Friday, June 12, 2020

Hot and Masks

We were up and out early on the bikes today.  Probably not early enough given how dang hot it was, but a person can only give up so much sleep.  I keep thinking that eventually we'll acclimate and it won't suck so much.  That day can not come soon enough.

So we saw something new and cool today.  After saguaros boom, they fruit.  The fruit opens and bats from Mexico come up to feed on them at night.  During the day, doves, bugs and other critters come for the nutrients.  Eventually they dry up and fall to the ground and other animals eat them. What's interesting to me is that the bats come from way far away, how do they know it's time to fly north?


Here is a better picture than my cell phone camera of the open fruit.  This was swiped from the internet.


The refrigerator repairman is here again to work on the annoying leak from the water dispenser and the equally annoying leak in the freezer.  Thank all of the saints that Jim had the foresight to get the five year warranty.  This is visit number five for this frig.  Eventually we can file a "lemon" claim on the thing and get our money back.  This trip may be enough service calls to qualify.  It just annoys the living spit out of me.  It was very expensive and I think it should do better.  Today we're getting a new water valve and ice maker

Anyway, I'm sitting in my chair with a bandana on so I don't have to hand wash a mask.  I know in my head that I am not suffocating, but why is breathing in a mask so unpleasant?

Eric Topol put up a tweet with a bunch of science about why the wearing of a face covering is so important.  There are a lot of words, but it can be summed up with "wear the damn mask."  The Irish Times also has a piece with words and not charts.  A friend of mine put this up on Facebook, which also simplifies the findings.  It's the asymptomatic people that are the scariest.  We were in Safeway yesterday, and mask wearing is at about 60-70%.  They're still limiting how many people can be in the store, spraying the carts with disinfectant and the aisles are one way.  We're still working on obeying the directional arrows.  But there are people with naked faces, and that is starting to look really weird to me, to see the bottom of people's faces.



I like Captain Sulu's take on the wearing of masks.  As a child, he was sent to a Japanese internment camp, despite being an American citizen.


NPR repeated a Brief  but Spectacular Moment by Damon Davis last week.  He's an artist and film maker.  It's about his experience of being African American in the US.  It was really well said and I want to keep the link.  The link has the video as well as a written transcript of what he said.  It's well worth looking at.

Finally, if you want to read Walter Shaub's fantastic take down of John Cleese comparing toppling Confederate statues to taking down all Aristotle and Socrates' statues, go here and read it.  That man can truly craft a sentence.  Update 8/30/2022:  Shaub's tweet has gone missing.  You can read the Cleese tweet here.

6 comments:

  1. that is one intense blue sky in the top picture. it is pretty amazing that the bats know when to come. fewer people here are wearing masks in this small town even though our case numbers are jumping and the grocery store has removed the social distancing markers from the floor at the registers.

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  2. Another brief but mesmerizing recap of another day in America.

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  3. John Cleese's politics have become quite scary in his old age!

    I'm guessing the bats, in eating the saguaro fruit, help distribute the seeds and lead to new saguaros growing hither and yon.

    I would estimate mask-wearing in London at around 25 percent. We've never had a mask advisory from the government and in fact the last I heard, we were told that outdoors they're unnecessary, and indoors they're only advisable if we can't maintain social distancing. It's interesting how there's so much conflicting information on all this, from WHO saying right off the bat that we don't need masks to the CDC turning tail and saying we do.

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  4. PS -- Masks ARE required on public transport here. So there's that.

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  5. I wonder if it's the amount of daylight or shortness of the nights, I guess because it's bats, which triggers the bats to search out the fruit.

    And really, why can't people just wear the damn masks? I wear one all day at work and I survive. It's not always pleasant but I don't want to make any of my patients sick. It's not just about ourselves, it's about everybody. I really like the graphic about the chance of transmission.

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  6. What kind of fridge did you buy? I need to know so we don't pick that one for the house we are currently in the planning stages to build. Thanks -- and sorry you got such a lemon! :(

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