i just picked up and cuddled livvy and told her what a good cat she was. enabling to the max.

@leslietownes Hah!

@leslietownes Any plans for tonight, or this weekend?

If we had a P and an S, we'd have OCTOPUS

DOCTOR, I imagine, already listed?

ERODE, CORRODE

FORTE, And this is one we see all the time on this site: DOUBT.

one K short of DUCK, one P short of POND

DEBT, DEBUT

we'll go to the duck pond. i dunno what else is on the agenda.

@leslietownes Your weekend plans: Duck Pond?

@leslietownes I was just wondering if you've got a movie in mind, but duck pond is good!

we always go to the duck pond, or the other duck pond, or the wetlands area. it's sometimes hard to agree on a movie.

@leslietownes That's right, your pro gruesome/horror, your wife, not so much. Whisper ("The Two Popes").

my wife's the one who likes all those murder shows. :)

jonathan pryce and anthony hopkins are hard to beat. great casting on that one.

Have you seen any "John Wick"? My brother has see them all, and has referred to them for over a year. He only recently shared with me that character is played by Keanu Reeves.

i haven't. i like keanu reeves.

i saw a similar revenge-themed thriller, 'nobody' with bob odenkirk. it was a lot of fun, but also very violent.

@leslietownes Oops, my flub!.

i like the gruesome horror films, she likes the murder shows, you'd think we could find common ground.

BORON. apparently some anti-vaxxers are bathing in borax in an attempt to undo the effects of the vaccine. i wish them the best of luck.

If you have netflix, you both would enjoy the Barbarians; six episodes only, a tad under 2 hours each. It contains murder \checkmark, and battle scenes that are fairly gruesome \checkmark. It's based on history, and an battle, ambush, on the Roman army, by the coordination of German times, a battle often called "A Battle that changed Hisstory"

truly the best of both worlds.

@leslietownes I hope it's safer than ingesting too much worm-icide!

you might get some dry skin. it's fine.

i sort of wish that these folks had latched onto some 'undo the vaccine' nonsense earlier, it might have vaccinated more people earlier.

@leslietownes You know, part of me wants to test how long it would take, to create a new trending solution to Covid, like observing a site advancing conspiracies and folk cures, and when the time is right, concoct a testimonial two family members, who learned some cure, which I would carefully concoct, to wait for it to proliferate on social media.

As you see, I have little faith in some Americans >:{

one time my childhood dentist hired a new hygienist and she spent most of my cleaning talking about how her friend sold herbs on the internet that cured AIDS.

i didn't complain, but she wasn't there the next time.

@leslietownes Hah!

i thought about complaining, but i thought, no, this will sort itself out. and it did.

some anti-vaxxers are wearing yellow stars to city council meetings. that is proportionate and in good taste.

some people are just so ignorant. you would not go broke underestimating the capacity of these people.

there's always something worse.

I don't get the "that is proportionate and in good taste" sentence.

flavor it with extreme sarcasm.

i would have thought there was a floor on this, but no, it's always something worse than one might have imagined.

i have some kind of sinus infection which means my voice sounds like gravel. it will be nice when this heals up.

@leslietownes And spewed from the mouths of House reps and senators. I can not stomach Marjorie Green.

she's definitely one of the worst.

@leslietownes I get the sense that she really, really buys into all of that. I hate jokes against women, but she's a wacky, stupid (bleached) blonde. Done, I said it!

twitter.com/PplsCityCouncil/status/1456080117382336513 is pretty sad.

about a third of my wife's students are homeless.

That's hugely sad.

they put it all into education. i hope it pays off, but who knows.

@leslietownes Maybe they should reserve a residence hall, or a floor of a hall, so students can sleep on cots, have access to showers, and such. I mean it's not like they're sitting around expecting handouts; they're struggling to study, train, etc., to have a better life. The situation is even more strained for homeless parents trying to work, earn a degree, and raise a healthy child, all while living in a car. :(

How much of the problem with homelessness in CA a function of the high cost of renting an apartment? I'm thinking it's a huge factor in San Francisco.

it's also a big problem in LA. they estimate around 60,000 people are homeless every night, although it is a hard number to track because people go in and out of homelessness. snapshots don't tell the whole story.

people are also very good at hiding how homeless they are.

@leslietownes Indeed.

Hello!!

good morning, or evening.

Right now, it is 1:31 AM. I don't know whether that will be evening because it's dark, or morning because it's past 12:00 P.M.

