Shutdown Diary
My youngest grandniece was born in Michigan earlier this week; another COVID-19 era baby grandnephew was born in Texas shortly after Thanksgiving. So what does have to do with shutdowns, etc.? My sister had visited after the birth days of her first 3 grandbabies, but she explained logistics made that impossible. (Not sure of the specifics, but I've not been a fan of Dictator Whitmer, so I wouldn't be surprised if they had some relevant restrictions on visitors from Texas.)
I have had a relative in assisted living over the last several weeks. She'll get her follow-up vaccine in about 10 days. But the Texas facility has had a handful of staff and residents infected with COVID-19, and one consequence is they have a quarantine period (they're about halfway through the current cycle). So two male relatives are authorized to visit her but they can't during quarantine. This exacerbates her loneliness. They'll have to be retested before visiting her again. Inside the facility, no social activities during quarantine, no meals in the cafeteria, so she's mostly in her room (with meals brought there), except for a couple of walks outside with her dog. The relatives generally get her out of the facility to attend mass and/or have a meal. Not sure which Texas restaurants are open, but I know one local seafood place she likes with plenty of outside tables.
I had mailed her a birthday card several days before her birthday earlier this month, and she still hasn't received it yet. What the hell is going on with the USPS? I'm now getting emails from subscriptions saying "Hey, because of mail delivery issues, you may not get your current issue in a timely fashion. We don't have issues you can download, but hey, you can pay your bill through the Internet; you don't have to mail it in." I don't recall delivery ever being so bad. I think my youngest sister just got her Christmas card last week, and she noted it was postmarked before Christmas. Does this have anything to do with retiring a bunch of mail sorters in Trump's attempt to disable voting by mail? I almost never use the USPS. Even ad hoc medical co-pay invoices mostly include an Internet payment URL. My last medical visit I still had to pay a $7 bill for the nurse practitioner; they could process the payment by credit card then and there. In fact I had just gotten the invoice and was going to mail it in. Her response, "Hon, you can just call us and we can do it over the phone." I just don't like the USPS ruining my credit score by delaying payment.
Biden: Some Initial Comments
I normally write political commentary in other formats but I may expand on the following comments in a future post. I just wanted to jot down some quick takes:
- I approve of lifting/modifying the travel ban, rejoining the WHO, putting a moratorium on Trump's southern wall building.
- I'm less of a fan of rejoining the Paris climate accord, Biden's non-civilian choice of defense secretary, his invoking the Defense Production Act for COVID-19. I think his COVID-19 relief bill is not only unaffordable, but he's larded it up in the context of Rahm Emanuel's philosophy of never letting a crisis go to waste, e.g., raising the federal minimum wage. All that does is lower the number of jobs available, pricing workers out of a job. If the market value of labor exceeded the minimum wage, they would already be making more. But mostly, Biden seems to manage the crisis from the top down, which is exactly the wrong approach.
- My approach is: how could Pfizer and Moderna ramp up COVID-19 vaccine production? Why haven't they already? Could they license their vaccine to other vaccine producers? Are they already doing that? If not, are government policies discouraging a more scalable response? Is the FDA expediting foreign-developed vaccine approvals?
- I'm impressed by more professional press conferences and uninterrupted briefings with scientists. I'm all for "let Fauci be Fauci", no ad hominem attacks by the scientifically-illiterate, scapegoating Narcissist-in-Chief Trump trying to make a presser all about him.
- I would like to see more of a "first dose first" approach which is a faster path to herd immunity.
The Worst Holiday Movie Remake?
Why am I writing about holiday movies again, less than a month after Christmas? Well, I hadn't watched Amazon Prime Video in a while, and they had listed some videos on the holiday theme based on certain past selections. Television, outside of the NFL playoffs, is pretty boring now. I will not touch FNC primetime/repeats, and CNN has been promoting Joe Biden's inauguration and progressive talking points almost non-stop for weeks now. I rarely watch TV with undivided attention; I typically might be working on my next blog post.
So one film that attracted my attention was a TV movie from the late 70's was "It Happened One Christmas"; I don't think I ever saw it when it first ran. Was that Marlo Thomas? And Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) playing the male protagonist lead (George "Hatch")? Yup. (I later looked up the movie from Google.) If you haven't seen it, it's basically a twist on the original "It's a Wonderful Life", only from Marlo playing the George Bailey part with some nuances. But a lot of the scenes and dialogue are almost a carbon copy of the original film. Other than Orson Welles playing Potter, a brilliant casting decision, the movie just really annoyed me to the point of wanting to change the channel. The rewrite just didn't work for me. It lacked the charm of the original.
