We're doomed! Again!

Yesterday's cheerful headline in an e-mail from Medscape: 

Tsunami of Death and Disability to Follow Pandemic?

Betteridge's Law of Headlines says "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." According to Wikipedia's article on the Law, "Phrasing headlines as questions is a tactic employed by newspapers that do not 'have the facts required to buttress the nut graph'." So let's see if Medscape's report can support this shocking implication. 

The article itself has a different header: "Post-COVID Wave Ahead of Death, Disability From Chronic Disease". But the first paragraph tells the tale:

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States will likely face a tsunami of death and disability from common chronic diseases that will affect society for decades, Robert Califf, MD, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), writes in an article published today in Circulation.

Oh, bother. What chronic diseases?

Califf says the impending tsunami of chronic health conditions — with cardiometabolic diseases, including heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes at the crest — demands swift and comprehensive action.

Califf thinks an "Operation Warp Evidence" (cute, huh?) will be needed for "more real-time, in-depth tracking of chronic health conditions, akin to the rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths." In other words, what will save us is the tracking of our fat, monitoring of our fat, and knowing who is fat. Because all the conditions in the "tsunami" come from sitting around the house and eating, adding to our personal spread while we were trying to stop the spread. 

Here's my favorite part:

The authors of an accompanying commentary note that the healthcare system has risen to the challenge of three simultaneous pandemics — COVID-19, economic disruption, and social injustice — even as many inherent fragilities have been exposed.

The "social injustice" pandemic is a self-serving lie that attempts to cover up the public health profession's complicity in encouraging morons to riot and burn last year. What else did they do for that "challenge" but make excuses for the damage in human suffering and property damage? Are we all social justiced up now, thanks to the healthcare system rising to the challenge?

Clowns like these authors are as packed full of self-regard as a jar is of jam. 

From a New York standpoint I can say they failed on every count, including "rapid data dashboards that were quickly implemented and hugely successful in the tracking of COVID-19 cases," because the information apparently wasn't used. If it had been, Chinese Death Virus patients would have been put on the hospital ship sent by Trump, and the field hospitals set up in Central Park and in the Javits Center, rather than stuffed into nursing homes to infect others. 

All we can gather from this is that nice sinecures will be procured with our money to track how fat and sick we're all getting, so our doctors (if we bother to go) can tell us to eat "veggies" and go for walks, like they always have, while many of us will nod and go back to our freaking Carl's Jr. Super Star with Cheese. Everything becomes kabuki theater after a while, doesn't it?

To their credit, a number of doctors in the comments section took issue with various parts of the report. It makes me think that there is a growing divide between the professional yappers in government medical services and the doctors who actually work with patients. If so, that's good -- because the only thing that will bring these useless tax suckers to heel is if their fellows reject and shame them. 

Fred's Book Club: Cheeky Devil!

Well, hello there! You must like to read, huh? You're doing it right now! And you're in the right place for our book feature, the Wednesday "Hump Day" feature we call the Humpback Writers, although nary a hump remains to be found. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter!

Today's novel is an unusual bird, a surreal comedy from 1943 that is still hilarious. You know the author best (if at all) as writer and creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But before he wrote the Dobie Gillis stories that became a movie and later a TV show, he wrote this, his first book:

Max Shulman took the title from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem that every schoolchild would have known back then, left off the "of tan," and pegged it to his novel about a dumbbell named Asa Hearthrug and his freshman year at Shulman's alma mater, the University of Minnesota. Calling this book a novel is kind of a stretch; it is a book-long comedy of the college scene, unsurprising since Shulman made his name as a humorist in college. 

You get the feel for how the book is going to go straight off the front matter, in the Author's Note: 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name "Minnesota."
     It is a combination of two Indian words -- "Minne" meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and "sota" meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique.
     The combination of the two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know. 

And we're off to the races.

Our book opens as Asa says farewell to his parents before his sojourn at the university. He also must bid a touching good-bye to his sweetheart, Lodestone La Toole:

Then I was beside her, and my funny little crooked smile gleamed across my bronzed face, and my brooding gray eyes crinkled at the corners. "Lodestone," I said simply.