I just want to share that here, children from 12 years old to 17 years old with comorbidities are getting vaccinated. I feel left out because I still don't have a vaccine. Soon.

it is appalling to me that the vaccine is not more widely available.

the state of california just declared that i can have a 'booster' shot (e.g. a third shot of the pfizer vaccine) although i am not too old and do not have immune issues.

everyone in the world should be able to get this at the same time that i do.

the only people left out in the current US regime are children ages 0-5. they expect the data to be good but it hasn't been approved yet.

i really got sick after the first vaccine. they say it can happen if you've had covid, which i may have had last year.

but nothing concerning. i just felt terrible for about 24 hours.

@leslietownes Yes, I've heard the same, and they often explain, in the same manner, why folks' second shot might lead to brief symptoms (given the immune system's memory of the first shot.) For me, both shots led only to an itsy bitsy muscle soreness in my upper left arm. Just like my weekly allergy shots as a kid. Of course, I was lucky in that respect, with respect to the covid shot. I imagine my upcoming booster shot might lead to 24 hours of feeling ill.

The think is, if you or eye refused a booster, so that dose can go to someone elsewhere on the globe who needs to get a first or second dose, that particular dose would never get to them. It's a matter of wealthier countries dedicated to help immunize those in need, globally. It's not really a matter of charity, but a matter of reducing, globally, the risk of covid. But then you get protest from the "America first" folks, with an attitude: Why should we be responsible for others in the world?

I can't imagine how people throughout the world, who have not yet been vaccinated, but desperately want to be, can stomach folks like Aaron Rodgers, and the arrogant refusal to be vaccinated, when there are tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands, of people patiently waiting for the opportunity to be vaccinated. :(

ugh. the new yorker had a good piece about aaron rodgers the other day. nothing new, really, just tearing him to shreds over his profound ignorance from a place of privilege.

@leslietownes Sounds appropriate! I'll have to search for the article.

newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/… it was open in another window.

@leslietownes OMG! Consulting "my good friend Rogan". Case closed. I hope the Packers don't re-up him. But I do love the title of that article!

@leslietownes Oh, and thanks for the link!

yeah, oof. i get that joe rogan's thing is being deliberately dumb, but when you have an enormous platform it's very irresponsible. and of course he took the horse paste when he personally got covid.

idiot.

@leslietownes Exactly. He's hardly a testimonial for Rogan, or the "do it yourself 'immunization'" nonsense he claimed. I would have respected him more, if he never misled. But if he'd have been upfront, he'd had have to follow protocol. And didn't want to have to wear a silly mask. Since spring, he's drawn attention from the media, holding out on honoring his contract until after training began, and now this? I'm sure he's become the darling of the wayward GOP.

i understand being skeptical of science. i don't share it, but i understand it. what i don't understand is adopting whatever someone just said on facebook as your replacement for science. "i don't trust these vaccines, i trust [whatever horse medicine someone came up with]." what the heck?

Anyway, I sort of don't want him to take up residence in my head, so really I'd prefer to see him go after this season.

it would be fine with me.

and people in a lot of parts of the world are sick and dying without access to this thing that he basically brags about not taking. it's offensive.

@leslietownes Exactly! That's what I suggested up above. It is downright offensive.

@leslietownes I don't fully understand being skeptical of science; I understand being intimidate by science, and I understand that US history, in using minorities to be guinea pigs makes it incredibly understandable to minorities. But Aaron is a privileged white man earning millions of dollars...

I mean, flashback to the days prior to penicillin. Now days, people claim skepticism whenever science informs us that climate change in speeding up the extinction of human life on earth, or clearly demonstrating anything people would rather not hear.

Studies that challenge what people want to believe, or need to believe tells us more about the human psyche, than anything else.

i love the tone of the new yorker piece. "Like many Americans, apparently, he read what he was inclined to believe, and found people who told him what he wanted to hear." yup.

@leslietownes Exactly. Couldn't have said it any better than that. As an undergrad, I tripled majored in psychology, in a program that leaned heavily on social psychology. And I remember concluding: The statement "Hey, I believe what I see" is only half the story. "I see what I believe" is at least the rest of the story.

social psychology is a very interesting field. one of my friends is a prof of it.

it had and maybe still has a huge reproducibility problem because of a relatively small number of prominent people faking their results, in an age just slightly before computer analysis would have made the fakery obvious.

still lots of valuable insights there, and very little of it flattering.

@leslietownes Yes, it is interesting.

gosh, it looks like she has something resembling tenure now. i should stay in better touch.

@leslietownes That's huge. Reach out. She'll no doubt love to hear from you!

she also grew her hair out. she used to have extremely short hair and now it is shoulder-length. the short hair looked better. i'll be sure to bring this up.

the pandemic made it a lot harder to stay in touch with people. i haven't even hung out with people whose houses i could drive to, in almost two years.