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Saturday, November 30, 2024

Post #7025 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest weekend stats from CDC;


Slight uptick in COVID19 infections in terms of related tests and emergency room visits; hospitalization and deaths are still declining but they tend to be lagging indicators. I expect the winter surge to be in its early stages, and if you haven't gotten this year's vaccine update, consider getting it soon, like I did about 3 months back.

Probably the biggest story of the week centered on President-Elect Trump's choice for NIH  the Stanford doctor/health economist Jay Bhattacharya, who notably opposed work/school closures during the pandemic. Trump has appointed a number of pandemic policy contrarians/skeptics.

Other news items of interest:

  • Legal/political news items:
    • "NIH Beats Claim It Withheld Information on Covid-19's Origins"
    • "Man tells court he escaped from Ingham County jail to avoid getting COVID"

Other Notes

Blog readership was modestly off although a good Saturday. I haven't published an essay in a while although I've started a couple, and next month will also include my annual mock awards. I've already decided the 'winner' of my Jackass of the Year, which is fairly obvious if you've read my past annual posts. We're less than 40 posts from 500 and we've hit or exceeded at least 40 posts each month this year. Twitter/X has trended on the lower side side of normal as I posted less around the holiday. I've noticed  there seem to be more Trumpkins than  progressives. I generally don't allow replies  to my posts; it's not because I don't like mixing it up in a debate. I just find I get a high percentage of personal insults or spam tweets (e.g., cryptocurrency).

My big project over the past week was finally upgrading my cellphone.. I often was quick to get some exposure to new devices; I was the first I know to buy a VCR and I went through more answering machine. I use to constantly change my greetings: it could be anything from a quote to vocal impressions. I swear to God this actually happened while I was a UH doctoral student. one of mt friends called me, and when I answered , he told me to hang up and not to answer because he wanted to hear my latest greeting. on other things, I lagged buying CDs because I had a vast vinyl record collection. Eventually I couldn't buy new records on vinyl. Regarding cellphones, I really didn't see the need over landlines, until I ran into car problems on a long rural stretch of the interstate driving to a gig in Los Angeles. But I didn't buy a smartphone until I could get data and texting in a monthly package maybe $10/month more than just calls. For the last few years I've had a major Android vendor budget model. i never thought I would fill up 32 GB. oh, I added an SD card so I could put a ton of licensed music tracks for VLC media player. And some apps you can migrate to the SD card. But the apps are installed to internal storage so it was a lot of busy work, not to mention I was constantly having to prune applications to patch other apps. So, my cellphone provider had a deeply discounted upgraded budget model which quadruples internal storage. Transitioning is a pain. The vendor has a utility to transfer apps/data; mixed results but it did much of the busy work. I had to manually reinstall like about 10 apps and VLC--including having to recreate playlists (which is not complex but adding hundreds of tracks is tedious). Other minor setups were necessary like pairing my new phone to my car, and I need a larger phone holster for my belt.

I still don't have my replacement credit card (not my decision) And although I specifically told my issuer i wanted the unlabeled Amazon Prime charge to go through, Amazon processed a prime cancellation. I've been assured Amazon should get it next week. And although i thought we went over all recurring charges, they didn't mention my cellphone vendor, which meant my new cellphone service was suspended the next day. it turns out talking to an agent for my credit card issuer, Amazon isn't the only vendor  who doesn't warn you about upcoming service charges. She said Microsoft does the same thing. No car title yet. I'm going to have to find out what's going on.  

Eggs are still up this week. Walmart lowered its budget eggs to just under $4/dozen

Well, i was using my cellphone to watch my Texas Longhorns beat the Aggies on the road while watching WWE Survivor Series on TV . I was born near Aggieland. The Longhorns never trailed in the first rivalry game since 2011 (they both joined the Big 12 after the SWC folded in the early 90's and the Aggies left to join the SEC). UT joined the SEC this season and will be playing Georgia for the conference championship next weekend.

Survivor Series was somewhat predictable with the only title change being Nakamura in his new dark heel persona beating LA Knight for his US title. the women's war game match was probably interesting  because of heel MITB winner Tiffany Stratton. i was puzzled why for once Stratton wasn't carrying her MITB briefcase to the ring. It turned out it was in a prop trash can. The 2 heel champions on Stratton's team were knocked out and Stratton seemed to want to cash in her contract, which didn't make sense because a pin meant the heel team would lose.

The old Bloodline with CM Punk finally beat Bloodline v 2, with each team member doing their finisher on '"tribal chief" Solo Sikoa.

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