rhetoric.)
Locally we're still pretending there isn't a pandemic. Associate Dean denied our requests for signs to remind students that masks are recommended. We're supposed to have back up plans when students go out sick.
My right hip keeps locking and sometimes that means I have to slowly ease it up until it unlocks before I can stand up. When it happens on the toilet, I feel like Elvis. I guess I should see a doctor, but waiting a month seems like a good idea too.
The doctor is probably going to tell me to take Motrin and stop going for long walks all the time and pee standing up.
Maybe he'll recommend that you dress up in black leather and throw a televised concert in Hawaii
129: Is that CIC Health? I didn't know they were a real estate services company.
136-37: You know the one Dr Everything Be Alright
131: They are opt-in tests here and the majority are not participating. They really should have done opt-out, since I don't think mandatory participation would fly.
138- yes, spin out of CIC, which is "an American real estate services company which bills itself as a "community of entrepreneurs""
If you say "community of assholes", you can't put that in newspaper ads.
Our school district is asking parents to substitute for the teachers out from Covid.
114: The cedar is just brutal this year.
143: I have never felt as sick from allergies as I did the other night. It was awful.
140: Somerville is opt-in but we somehow managed to get 97% of students opted in.