We braved the wilderness to forage for food today

It’s a big production. We’re avoiding human contact as much as we can, so we only rarely venture forth for essentials, like groceries. Unfortunately, today was the day. We’re in the last half-week of the semester, so no labs, so we could use my morning lab time to make the long drive to Aldi in Alexandria to pick up a load. We go in the early hours, arriving just as it opens, again to minimize exposure to filthy humans, and we stock up on about 3 weeks worth of food, and then we flee back south to the safety of our home. We’re probably OK until mid-December now.

We’ve made a major shift in our habits, and it still feels strange. It used to be we’d take grocery shopping for granted — the store in town is close enough that I’d plan ahead only a day or two, and walk the few blocks to pick up a few things every few days. But then the local store got all pestilential and refused to enforce the mask mandate (they’ve gotten better now, but they’ve lost our trust), so now we prepare weeks ahead — I also have a store of really basic staples, like dried beans and peas and rice, that could keep us going for a few months, if necessary — and I feel like one of those stupid doomsday preppers, and I despise those people.

Now we’re back, and that means buckling down to grading. It will be great to finish up this semester, and even greater to finish up this pandemic, some day in the distant future.

An unfortunate synchronicity

OBIT Edward J. Conrad died Thursday, November 19, 2020

Here I go and post a video about Ed Conrad on the 22nd of November, and then I learn that he had died 3 days before. I had tried looking him up, but he’d dropped off the internet as near as I could tell in 2015; I guess he was living the quiet life all this time.

I hadn’t mentioned that one of his other obsessions was life after death, and he wrote a fair bit about the Sheppton Mine disaster, and was confident that the experiences survivors and families had in that traumatic evident were proof positive of an afterlife. I did not find his stories persuasive. And no, the ghost of Ed Conrad did not visit me and tell me that I had to memorialize him with a YouTube video.

OOOoooooOOOOwoooooooooo.

Have you no sense of decency, ma’am, at long last?

A German COVID-denier (hard to believe such things exist anymore) decided to present herself as bravely defying the government by standing on a stage and claiming to be just like Sophie Scholl, which kind of takes one’s breath away as an appalling act of hubris. A security guard at the event is so disgusted at the way she’s trivializing the Holocaust that he publicly quits on the spot.

Watch to the end. The best part is when the young woman is so embarrassed that she throws her microphone down and storms off the stage.

Be like that security guard. Don’t be like Jana from Kasse.

Stay home. Please.

Have you read the news from Minnesota?

The daily scene at Regions is playing out in ICUs across Minnesota as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 sweeps across the state. Open ICU beds were down to single digits in some parts of Minnesota last week, when Gov. Tim Walz ordered a four-week shutdown of bars, restaurants and entertainment and fitness establishments in hopes of slowing the virus’ spread to alleviate pressure on hospitals.

From Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids to Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar to Regions, ICU beds are filling as quickly as they are opening up. Statewide, 79% of available ICU beds are filled, and 26% filled with COVID-19 patients.

The state’s capacity of open ICU beds has declined about one percentage point per day the past two weeks — raising the probability that some of the 408 ICU surge beds might need to be activated in unused hospital and nursing home wings.

“There’s no beds anywhere,” said Dr. Matthew Klee, whose ICU at Mercy is full and under pressure to take patients throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. “It’s become like a game of chess over the entire state.”

More worrisome are the growing infections among health care workers who then can’t care for patients.

HealthPartners on Friday reported 308 workers absent due to COVID-19 infections and 414 who were quarantined due to viral exposures. Collectively, the Allina Health, CentraCare and Mayo Clinic systems reported more than 3,000 such absences last week.

Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.

You don’t need to go gallivanting off to visit family this weekend. Really, you don’t.

I get mail…from Autism Speaks

Yesterday, I got a letter from a charity in the mail — it was from Autism Speaks. It had me mystified me — why are they asking me for money, and most of all how did they think I’d be interested in their organization? I didn’t bother to open up, but just threw it in the trash.

So today I ran across this useful guide to autism organizations, and thought I’d share it, just in case they’re doing a large scale fundraising drive.

The new Minnesota rules

The crackdown has started at last — late, but better late than never. Just in time for Thanksgiving!

Most prominently, the state is telling Minnesotans not to gather with anyone outside of their immediate household, just a week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

In addition: Indoor and outdoor dining will be prohibited, limiting restaurants and bars to takeout service only. Public pools, rec centers, gyms, fitness and dance studios and indoor entertainment venues like theaters and bowling alleys will also be closed.

Wedding receptions, celebrations and private parties are also not allowed under the new orders, though wedding ceremonies, funerals and other religious events are allowed if they follow current capacity and social distancing rules.

This is good. Shut down this nonsense now.

Unfortunately, there is some bad news.

The order also puts organized sports — for youth and adults — on pause, but allows professional and college sports to continue, under certain restrictions.

Retail, salons, places of worship, other activities will operate under restrictions already in place.

You know what this means, sports fans and church-goers! The state is just fine with you getting sick and dying. That’s no skin off my nose, since I don’t belong to either group, but I think you ought to be protesting and demanding equal respect. Close the churches and the sports arenas too!

