“Noting that Roe v. Wade was decided 45 years ago, and reaffirmed 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I asked Judge Kavanaugh whether the passage of time is relevant to following precedent. He said decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence.” — Susan Collins in her speech explaining her decision to cote for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on October 5, 2018
“Here is the trap you are in…. And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules
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I got it. And that’s despite four shots of Pfizer COVID vaccine and injections of the drug Evusheld which is given to immunocompromised people like me. I’m sure without those I’d be in a lot worse shape.
How bad is it? For me so far this is day four and I’m Ok. It’s sort of like a cold and the flu. I’m tired a lot, a little lightheaded and I carry a Keenex box with me wherever I move around the house.
If COVID were the chickenpox, we’d have parties and infect each other and be done with it. But it isn’t and the pandemic isn’t over. Maine has been one of the states that hasn’t had it too bad until now but that’s apparently no longer the case.
So, what’s worse than COVID at least for me so far? How about a million other things. Hey, and then there’s the axiom “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Case in point… There’s a bent hinge on one of our screen doors. I called up the company that made it last week to inquire about purchasing a replacement. This morning I got an email informing me that the French screen doors we bought eleven years ago were discontinued as of last year.
Their proposal is that I buy new ones which would cost over $2400. I was shocked and my blood started to simmer and as it was about to boil over I unscrewed the hinge and turned into Superman. Yes, I bent steel with my bare hands!
We’ll see how long my repair holds.
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Yes, I’m throwing the book at her!
Susan Collins calls the cops over polite abortion message chalked outside home
‘Intricately drawn’ message urging Republican senator to back reproductive rights bill was not a crime, police in Maine say.
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If you have not yet met up in the ring with COVID 19, I hope you won’t. My own bout is now in the second round and I want to pass along my experience not as a warning but as information that might be useful. I also hope I won’t be a long hauler but I think from all we know at this point we are collectively in for the long haul with COVID for perhaps as long as we’re still around.
A drug called Paxlovid delivered what I thought was a knockout blow in the first round but the virus wasn’t apparently down for the count and is up off the canvas. I’m feeling better today and according to what I’ve been able to research that just may be the problem. Let me explain.
Paxlovid, developed by Pfizer, was given emergency use authorization last December by the FDA. It’s an antiviral drug meant for patients like me and probably you if you’re over 65. We’re at higher risk of serious disease and if in addition we are immunocompromised, it doesn’t matter how old we are. COVID is potentially a dangerous disease to contract.
Paxlovid’s effectiveness in keeping those for whom it is prescribed from being hospitalized is nearly 90%. That, in addition to the COVID vaccines, has been a game changer and especially for those of us with certain cancers and other serious health challenges.
But there are also rare instances where people who have taken Paxlovid– which consists of 6 pills daily over five days –have relapsed with the same symptoms they experienced initially and tested positive again for COVID after only a few days after testing negative. That is what’s happened with me, things were fine and then they weren’t.
Here’s my own timeline:
–Symptoms began on 5/6 and I tested positive on 5/7 and began Paxlovid that same day. My symptoms subsided and disappeared after three days.
–I tested negative on 5/12.
–My symptoms returned on 5/16 and I tested positive on 5/17 and have begun a second round of Paxlovid on the advice of my oncology team at Dana-Farber.
It needs to be noted that from the onset of symptoms for COVID there is a five day window for starting a Paxlovid course of treatment. After five days the virus will have replicated too much for the drug to have any effectiveness. At that point it’s all on your immune system and your COVID vaccines to wage the battle and for most people their immune system and the vaccines are up to the challenge.
COVID’s symptoms are varied. My own have been nasal congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache, lightheadedness and fatigue– similar to a bad cold, maybe more than like a virus since I haven’t had a fever.
So, why do I think Paxlovid, at least in my case, may have led to a relapse– in medicine it’s called a rebound –of my COVID? According tothe New England Journal of Medicine and the website Yale Medicine, the drug is so effective at knocking down the replication of the COVID virus that the “immune system didn’t have a chance to see the full extent of the virus, since Paxlovid suppressed replication early in disease.”