     "Asa," she breathed, for that was my name.

     She was in my arms. Our lips met. Time crashed wildly about us as the entire universe was resolved into our wild embrace. I was laved in the fragrance of her. I knew a pulsing, mounting ecstasy, Then suddenly I was still, at peace in a pastel world. 

     "I'm hungry," said Lodestone at length. "Can't we get something to eat?"

     "Not now, my own. I haven't time. I must leave you in oh, too short a time to go to the University of Minnesota."

     "Maybe we could just get a hamburger. That don't take long."

     "I am going," I continued, "and yet I am not going. For you will always be with me. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I shall always think of you."

     "There's a White Castle down the road a piece. They have real nice hamburgers. It don't take them hardly no time to fix them neither."

Alas, soon our Asa is in college, and before you know it, swept into the Alpha Cholera fraternity, confused by professors, and prey to a femme fatale.    

I felt a prod in my ribs. Turning, I saw a dark-eyed, finely mustached girl in a close-knit burlap dress. "Hey," she whispered, "you know what sociology is?"

     "The study of how people live together," I answered.

     "Nah," she said. "It's the study of how the working class is oppressed under the capitalistic system."

     The professor fixed us with a baleful eye. "If you two don't mind," he said, "I'll go on with my lecture."

     "Tool," hissed the girl.

Yes, this is a member of the students communist party, Yetta Samovar. Or so she calls herself, having taken the name from a hero of the Soviet workers' paradise.

"She was the first Soviet woman to operate a power crane," said Yetta. "One day while working at the Dnepropetrovsk dam she leaned out of her crane to wave a greeting to a young man whose bed she shared and with whom she had become quite friendly. She leaned too far. Down she plunged into a block of newly laid, quick-drying concrete. Her last words as the concrete hardened around her were, 'Solidarity forever!'"

Asa's fraternity brothers struggle to save him from the grip of the communists by setting him up with another woman, named Noblesse Oblige. Asa falls in love with both. But what of sweet and hungry Lodestone La Toole? How will Asa decide? 

Asa is also put forward by his Cholera brothers to run for freshman representative to the student council -- can he win? What about the student newspaper? Why are they yelling all the time? ("Tear out the front page! I just got the results of the intramural chess matches.") 

It's a fast read and very funny, and while time has changed college culture to be even worse than it was in 1943, rest assured that it should all be recognizable to a student in any era.

I have to confess that the copy pictured above is not mine; mine is a 1948 three-in-one edition that I got from the Strand for $4 (price tag still inside). The collection includes Barefoot Boy, World War II home-front sendup The Feather Merchants, and the further adventures of Asa Hearthrug in The Zebra Derby.

I just want to mention one more gag, this from The Zebra Derby, in which Asa goes to war. In that book we find out that Asa's father is named Max Hearthrug. Max Shulman includes this footnote:

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

And sure enough, in the course of The Zebra Derby we meet Max Pilfering, Max Onus, Max Clodde, Max Nipthung, Max Stagecraft, etc. etc.... and the return of Yetta Samovar! 

With jokes like these, you should read something else?

So is Brenda Lee.

On April 6 we celebrate National Sorry Charlie Day.

According to National Today, keeper of the kooky kalendar keys for kakamamie kelebrations, Sorry Charlie Day is only tangentially connected to the famous animated StarKist Tuna spokesfish for which it is named. It is a day that "allows us to pause and reflect on the rejections we’ve faced throughout our lives." 

Cathy Runyan-Svacina started National Sorry Charlie Day out of admiration for Charlie the Tuna’s remarkable attitude in the face of rejection. Having recently experienced rejection herself, Runyan-Svacina thought it would be good to spend a day acknowledging rejection and understanding how we can move on from it.

It's not the worst idea for a fake holiday. There have been a lot of successful people who have faced rejection and fought to overcome it. Tom Brady rode the bench in college and was a sixth-round draft pick for the NFL. Fred Astaire's first screen test was a notorious disaster. Nixon lost two major elections before winning the presidency. Okay, maybe Nixon's not the best example. 

