Me and Cormac

Me, after reading a Cormac McCarthy book: I think I’ve read all the Cormac McCarthy I care to.

Me, a year later in the Library: ooh, a Cormac McCarthy book!

I’m reading Blood Meridian, which is the one where a boy heads from Texas to Mexico where he has a series of deadly yet picaresque adventures and becomes a man while riding a horse all the time. Oh, wait, that’s all of them except The Road, which is the one set in a bleak post apocalyptic hellscape which plumbs the depths of depravity and despair and somehow got made into a movie. I’d have like to have heard the elevator pitch for that one – It’s McCarthy’s bleakest book but hey Old Country for Old Men made a lot of money so let’s make this one into a movie, at least it’s short and has few characters. It’s one thing to read a bleak book because when you want to sip, you can sip, and when you want to gulp, you can gulp, but a movie version, that’s almost two hours of bottoms up, chug a lug from the growler of depravity and despair until every last drop is gone. Let’s just say Cormac McCarthy thought John Calvin a cockeyed optimist – I’ll see your total depravity and raise you way more depravity than total and no God to redeem anyone.

But man, does his writing have a unique style that just pulls you in.

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May You Live In Interesting Times

I’m beginning to feel just how big a curse “May you live in interesting times” really is.

I’ve reached an age where putting blueberries in my outmeal is all the excitement I want.

Do COVID Precautions Work?

Do COVID precautions work? Yes, but they haven’t made a big difference.

I guess it depends on the meaning of “work”

Behind a NYT paywall, so I only read the headline, which gives new meaning to adventures in cognitive dissonance – of course they are hugely important even if they don’t actually do anything! How dare you!

Says the guy who still hasn’t caught it despite my ignoring precautions to the best of my abilities. I credit the bag of oyster crackers I had to buy with my wine in New York for warding it off for the last 25 months and 25 states. I chose to focus on improving my overall health instead of an obsession with a single risk. Still do.

I know, I know, now when I catch it, I’ll die – just like when the tree fell on our house when I mocked the over the top reaction to a typical spring thunderstorm.

UPDATE: I caught COVID at Thanksgiving 2022 and thankfully survived. It felt just like the ordinary flu, which I haven’t had in a very long time, no doubt due to my totally deserved moral superiority.

TOPGUN

We saw Top Gun Maverick at the $5 show today. Very enjoyable, and even MBH liked it. Yeah, the usual Hollywood cliches and inaccuracies, but a lot of fun. I think that was the APG 73 sea scan radar display that made a surprise appearance in an air to air battle, but at least it was a real display. Did they know “Floyd” was a TOPGUN instructor who had an F-18 algorithm named after him? Speaking of call signs, in Hollywood they are always cool like “Warlock” or ”Coyote”, instead of the actual Navy ones that memorialize an aircrew’s worst failure, smutty escapade, or lame play on name. The more the recipient dislikes it, the harder it sticks.

The movie and the flight sequences were both unbelievable, just in different but still enjoyable ways. And oh yeah, in ‘96 TOPGUN moved (more like exiled for the Tailhook scandal) from beautiful North Island NAS to desolate Fallon NAS. I guess Hollywood decided even they couldn’t make Fallon look inviting.

The Multiverse Just Got Real

I used to scoff at the idea of the multiverse – there are an infinite number of universes out there where anything is possible – but after hearing that James Cromwell superglued his hand to the counter at a Starbucks as part of PETA protesting the up charge for fake creamer at a company that is built on the up charge because apparently vegan creamer is a basic human right or something, I now subscribe to the leaky multiverse hypothesis: not only do we live in a multiverse but people can leak through between them. Because clearly no one from this universe, what with all the war, famine, disease, inflation, crime, etc would think that most pressing issue facing us is that vegan creamer costs more at Starbucks. We should be running tests on these people to see if they interact with neutrinos or emit zeta radiation or whatever to discover what alternate universe they are from and how to “leak” there so we can find out how they solved all the problems we have such difficulty with.

Sorry about ending not just the sentence but the whole paragraph with a preposition but that’s just the kind of rebel I am.

Not Quite Ambrose Bierce

Parents: People who make every effort to ensure their children have it better than they do, and who then complain bitterly when their children have it better than them.

Snowpocolypse II

We have survived Day 2 of the snowpocolypse of 2022.

Last night MBH and I huddled together under a blanket and rode out the storm. Since we live in a climate controlled house it was basically just like every other winter night, only with snow falling outside. I bet the wind was blowing too, but what did we care, we were inside a house.

