Tucson and the Virus

Greetings Earthlings.  How are you doing today in your self imposed, socially distanced, quarantined homes?  If nothing else, I will learn how to spell quarantine during this process.  I've been using a process of elimination of letters and spell check.

Here we have a yellow cactus bloom.  It's a cholla, it has the ugly gnarly arms.

There is a new neighborhood going in on Congress Avenue, near downtown.  They have a modern street car stop right by the complex.  I have previously written about it here and here.   The concept of the neighborhood was that it would be walkable, and that people would know their neighbors.  There are restaurants and wine bars within spitting distance.  I really have to wonder who approved zoning for the area. After going to Walgreens for Flonase, we took a drive into downtown to look at the area.  Yay!  Road trip, sort of.

Look in the background.  See that horrible white structure looming over the houses?  That wasn't there last year.

Look at how close the apartment building is to the house.  There has been no progress on the house in over a year.  I wonder if the people who commissioned its construction have bailed on the project.

They're putting two of these in.  Across the street another giant hole is being built for more apartments.  Across the street, land is being cleared for another giant something.  I get that infill building is good, but I think there could have been a little more sensitivity for the houses that were there first.  It goes without saying that no increases in road capacity are being built to accommodate all of the new housing.

There is a lot of glare in this photo because I took it out of the side window of the jeep.  Those a Palo Verdes in bloom.  Look at the size of them!  Jim and I bought round two of the Flonase at the drugstore today so we can continue breathing.

Yesterday and today have been fairly depressing.  WHO announced today that there is no data to back up the belief that having Covid-19 confers immunity from future infections.  If that's truly the case, then there will be no herd immunity, and without a vaccine or therapeutics, it's an extinction level event.  Really not what I had in mind for my golden years.  Probably not yours, either.

Do you ever wonder where the orange menace gets his ideas?  The Guardian is reporting that a leader of a group espousing industrial bleach for use on humans has been in touch with the White House.

The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.

In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.

I hope no one from the Arsenic Foundation starts writing him.  What could go wrong?

There will probably be food shortages.  It's all over the news, that with each processing plant closure, a large chunk of the food supply goes off line.  One wonders why there are so few processing plants; that each one represents such a significant source of food.  Did you know that Smithfield is not American owned?  China.  Anyway, neither here nor there, but what has happened is that anti-trust laws have not been enforced.  Over the years, fewer and larger processing plants have resulted from mergers and ownership by multinationals.  There is no slack in the system.  As the virus spreads, more plants will close.  It's not just meat packing, it's french fries, putting carrots in the bags, putting stickers on the tomatoes.  It all requires human touch.  W. Kamau Bell did a really good interview about these things with a farmer in the heartland, Scott Blubaugh.  It's a good read.

Do you ever wonder what the president does all day?  Your questions are answered here.  It involves watching a lot of television.

Covid-19 is the gift that keeps on giving.  Younger people are developing mild cases of the virus, but they're also developing blood clots.  They're both in the veins and the arteries.  The neurosurgeons pulling them out of people's heads described snagging one with the hook and seeing others forming.  It's a fairly chilling article.  If you have friends or kids in the 30-40 year old range, make sure they know the symptoms of stroke and that it's treatable if they get to the hospital quickly.  Time lost is brain lost.  More can be found here.

Finally, we have this.  I think it's funny.