The point is that we, like Charlie the Tuna, should take heart when we face rejection. We can learn from our failures if we don't just mope and blame others. We can try better, try smarter next time. We can improve and overcome. It's what builds the steel in our souls. And one day, my friends, one day someone may say Yes, we want tuna that tastes good, and you ARE the tuna that tastes good!

So Charlie continues to try and -- let's face it -- continues to fail. Or does he? Normally an Atlantic Bluefin tuna fish in the wild can live no more than forty years; Charlie is still going strong at sixty. And you know, if Charlie had been accepted by StarKist, he would have been so much tuna salad a long time ago. We must ask ourselves: Does he really consider it a success to be eaten? Or does he just want to bring attention to the StarKist brand? If the latter, you win, Charles. 

All this is starting to make me think about lunch; I wonder if we have a can of tuna in the pantry....

Umm... Sorry, Charlie.

🐟🐟🐟🐟🐟

NB: Classic Crenshaw reference in blog post title.

Come on Spring, you idiot!

Short post today; busy weekend, busy Easter. But I'm sure you'll find something of fascination below. (Note: Fascination not guaranteed.)

One of the weekend tasks was to try to shame the season of spring into action. Not that there was a lot of reason to complain; the mornings were gorgeous. The week ahead looks good, although I did wear the winter coat out with the dog this morning. 

My weekend plan was to get a jump on the spring projects and move things along. After all, Mets fans missed out on opening weekend thanks to the Chinese Death Virus, so I had to do something.

What I did was, put down some of that mulch I bought. I put it around the trees. I also wanted to hammer in some fertilizer spikes for trees and shrubs, but found that the ground was still frozen about three inches down. Those spikes are just compressed fertilizer; they do not penetrate hard surfaces well. So I abandoned that task, although the mulch is nice.

Closer to the front, the lovely and talented Mrs. K wanted to replace some mums, which take all summer to pop up and last a brief time, with shrubs. I got some little firs, but I did not put them in yet. There's an issue with symmetry that needs to be resolved. See, it's not obvious, but one end of the porch is a little longer than the other, and she would like that to not be obvious. While we puzzle this out, the firs remain in pots on the porch.

Also in pot news: I planted my bell pepper seeds in pots. Too early for this zone, but I don't care. I was late with my cherry tomatoes last year and we missed out on some late harvest. Get moving, spring!

I oughtn't to tempt fate, though. Here's a scene from last May 9:

Another 2020 joy

Latest snowfall I've ever seen here. Killed all the daffodil and rhododendron blooms. Went away fast, but the damage was done. 

What will 2021 bring? I don't know, but I'm giving it the gimlet eye. Prove me wrong, spring!

Here comes non-Santa!

I always felt a little bad for the Easter Bunny. 

No, really. He's always way behind Santa Claus, the Christmas Kahuna. Even kids in families that don't celebrate Christmas love Santa, but there's no love for the Bunny there. 

There are a lot of reasons for this.

1) Santa comes to visit at Christmas, when Jesus was a baby. Christmas is fun! The Bunny comes at Easter, after we killed Jesus with agonizing, brutal torture, but He returned from the dead to save us. Kids have a tough time grasping that. Hell, adults have a tough time grasping that. 

2) Santa's got the tunes. I cannot begin to count all the pop songs that mention Santa. What does the Bunny have? "Here Comes Peter Cottontail." There are others, but they're hardly well known. And they never bother to play them on the PA at the supermarket.

3) Santa's mythos is much better developed. We know where he lives, who is married to him, who works for him; we know how he gets around, and even the names of his animals; we know what he does and why he does it, and the methods used in his distribution; we know what he wears, how he keeps his hair, and what he likes to eat. As for the Easter Bunny, we know he brings eggs, hard-boiled or chocolate, and other candy because... I'd have to look it up.* Where does he live? Who are his friends? What's with the Technicolor hen fruit, anyway? Bizarre.

4) Santa is fat and fuzzy when you see him around. On the rare occasions you see people in a big bunny suit, they look like freak show golems made from old bathmats. With those big, dead eyes. Children scream and run. Santa is almost never scary.