The milk is holding out so no trudging through the snow uphill. My back, however, isn’t holding out after shoveling the driveway yesterday and today.

This morning running was out of the question, so I headed to the basement for my weight workout. After the first set, 25 push-ups, my back was killing me, so I came back upstairs where MBH observed “that seemed fast”. Fortunately after a rest and a variety of painkillers I was able to clear the driveway this afternoon. Tomorrow I will clear the driveway one last time – I’m hoping to use the push broom and salt. I’m confident that Manchester will plow one last time and block the end of my driveway again so I foresee a contest of wills over which one of us will be able to outlast the other, a contest I’m not willing to lose.

I realize many of you are celebrating and enjoying these “snow days” but this is interfering with my regularly scheduled “retirement days” which is just like a snow day except without all the cold, snow, and most importantly immobility and therefore much more enjoyable. For those of you who continue to suffer “workdays”, I can only offer my deepest sympathy and gratitude that you continue to produce all the goods and services I consume.

Tomorrow I hope that I don’t just leave the house, I leave my property. It’s good to have something to look forward to.

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Snowpocolypse I

We have survived Day 1 of the snowpocalypse of 2022.

We have an eighteen day supply of eggs, an indefinite supply of bread since we only eat it on as needed basis, but the milk could run out in a matter of days. MBH is the only one who drinks milk, well technically eats it on cereal for breakfast, so if we run out I’ll be trudging uphill through the snow to buy more.

Tonight we feasted on quinoa, black beans and chicken. It was our last can of black beans, but we can survive. We will survive. Even when forced to eat low sodium beans.

I have enough Kale and Tuna to last weeks if I ration carefully. MBH doesn’t eat much, she will survive if I can just keep her in milk. Milk is the key, and I’m intolerant. I can only hope she will drink my almond milk. It’s our last, best hope.

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Uncontrolled Spread

I finished “Uncontrolled Spread”, Dr. Scott Gottlieb’s book on why COVID crushed us and how to defeat the next pandemic. It’s not a perfect book – the narrative part ends with the vaccines are here and how great the mRNA vaccines are now and they’ll be even more wonderful in the future but it does get us through the pandemic phase so I suppose if we adopt his proposals the next pathogen won’t become endemic. The focus is on the institutions, mainly governmental, so Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx get like 3 mentions each, and Trump comes up in a single chapter mainly about messaging. And you have to remember that Gottlieb is a former FDA commissioner and on the board of Pfizer so those institutions mainly (only?) get praise.

Before COVID I thought the CDC was pretty good for a government agency, after COVID crushed us but before I read the book I thought the CDC is just another lousy government agency, and after reading the book hoo boy they come off as one of the crappiest government agencies ever, on a par with the Austrian army of WWI. Everyone looked to them as the field general who was going to lead the public health team to victory; they saw themselves as an historian who years later would write the definitive account of the war. They screwed up testing, both by botching the initial test and then delaying all other entrants by every means at their disposal like insisting on IP protection and not providing samples of the virus. And it was all downhill from there.

The basic science was also lousy. Everybody wanted to get in on a study of some sort and most were basically worthless. For instance, 90 percent of the COVID trials run were designed in a way that would never yield actionable results that could change medical practice. That means all those participants time were wasted and it was hard to get people to enroll in the trials that could make a difference. The NIH set up the ACTIV clinical trial database and refused to participate in the British RECOVERY trials because they viewed it as insufficiently rigorous i.e. too simple. Not a single therapeutic would be authorized by the FDA based on ACTIV, the use of dexamethasone in severely ill COVID patients came from RECOVERY.

Ultimately, our failures on COVID were the failures of our public health institutions. For instance, the reason politicians up until mid march were assuring us there was nothing to worry about is that that was the message from CDC, NIH, etc. They kept saying it wasn’t here based on our data and that if it does show up we will be ready. Ha. The fact that we couldn’t test for it? We have our flu like illness system and it doesn’t show an uptick in cases. They didn’t realize the lag involved in much of the data from that system, set up by “historians”, or that the signal from COVID would be swamped by the decline in numbers at the end of a flu season. Their overconfidence was only overshadowed by their incompetence.

I could go on and on but then few have read even this far, so you get the idea. And if you want to read more, go read the book.

Lots of good recommendations in the book, but since they involve spending money in a way that doesn’t buy votes and/or a change in the way government agencies operate, I have little hope that any will be adopted.

On Cleanliness

Cleanliness is far from Dogliness

Kevin Murphy