Aside from my usual New Year's Resolution: doing more of the same, I'm going to add a bonus resolution-- I'm going to try to text all year using my left thumb instead of my right thumb . . . yes, I'm a one-thumb texter (and I believe it's hurting my score on the mini) so I'm going to switch thumbs and then perhaps next year, I'll be able to text fluidly with both thumbs.
Pandemic Stuff
Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:
The CDC was avoiding controversy
Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking
Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .
All Thinking is Flawed
He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”
Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.
Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.
My Job is a Hot Zone
“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
You Need to React Quickly
“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.
Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.
Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon
They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.
It Could Have Been Worse
So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”
Politics Played a Role
But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.
Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape
“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,
In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:
You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.
It Wasn't Just in Italy
On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”
Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.
half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier.
In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.
Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead
Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.
American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;
“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which
You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”
He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.
Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.
Happy Media Manipulation Day!
600 kids were out at my school today (and it was the same percentage of kids out in Highland Park, my own children reported) due to some TikTok meme promising school shootings today . . . despite the fact that New Jersey has the lowest rate of school shootings of any state in the nation; they should call it antisocial media (but at least order has returned on the illness front, Lola is pooping solid again and I got a negative result for my Covid test).
Chinese Democracy?
A Chinese algorithm is proving to be excellent at school shooter terrorism . . . and many of us have let it happen, we opened the door with open arms, installed TikTok on our phones, and let our children do the same.
Covid Ruins Sick Days
I was really tired two days ago and went to bed at 7 PM and then I felt lousy yesterday and it turned out I had a 101.5 fever-- so I slept in the basement, in case I had covid, and I scheduled a PCR test for 9 AM this morning and then I woke up this morning and my fever is gone and I feel fine-- but I still went for the test and stayed home from school because that's what you're supposed to do now . . . but the imminent threat of covid certainly ruins what used to be a regular sick day (and the dog is sick as well, she puked all over the house two days ago and had diarrhea yesterday on the kitchen bench cushions-- so they are in the trash-- and now she's on rice and water and she got me up at 3 AM last night to go out . . . so maybe we have the same virus . . . is that possible?)
Do Animals Understand BEEP!
I was driving up South Adelaide Avenue early this morning-- it's a narrow street and it was still very dark-- and a deer darted from the shadows directly in front of my car and I reacted exactly as if someone had cut in front of me without using their blinker . . . I slammed on my brakes and beeped . . . BEEP! and then I realized how ridiculous it was to beep at a hoofed ruminant (but it did work-- the deer got out of the way and we didn't have a collision).
Weddings and Funerals . . .
Some people know how to wear a suit and a tie, but I am not one of those people (I have a thick neck or something).
Dave Revises His Expectations Mid-match
Today was my first match of the winter tennis league at the racquet club-- I'm playing in the A division, and most of those matches begin at 7:00 AM-- and I had to play an agile and skilled 29 year old this morning, but he made a few errors early on and I was serving well, so I went up 2-1 on him and I thought to myself you can do this but then he started getting to all my shots and running around any forehand that I didn't hit very deep and hitting an inside out diagonal forehand that pretty much angled off the side of the court (on my backhand side!) and I thought to myself there's no way in hell you can do this but it was still a fun match and we got a lot of exercise very early in the morning and I learned that I've got to hit the ball very deep on young players.
Rutgers! Gum!
I forgot my loose, breathable fabric mask at home today (it's drying on the handle of our exercise bike) so I had to grab a leaf-covered disposable garbage mask from the floor of my minivan and now I'm trapped inside this thing with tequila breath while I teach because we went out last night after the incredible Rutgers basketball victory over Purdue-- the first time Rutgers has beaten a number one team-- but luckily I have lot of gum (sorry Connell).
Silence!
The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides, is one of those smoothly written thrillers that hypnotizes you with the easy reading so that you don't think about the absurdity of some of the plot devices (like a diary that contains every piece of dialogue and information to uncover the killer . . . a diary written until moments before death) and I will stay silent about everything else, except that there is--of course-- a twist (which you might see coming if you're thinking deeply about the plot, but the best way to read these things is a mile-a-minute while biking at the gym, so that everything is a surprise).
The Feeling Is Mutual
While I was on my way to one of the few water fountains in operation in the school building-- most are closed down because of Covid-- I passed by a foods teacher who I rarely see . . . and we were wearing masks (of course) and she said, "I feel like we're living in an alternate universe" and though it was a transitionless non sequitur, I knew just what she meant.
It's Still Tuesday . . .
What Monday is to Garfield, Tuesday is to me . . . and despite having some good ideas at work, crushing the mini, covering a class for extra dough, and exercising at the gym for 90 minutes-- the entire time Ian was at tennis-- I'm still feeling disoriented and ready to surrender to the week . . . it doesn't matter how much I get done on a Tuesday, it's a drop in the bucket, an exercise in futility, a weak attempt at conquering an insurmountable amount of time . . . I'm going up to shower and read my book, certain that this week will never end (and when it does, I'll be attending a funeral for my Uncle Mike, a great guy who had the decency to pass away on a Sunday, not a Tuesday).
