Panic! At the Pandemic

[captainsblog]

Yeah, just another weekend. I still have High Hopes we will get out of this okay, but you gotta wonder sometimes.

Maybe it's a matter of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.  In the early days of shortages and hoardages, I sensed more of us all being "in this together."  Now, the toilet paper and meat and dairy products seem adequately stocked, the Wegmans queues have become more organized and predictable, and even after heading out last week to pick up my first stash of black-market yeast for Eleanor from a local bakery-



- even that was back in stock in the usual Fleischmann's three-packs at Wegmans later the same day. Yet it's the hint of normalcy that seems to push people back over the edge of stupidity. Two weekends ago, I saw a nice gesture in our neighborhood: a couple of cars driving around, with slogans and the mask-ot (a plushy tiger sticking his head out the window with an N-95 on) of Emily's high school passing out congratulatory lawn signs to the seniors here:



Apparently, in some places these have escalated into full-on "senior parades" of tons of cars going around to ALL the graduates, and while social distancing may not be a problem in the cars themselves, there are no doubt staging areas for these events, with parents and those precocious little brothers and sisters running all around- so states have taken to banning even these.

The weather stayed cold and was snowy/rainy most of the weekend, but even with that I ran across at least one outdoor gathering on Saturday: big Winnebago parked in the driveway, surrounded by at least four bigly TRUMP2020 flags on both sides.  And on my radio, at that very moment,-



Sometimes the soundtrack of my life just syncs up perfectly:P

----

Yesterday morning brought no official parks, but a trail and a public golf course.  We planned to use the Amherst Bike Path just as an entry point, since it tends to get pretty crowded. Because of our veeroff, we missed this particular spectacle:



Pepper also avoided getting introduced to Murder Wasps, who had a nest in this particular bed:



But past that was the town's most-used public course, empty of duffers on this Sunday, though we did find evidence of their having played through:




Fore!



Or, I suppose, Three! (Just Pepper and two other dogs, though we had a fourth unaccompanied human with us.)



We put in over three miles between the path and about six of the holes. I then drove home by way of a Fundie church about a mile from our house. Despite rules limiting even religious gatherings to under 10 people, it was clearly open- with balloons on the entrance/exit signs, more than 10 cars in the lot, and refreshment stands in front of the entrance. I didn't stop or slow to see, but I have no reason to believe there would be any effort to use masks or proper distancing.  You may think me to just be one of those cranks who Hates Jeebus and wants to infringe on religious freedoms. Not at all; I'm just relying on science. From a post by a friend and EMT the other day, chronicling things in order of their relative safety:

Any social event with singing, chanting, or yelling will be worse. If your religious services involve singing together, if your sporting events involve cheering, you're gonna die. Studies done a century ago demonstrated that choral singing was the activity which created the most airborne transmission of tuberculosis. Standing next to a tubercular person in chorus was worse than having them cough directly into your face -- singing involves moving more air out of your lungs faster than coughing does, and if you are singing, too, you are breathing in just as hard as the person next to you is breathing out. Concerts where people sing along, sporting events where people cheer together, and church where people sing hymns or chant prayers together are probably the most dangerous things people can do in airborne-transmission epidemics.

Just imagine- if otherwise well behaved Xtians are risking this, think what 70,000 pong-table-diving drunks in Orchard Park will be doing in just over three months.

----

We spent the rest of the day indoors- watching a cute and kinda anti-romcom from 2009, grilling hot dogs for Mothers Day, listening to new music, and trying not to let the craziness of the deniers get to us.  On my one brief trip out, I took Eleanor's car, and noticed she’d been doordinged on the back driver’s side door. I asked her about it, and yes. Not only had she seen it, she remembered that it happened while she was parked in a handicapped spot, legally and with her hang tag. Which means that the idiot who did it parked in the marked spot between spaces you’re not supposed to park in. 

Siri, compose message:

I don’t know who you are, and I know I’m going to hell, but I’ll be several circles above you. I’d watch out for flinging poo if I were you.

On walkies with Pepper this morning, we passed these three, who promptly said, Don't look at us, we didn't do it.



They, and the dog, just stood there silently for several minutes. I think it was THEIR way of saying