Huzzah! The last Thursday of the semester!

I have complained about my Thursday schedule before, which makes it the worst day of the week for me. Well, this is the last one! As an added bonus, I also have no committee meetings scheduled for today at all! I can’t get too excited, though, that just means I have a few free hours I can use to tame that savage stack of proliferating grading obligations. Oh, and I have to compose the lab exam that I’ll be flinging at cell bio students tomorrow. And it’s oral presentations day in my communication class. And I need more coffee. It’s not a perfect day, but it’s getting better.

That settles it — I’ll be cowering in my bunker

I do believe I’ll be staying home for Thanksgiving. I definitely wouldn’t be attending any 10-person get-togethers, but if I got together with my daughter, who lives in the center of the dark red infection zone in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I’d be facing a somewhat unacceptable risk. I’m not going anywhere near the death zones of Fargo or Sioux Falls. In fact, the whole Midwest looks like a disaster, but I’m trapped in the middle of it.

You know, if I huddle alone in Morris, Minnesota for the entire holiday season, looking like a dork, and do everything the epidemiologists tell me, I am going to be so pissed off if I get COVID-19 and die anyway. I’m going to haunt all those Republican motherfuckers for eternity if that happens.

I don’t care that there is no such thing as an afterlife. My rage will not be contained.

One. More. Week.

The last day of the Fall semester is Wednesday, 25 November. I can tell I’m going to barely scrape over the finish line. Yesterday was exhausting, with my face locked into Zoom all day and early evening, and I ended up totally zombified by the time I’d suffered through my last online meeting. Today I have the morning sort of free (there’s always prep work & grading to fill in the gaps), and I’m going to use it to dart into the lab and feed the poor neglected spiders. That seems to be the only joy in my life right now, and even that has to take a backseat to wading through Zoom and clearing my backlog of grading.

Of course, this is the last week of instruction — the final surge of assignments and exams comes sailing over the transom to keep me occupied from Thanksgiving through the first week of December.

Oh, and the holidays…we’re supposed to be sensible and avoid large family gatherings, and I was thinking that maybe we could get away with a small family gathering for Thanksgiving, meeting with my daughter & her husband & the adorable granddaughter. With us, that would only be 5 people, and they all work from home and have been careful about minimizing exposure. But then I realized that I am the dirty, filthy plague rat of the family, since I have been compelled by my job to share a physical space with about 40 people per week. My presence alone would expand their bubbles to a much larger size.

It makes me very unhappy, and it isn’t fair — I’m also probably the most at-risk person for severe symptoms in the family — but it would be terrible if, in this case, it was Grandpa who was responsible for infecting the younger family members. I guess I’ll be staying home. Maybe if I quarantine myself for a month I’ll be able to meet in a tiny family gathering without worrying that I’m going to kill someone.

Actually, after this killer semester, I might be content to just lie down and take a nap for a month, anyway.

The pool boy speaks!

The pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, who was entangled in a menage a trois with Jerry Falwell Jr. and Becki Falwell gives his side of the story to journalists. It’s sordid and depressing — everyone involved is self-centered and hypocritical and oblivious to their own unpleasantness. So, the Falwells picked up an attractive, well-built pool boy at a hotel for sexual encounters in which Jerry Jr. would watch Giancarlo have sex with Becki, and built it up into a many years long relationship with promises of helping Giancarlo get rich in real estate. Everyone is clueless. Jerry Jr. doesn’t think there’s anything peculiar about the head of an evangelical Christian “university” that strictly polices the sexual behavior of its students getting jinky in a three-way; the pool boy is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Falwells just wanted him for sex.

More and more, Granda would not want to have sex with Becki. By 2013, he would call his sister and tell her that he “physically could not continue” having liaisons with the couple. But whenever he tried to pull away from Becki or tell her that he didn’t want to have sex, he recalls, Jerry would grow furious at her.

The moral majority scion would also threaten Granda, he says, telling him that he would send videos of them having sex to his family and girlfriend.

Becki, in turn, would beg Granda to sleep with her, reminding him of when “we went to bat for you” to buy him the hostel.

“I don’t want this to sound like I’m being forced,” Granda emphasizes to TPM, thinking back to how he felt at the time. “I want to take ownership: I’m gonna bang her.”

“But I always felt like if I stopped, I would be completely cut off,” he adds. “Not financially speaking — losing out on the family experience, which I cared more about than anything.”

It’s around here that Granda began to feel that his place in the Falwell family was conditioned on sex, a cold but persistent feeling that would nag at him throughout the year.

It’s fine with me if Jerry Jr. gets off on voyeurism and infidelity; I am unbothered if Becki enjoys the kind of open relationship that lets her get laid with multiple men; Granda is a willing, consenting participant in their activities. But man, I despise stupidity and dishonesty. Be open about it. Don’t do a wildly hedonistic thing while simultaneously bullying others out of doing likewise.

Also, it’s appalling how much money these people were throwing around. Did Granda seriously believe his penis was worth millions of dollars?