Pandemic Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
The latest vaccine stats from CDC:
Well, deaths spiking to nearly 500 deaths a day serve notice that the pandemic isn't over. The daily counts are somewhat up to 113K a day. I still think we are at or near the type of the omicron BA.2 wave, although increasing share for substrains BA.4 and BA.5. Probably the biggest news over the past week is that the US is dropping negative COVID-19 test results for international travelers to the US. CDC is recommending two-thirds of Americans to wear masks indoors. The FDA also seems to have blessed Moderna's vaccine results for young kids prior to next week's meeting. The Biden Administration is talking starting distribution of the vaccine starting roughly a week from Monday, assuming FDA and CDC signoffs on the Pfizer and/or Moderna vaccine results. (I think the Moderna protocol is two mini-doses, and the Pfizer 3.)
Other Notes
The long drought of blog readership continues; it's not clear why, although I have more recently posted daily posts in the early morning hours versus long-standing evening population. I've noticed late night numbers now are spartan. I may shift back in the near future.
PC mishaps continue. I've had a history over the past 30-odd years of all sorts of issues. A few of them involved fluke coffee spill splatters to the point I almost always use external keyboards with notebook computers, keep the notebooks elevated and physically separated from any drinks, not to mention wearing lids on coffee mugs. Then there was the time the 2 notebooks I was driving to Arizona on a 2016 move were in an unusable state at some point during the move. The first was involved in a fluke soft drink incident on a routine turn in the way to the interstate in North Charleston. The large drink just toppled over and my laptop bag on the passenger-side floor wasn't waterproof. The other lqp6op booted up fine, but after I plugged in an external drive. the laptop went dead and wouldn't power up. The vendor said it was out of warranty and repair costs would probably amount to more than the cost of a new laptop. I ended up buying a new laptop in Yuma, Arizona. Several months later I coaxed a brief flash of light from the second laptop, and long story short I'm typing on said backup PC.
I took my principal laptop on my Texas trip in January and somehow the laptop power button dislodged; to the present I have to resort to a tiny screwdriver to power it up. I had also had a desktop for most of the past decade which also served as a backup; sometimes I played DVD movies on it. I had power issues with it and replaced it with a Dell about a year back. Over the past week, I had some sort of a surge incident (the Dell was off, but...) So I've probably lost that. I've been shopping to a replacement and found an inexpensive renewed one with an SSD and Windows Pro.
Somehow I ran across a NY Post article about a woman who had run into an encounter at a restaurant around the time she was celebrating her 30-something birthday. Apparently the young woman was well-endowed and wearing an outfit showing some modest cleavage. Another woman at a nearby table complained to her that her breasts were too distracting; in fact, the other woman was so unnerved that she asked to be reseated at another table.
Believe it or not, the story rang e bell. No, not from my own disastrous dating history, and most of the women I've known or dated have had average but very feminine figures. But while I was a young UWM professor, I was doing a research project involving the use of confirmatory factor analysis, later published in a DSI proceeding. I was using a software product called LISREL, which I couldn't access through my office PC. I had to use a campus computer lab. So the nearest lab was typically staffed by this graduate psychology major woman. She and I quickly bonded; I think there was mutual attraction (she once invited me to her apartment), but as a tenure-track professor, I didn't want to risk my career dating a student, even one not in my own classes. She was cute and had an ohvious full figure, although she tended to wear these thick, loose, oversized sweaters that deemphasized her curves. I don't think I ever saw her showing an inch of flesh below her neck.
So one day we're chatting and all of a sudden, she starts telling about one of her psychology professors holding her back after class one day, and he reportedly told her that her large breasts were too distracting. (Yup, the same word used in the restaurant incident.) To be honest, I wasn't sure what to say to my coed friend. To me, discussing a student's body parts was wildly inappropriate. In fact, as a single male professor, I insisted on keeping my office door open when coeds visited. I've never touched or dated or discussed anything inappropriate with a current or even former student. I can't even imagine discussing a coed's breasts. It's outside my value system. So I wasn't sure of the professor's motivation; maybe it was some weird pass he was making at her.
I'm not sure what happened to my friend; I didn't need the lab after my article was done. I was leaving UWM for UTEP and grabbed a local student newspaper when I read a piece where she had been interviewed and telling the same stories she had mentioned to me.
Personally, physical attraction is very subjective. The 2 biggest crushes I've had were on very petite women. But my attraction was more to their personality than their size. I remember at a high school bus stop some redhead proudly telling me her bust measured 37 inches, "one shy of a perfect figure" I wasn't quite sure what to say: congratulations for her good genes?