Cat and Ed Defile the Buddha
You can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the girl (or Ed) so despite my warnings of bad karma, there was some classless abuse of the Three Legged Buddha at Storm King . . . and if you haven't been there, it's epic-- Grounds for Sculpture on steroids . . . Jersey's version is 42 acres but Storm King is 500 acres of trails and lakes and an incredible variety of sculptures, set in a valley and on the side of a mountain-- we went for Cat's birthday, and a dozen of us stayed up in New Paltz in a big Air BnB right by the Rail Trail-- Cat looks a bit hazy in the photo below because she over-served herself tequila Friday night, but she recovered and we were able to bike around the enormous sculpture park and enjoy a good dinner Saturday night-- a great 50th Birthday weekend.
Sad Day (Hard to Recover After a Dart Like This)
It's going to be a sad Outer Banks Fishing Trip this year . . . as our main man Johnny G. passed away today-- I hope he's sleeping soundly in the big hammock in the sky (not on a picnic table in the courtyard of The Weeping Radish, unnoticed for several hours-- so that when he returned and no one batted an eye, he said, "What! Nobody even missed me?!") and this was a theme with him, as he went missing at Cat's Fortieth and OBFT XXV . . . anyway, whether it was playing poker or darts, shooting the shit about sci-fi, or our annual ride together from Norfolk to the Outer Banks, I always enjoyed spending quality time with Johnny and I know he will be sorely missed by the whole gang (he's to my right in the old photo-- I'm the one who looks like he's wearing a toupee . . . I used to have such thick luxurious hair) and I will never forget his favorite good-natured darting heckle, done in his gravelly voice: "it's hard to recover from a dart like that . . ."
Sexual Selection Defeats Survival of the Fittest
My wife turned fifty today and she received a pair of lovely diamond earrings . . . and this bowerbird mating video explains why this happened-- if you need a full explanation, listen to this Radiolab podcast.
Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty
My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:
there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .
Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .
on imagery
We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"
on the stupid geese in the park . . .
Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.
on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:
In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.
on the past and the future
And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)
Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
a sports essay that made me cry
Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.
and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .
And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.
Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.
more on lawns . . .
more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.
Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”
and he writes about my favorite poem . . .
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge, And
Finished knowing - then -
and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:
“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons.
and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .
Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
I gave John Green's new book five stars!
Dave Might Survive
I am the worst at being sick-- but now that I'm feeling better it all seems kind of silly; the Thanksgiving break started off well-- we saw a great Beatles cover-band at Pino's on Wednesday night, then on Thursday Ian and I played two sets of tennis-- and I can usually only make it through one set (Ian beat me 6-4 and 6-3 and he claims I will never beat him in a set again and he put a pound of quality chocolate on the line) and then we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at my parents and then Friday I got a BRUTAL massage from an old Asian lady (after I went to the gym) and then I played tennis with Ian later in the day-- though it was cold-- and then we went to the Rutgers women's soccer game that night and it was freezing and the game went into overtime RU won!) and the next day I felt kind of crappy-- glassy eyes and fatigue-- and then Saturday night I hung out at my parents' place with my dad and my cousins while the ladies went to a fancy Italian restaurant in Robbinsville-- and by the time the ladies got back, I was feeling really lousy, and I spent the night freezing cold and then burning hot-- with some stomach issues-- and I felt awful all day today (and I even went for a Covid test) but now my joints are no longer sore and my stomach doesn't hurt and I just might live . . . of course, I might not live-- and I've been reading John Green's new book (The Anthropocene Reviewed) which can make you into an obsessive hypochondriac (but in a fun way) and his chapter on the plague is pretty grim . . . but this doesn't seem like the plague (but only time will tell . . . and while the plague had some terrible suppurating and devastating symptoms, nothing is worse than glassy eyes).
Something For Which We Can All be Thankful
I just finished the third book in Ben H. Winters' Last Policeman Trilogy (Word of Trouble) and while I will offer no spoilers, I will say that the books remain mystery novels until the end-- the milieu might be apocalyptic but the thrust and theme of the novels are solving crimes, seeking truth, and answering questions-- and this Thanksgiving, I am thankful that a giant-civilization-ending asteroid is not headed for the earth any time in the near future (as far as we know).
If You're Wondering Why There's a Teacher Shortage . . .
This morning during first period I got the weird silvery aura in my right eye that happens sometimes when I look at a screen too much-- and I'm always looking at a screen these days, since they took away the printers and we migrated all our texts and work to Canvas: our digital learning platform-- and now our periods are 84 minutes long, instead of 42 minutes (because someone thought that was a good idea) so I was in for the long haul with this hazy eye (and oncoming headache) so I put on my blue-blocker screen glasses-- which I never use because I have to wear a mask and when I wear a mask and glasses, I fog up (probably because I wear a modified, very breathable, fake mask that barely touches my face) and after a second 84 minute period the silvery aura faded (I did some stuff where the kids wrote on the whiteboard, so I could avoid looking at a screen) and even writing this sentence is hurting my eyes a bit so I'm going to end it here.
Tragedy of the Viscid Variety
It's the end of an era, a cataclysmically tragic truncation of the most royal jelly . . . Birnn Chocolate-- our delicious town chocolate factory, a Highland Park institution-- no longer makes raspberry jellies-- the only raspberry jellies worth eating (because the jelly is homemade, firm and not that sweet) and they are discontinued due to lack of demand, and judging by the rather unconcerned reaction of old lady Birnn to my horror and lamentation at the loss of the jellies, I don't think they are coming back any time soon.
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