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Saturday, January 17, 2026

Post #7528 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest CDC weekly stats:



The Sick Times:


COVID-19 cases are still increasing in DC and Hawaii, while decreasing from higher levels in most states. There are still locations, such as hospitals and nursing homes, that maintain masking requirements. Sky-high flu rates have lessened in the last couple of weeks, but the disease remains a high risk.

The latest  COVID-19 news:

Other Notes

The blog continues to obtain dubiously high pageviews. except today, but lower stats on Saturday are not unusual. I did publish my first essay of the year (on the Ross murder of Good in Minnesota); it attracted a reasonable number of hits, but given the hot topic, I thought it might do better. X/Twitter continues to go through a similar pattern, although fewer tweets than last week in the aftermath of the murder.

On YouTube, I've been an avid subscriber to these storytelling channels. Any regular daily blog readers know I usually have a cute kids video under the "Choose Life" feature. (I never married, no kids, but I have 6 younger siblings, 21 nephews and nieces, and 28 grands). I've written about these YouTube channels before; typically, there's a wealthy protagonist, often living in some wealthy empty penthouse; maybe there's a sad story like he's a widower or lost his only child to an accident or to a fatal disease. Then there's a child protagonist, usually a young girl, maybe about 5-8 yo. There's a compelling hook: maybe she doesn't have enough money to buy milk for the hungry baby sibling she's holding; maybe she's trying to sell a beloved doll or teddy bear to buy medicine for her dying single mother. It may focus on a crippled orphan always getting picked over by adoptive parents. Maybe it's a poor schoolgirl mocked over her attire or without an adult to attend her school performance. Sometimes it's a child abandoned by a cruel stepparent in freezing weather on an isolated road. In a few cases, the child turns out to be the wealthy protagonist's own son or daughter; maybe the ex-spouse was pregnant at the time of divorce. unknown by the father, or the male protagonist's parents disapproved of his pregnant fiancée.

You don't always get storybook endings like the male protagonist falls in love with the child's mother and they live happily ever after. Quite often, there are sad nuances like the child's mother's health condition was too much to overcome.

And then there are like weird science fiction twists like the girl had secret powers, and the powers that be knew that he would pass by the girl at a certain location and pick her up. The weirdest scenario is not one of these, but probably the strangest overall, without resorting to a supernatural context (although it is still an unbelievable context). A professional single woman without children gets a call from a local school, upset that the girl is still there long after classes were finished for the day. She insists they are confused; she has no daughter. They insist they have her signed contact information. They also speak of a dad, an old boyfriend who disappeared from her life sometime back. They threatened to escalate the issue to CPS unless she picked up the girl, so she finally agreed to go there.

So the woman arrives on the scene, and the story gets even weirder. The girl is a mini-me to the point of replicating a childhood scar above her lip and greeting her as if they saw each other over breakfast earlier. [At this point, I start thinking this is a weird amnesia case. Nope.] She gets a DNA test confirming a maternal match; how could she be a mother without giving birth?

I'm not going ging to summarize the whole plot here, but much of it involves tracking down the old boyfriend who has forged her signature on documents; I still don't understand why he is abandoning his daughter (more on that below) and his motive for revealing her to the girlfriend,

Apparently, years back, the couple was in love, but she wanted a career first before motherhood; knowing the biological clock on fertility, they decided to store some of her eggs. For some reason, he seemed dissatisfied with his girlfriend deciding when she was ready to be a mother, so they broke up. He stole the eggs, fertilized them with his sperm, and had one or more implanted in a surrogate he hired.

She eventually tracked him down, and he had broken a lot of laws. By the end of the story, she has decided to gain sole custody and expunge him from their daughter's life; he's desperate to retain visitation rights, denied. I still don't get how or why he trained the girl to live with a mother she never met or why he abandoned her to her egg donor mother. Maybe he decided being a dad was inconvenient, and he didn't trust himself to leave her to the foster system. Maybe I read past relevant clues.

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