5) Santa's got the loot. The Bunny may bring such toys as can fit in a basket, but Santa can come through with a bike. Maybe even a BB gun. On car commercials it seems like Santa might drop off a BMW. Easter Bunny can't do that! He's just a bunny! He can't even drive!

I guess EB will always have to be number two, but he tries plenty hard. So do his helpers. A friend of mine was putting together Easter baskets with his wife for their various grandchildren, and right at the end they found a sawbuck that did not make it into a plastic egg. God forbid all the children got a ten spot and one didn't! So they had to go through the baskets and open every plastic egg that didn't rattle until they figured out which kid had almost been slighted. It's hard work, being an Easter Bunny.

So we salute you, Easter Bunny! As thankless as the job may be, at least you're not the Tooth Fairy, dealing with old teeth. Or the Great Pumpkin. Now that's a crummy gig.

🐰🐇🐰🐇

*According to Dr. Wiki, "Originating among German Lutherans, the 'Easter Hare' originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behavior at the start of the season of Eastertide." There's a lot more at the link, but it's all weird.

Ain't it the truth.

 

Fast acting.

I don't have much to say today, Good Friday, that I didn't say yesterday in cartoon form, except to add: I'm HUNGRY!

Well, all right, I'm not hungry, yet. But as an American who has never had to go a day without food because there was no food available, I'm not used to the fast that falls on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I'm totally spoiled that way, and I wish everyone on earth that privilege. 

The rules are, as outlined by the bishops: 

For members of the Latin Catholic Church, the norms on fasting are obligatory from age 18 until age 59. When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The norms concerning abstinence from meat are binding upon members of the Latin Catholic Church from age 14 onwards.

If possible, the fast on Good Friday is continued until the Easter Vigil (on Holy Saturday night) as the "paschal fast" to honor the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus and to prepare ourselves to share more fully and to celebrate more readily his Resurrection.

I didn't know this latter part about the fast continuing to the Saturday Vigil, which usually begins around eight in the evening here. Dude, that's like, four meals I'm missing, with just one meal in between! And no snacks! And no meat! Do I look like John the Baptist to you? Camel hair is not my color!

Of course, fasting has been a crucial part of Christian teaching, and that of every major religion. Self-denial is paramount in learning obedience to God, and to putting our egos in their proper and healthy place. What the Catholic church urges us to do is nothing compared to the Ramadan fast observed by Muslims, where not even a drop of water may be consumed from sunup to sundown. Because it is keyed to lunar cycles, it is celebrated (if that's the word I want) at different times of the year each year. When it falls in June or July, it must be murder. And it goes on for a month. 

Some people these days fast for bodily rather than spiritual health. Harvard Health has some good things to say about this practice, and it has shown great promise, especially in fat rats. And I say: It's about time those rats got off their tails. 

Along those lines, today, April 2, happens to be the feast day (so to speak) of St. Francis of Paola, founder of a strict order in the 15th century. 

Humility was to be the hallmark of the brothers as it had been in Francis' personal life. Abstinence from meat and other animal products became a "fourth vow" of his religious order, along with the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Francis instituted the continual, year-round observance of this diet in an effort to revive the tradition of fasting during Lent, which many Roman Catholics had ceased to practice by the 15th century. The rule of life adopted by Francis and his religious was one of extraordinary severity. He felt that heroic mortification was necessary as a means for spiritual growth.

He lived to the age of 91. Some might suggest that he felt like he lived to the age of 391 with a diet like that, but that wasn't what he was about. 

Meanwhile, back home, our parish has had some outstanding pastors, but they seem to have had different takes on food. The one we had when we moved here looked like he'd never missed a meal in his life; one after him looked like he'd never eaten a real meal. The current one is somewhere in the middle. 

Well, I am sure I can endure this hunger situation, and could even if it went until Saturday night. There is a world of difference between hunger when you don't know where your next meal is coming from and hunger when you see Snickers eggs and braised lamb shanks at the end of the tunnel. 

I feel like a guy playing at being needy, but maybe that's better than never giving the state and consequences of true need any thought at all.