Day: April 10, 2020

Posted, discussed and more or less settled here in mid-March. Re-discussed this evening (Friday, 4.10) on Real Time with Bill Maher.

“Fair Reference,” posted on 3.17.20: HE agrees that Trump calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” doesn’t help anyone or anything. CDC officials are correct in saying that this kind of terminology “stigmatizes residents” of China, etc. 

But it’s also fair to note that with the exception of H1N1 and maybe one or two others, nearly all viruses over the last few decades have been routinely identified by their geographical origin.

There’s no denying that COVID-19 is widely believed to have originated in a “wet” wildlife market in Wuhan, and specifically from bats or snakes. Trump has earned his racist credentials over and over, but if he’d used the term “Wuhan virus” he wouldn’t have been wrong.

Was it stigmatizing to acknowledge that the Ebola virus partly originated in Yambuku (Democratic Republic of the Congo), “a village near the Ebola River from which the disease takes its name”? Or to acknowledge that the Zika virus came “from the Ziika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947”? Or to say that the West Nile virus “was discovered in Uganda in 1937″?

Was there an anti-white-person motive when Lyme disease “was diagnosed as a separate condition for the first time in 1975 in Old Lyme, Connecticut”? Have CDC officials ever said that the term “stigmatizes” residents of that Connecticut town? Just asking.

15 minutes ago. Pulled over at Melrose and Westmount. Parked, jumped out, snapped this.

Obviously everyone’s streaming movies at home these days. Hand over first. Obviously the demand is greater that at any time before, and obviously the streaming speeds are slowing because of this. I’m paying for the fastest Spectrum service available so I thought I’d be okay. I’m not. I guess no one is. Last night I attempted to watch a press-link streamer of a feature film, and it began stalling around the 12 or 15 minute mark. Slogging through the first hour wasn’t agony, but it was definitely irritating. I presume others are experiencing the same.

Friendo to HE: “This is a very rare sketch from a 1972 NBC special written by Neil Simon. It aired once and never again. Inspired turns from Gene Wilder and Jack Weston. It speaks to the anxieties that quarantines can cause. It’s near impossible to find so your readers may dig it. I love the ending.”

Nothing new here. Widely posted. Nostalgia for responsible leadership. Yeah, even from Dubya.

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This isn’t bad. 12 guys, 12 different locations. But why is Sting singing in a lower register? Is he having trouble hitting those high notes or…?

I’ve mentioned this two or three times before, but my transcendent moment with this song happened in a pub in Stockwell (south of the Thames) in December 1980. 9:30 pm or 10 pm. Not many people, maybe three or four at the bar. I was sitting near the jukebox with a pint of bitters, feeling a tiny bit buzzed. And then the song, which I hadn’t paid much attention to since its debut in October, began playing, and the bass tones were magnificent. I fell in love then and there.

The next morning the news was on the BBC about John Lennon‘s murder.

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Does LexG even think about wearing an X-factor mask? Or does he just wear bottom-of-the-barrel paper masks, grunting “good enough”? Who among HE regulars is wearing (or has ordered) anything other than generic surgical masks? I for one believe that one should at least attempt a sense of style when visiting the local market or gas station or whatever. (The other night I was seriously impressed by a Predator mask that a guy was wearing at Pavilions.) The problem right now is that when you order this or that the Amazon arrival date is in May or even June.

The results of a Republican-funded poll, published today by the New York Post, claim that Gov. Andrew Cuomo is vastly preferred over Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Cuomo and Biden are running roughly even among my demo — white, reasonably well-educated, 45-plus, X-factor — but generally speaking 56% of Democrats have said they would prefer the current New York governor over Obama’s vice president as the Democratic presidential nominee. 44% say they would prefer sticking with Biden. The rightwing poll has a margin of error of 4.8%.