Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
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| Courtesy of WaPo |
According to CDC:
There's no way to sugarcoat a nearly 40% jump in cases in week--and omicron's nearly 75% market share of new cases. The last I had heard it had been 3%; it's mind-blowingly exploded. It does serve to remind us how futile it can be to do things like ban foreign visitors. A contagious disease can spread before immigration officials are aware of it or can even test for it. I'm not arguing against testing foreign visitors, but I think there are testing protocols in place.
There are some interesting nuances in omicron symptoms. Of particular note is few have a signature symptom of the loss of smell or taste or fevers, more like a common cold (runny nose, sore throat) with tiredness or muscle aches.
On a positive note we are seeing oral antiviral meds from Merck and Pfizer authorized by the FDA.
I think most people are probably getting personally touched by the pandemic. Like I've recently tweeted. a nephew-in-law recently lost both parents to COVID-19. Please vaccinate and get boosters.
Other Notes
It always amazes me when I run into a new PC issue I've never seen before . In this case I had launched iTunes to listen to my subscribed podcasts when iTunes popped up with a vague configuration problem. I Googled the issue and didn't come up with anything usable; had I somehow installed a rogue update to iTunes in the interim since I last listened to a podcast just days earlier? At some point later I launched Youtube which is a source for most video clips embedded in my daily blog posts. I suddenly realized I had a broader sound problem: none of the videos were playing with sound. At first I thought it was a common annoyance: somehow the sound was muted. However, when I launched the Windows sound window, the usual controls were disabled--long story short, I would soon discover there were no soundcard drivers installed--in my laptop with an integrated sound system. This was a first in decades of owning/using laptops.
I was fairly sure that the original drivers were available in the laptop recovery infrastructure, but it wasn't clear how to tell Windows where to find them; it expected an external driver disk. I didn't want to reset the PC just to get my sound back. Of course, I could always attach or configure USB or Bluetooth speakers.
At first, I thought the problem might be resolved by the old adage "when in doubt, reboot". That often works with the Thunderbird email client--say, where one of the default folders (say, the trash folder) disappears on rare occasions for God knows what reason, and it would regenerate on a restart. But in this case Windows restarted without sound drivers again. Long story short, I eventually tried adding sound drivers via Windows (didn't work) and deinstalled. This time Windows reinstalled the correct drivers on system reboot. I'm not sure this is a general workaround; after all, initially I didn't have a sound driver to deinstall.
I FINALLY saw a classic Christmas movie show up on my cable channels: "White Christmas", which is on AMC's rotation. At first, I grumbled: they had it scheduled on at 2 AM, and I had to work that morning. But I think it came on at 9 AM a couple of days later, and it's on late morning on Christmas Eve.
I did catch "Miracle on 34th St" on Amazon Prime I believe, but apparently there are multiple versions. The one I'm more familiar with has a couple of iconic scenes; one involves an adopted Dutch orphan who Kris Kringle speaks to in her native tongue. I didn't recall seeing that in yesterday's version. Then there's how Kringle gets sent to Bellevu. In the familiar version, Kris gets agitated at the store psychologist who gets this young male employee to doubt himself and smacks the psychologist on the head with his cane in confronting him. In this other version, this speaker starts ranting about the Santa Claus myth in front of an audience, and an irritated Santa backstage clobbers him from behind.
I still haven't seen a couple of Meredith Baxter fantasy movies in Hallmark's Countdown to Christmas this fall/winter: Angel in the Family and A Christmas Visitor. In the former, she plays a deceased wife and mother who returns over Christmas to help her surviving struggling family members; in the latter, she plays a mother still mourning the loss of her eldest, only son, who lost his life as a medic in the Gulf Region. The surviving parents have a young daughter with signs of a serious health issue. The Army vet Dad picks up a hitchhiking vets and invites him home to spend Christmas with his family. He asks the vet to play along that he had happened to meet the deceased son overseas. The dad gets suspicious when the vet plays his role a little too well. Just who is this stranger?
I do like the adoption movies that Hallmark has. In The Christmas Note an Army wife and son move home to a separated parent's home while the dad is overseas recovering from an IED explosion. A workaholic neighbor's mother, living elsewhere in town, dies, leaving a mysterious note, confessing the daughter has an older half-sibling given up for adoption at birth. In Holly and Ivy, a single jobless librarian had closed on it fixit-upper next door to a single mom with 2 young daughters. The mother is initially in remission from a horrible life-threatening disease--which returns with a vengeance. She has no family to leave her girls with--and Melody (the librarian) impulsively offers to become the girls' legal guardian. But the courts won't sign off unless she has a steady income and a home up to code. Finally, A Christmas Love Story, involves a former Broadway star who reinvents herself as a youth choir director who has been commissioned to write an original song. She ends up meeting a widower with an adopted son, who finds himself in her choir. As sparks begin to spark between the dad and choir director, she admits she gave up her only son to adoption.
There are other Hallmark movies worth watching. In The Christmas Secret, Christine is recently divorced, a struggling mother with a young son and daughter. She finds herself an unemployed waitress after she saves the life of a woman owner in an auto accident on the way to work, losing a family locket in the process. She soon finds a job with a local baker Betty but keeps running into the shopowners' grandson Jason temporarily filling in at the shop. It turns out the lost locket has special significance to Betty and Christine's father, who died before her birth.