I guess some things are too good to be true and a few others might just be too good to even know when you’re through! I started with boxing and will end with basketball. I will rebound from my rebound and if there is anyone out there who has been sitting on the bench about COVID, get off of it and take your shots!
I wonder if George Calin might not have been a prophet if he had lived in the time of the Old Testament. He certainly made a career out of lambasting our foibles and absurdities. He spoke funny and often dirty to power. But it’s hard to make the case that he was speaking on God’s behalf. He didn’t believe in God.
Carlin didn’t believe in the present either and had a cute bit about. He would stand on the stage and turn to his right and say, “Hey, there’s the past.” Then he would turn quickly to his left and say, “And here’s the future.” While turning back and forth he’d add, “The past, the future. You see, we’re in either the past or the future. The present is an instant we can’t stay in. It’s one or the other.”
It’s sort of how I feel right now. The present has become pretty unbearable and the future is just downright scary. Ah, but we have the past to cherry pick. Sure, there were bad moments there too but more and more I cling to the good ones and especially the innocent and uncomplicated ones.
George Carlin died in 2008 but he already said he had checked out several years before. He’d given up on our species and as he gently put it,
“Humanity is circling the drain and I’m just going to sit back and watch it.”
He put his pessimism in a geological context and asserted that our claim that we are destroying the earth is foolish.
“The earth was here way before we were and no matter what we do, I’m sure it will be here another billion years after we’re not.”
I’m sounding pretty dark and I apologize for greeting the weekend with my present thoughts — no, they’re in the past now until I add some new ones in the future.
But what has bothered me since the mass shooting in Buffalo is how used to these occurrences we have become and how we– our country –have done absolutely nothing that needs to be done to try and stop them.
I have written about this before. I covered the shooting in Colorado at Columbine High School in 1999. We stayed for two weeks which was too long but how much news coverage is being devoted to Buffalo, especially in light of it being a hate crime? I guess thoughts and prayers don’t even rate air time any more.
There was a moment at Columbine that has stuck with me ever since. In the tragedy’s aftermath a spontaneous memorial grew from people who brought a few flowers to thousands of others who did and thousands more who came just to express their sorrow. As they hovered there you hardly heard a sound.
We did a story about this and one woman we interviewed said that what bothered her most was that the community knew by then how to do a memorial because there had already been so many that they’d seen elsewhere. That was in 1999 and nothing has changed. So it goes and sadly is likely to many more times.
My “cartoon” is a painting by an artist named Nahum Gutman. He was probably known better as a writer and illustrator of children’s books and I guess you can see that connection in his work here. I’d never heard of him until I visited a museum where his art is on permanent display in Israel. Art that I like is soothing and a refuge.
Music is the most powerful form of art for me. It can change my mood in ways like nothing else. Several years ago I discovered the music of Arnold Rosner. Rosner composed in virtual obscurity and he composed a lot. He died in 2013 alone, his body discovered only after a few days. The vast majority of his works went unperformed during his lifetime.
I’m attaching one. It’s called Gematria, which is a form of numerology that gives Hebrew letters numbers that practitioners of Jewish mysticism– Kabbalah –believe find hidden meanings to things. It’s conception dates back nearly 3,000 years.
The Rosner piece is both dramatic and romantic. He was influenced by composers Alan Hovhaness (dramatic) and Ralph Vaugh Williams (romantic).
Oh, and HBO is airing a two part special about George Carlin tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m. Oops, that’s now.
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The link at the bottom of the post is to Steve Kerr’s statement about yesterday’s school shooting. It’s worth listening to but those who actually have the responsibility to do something about changing anything will shut their ears and close their minds unless I’m totally naive enough to think that any of them have the courage to put saving lives ahead of holding on to their positions.
I’ve read about the shooter and apparently, he was bullied because of a speech impediment when he was younger and had a mother who was a drug user. He had a history of erratic and recent violent behavior and yet, when he turned 18 in Texas was able to purchase guns. And not just any guns, two were the equivalent of military assault weapons with large magazines.
I’m willing to bet that if sensible and merely reasonable gun permitting and registration laws had been in effect, this person would have been denied any gun. He should have been. Would he have been able to purchase one illegally? Sadly, that’s very likely. The estimate is that there are already 400 million guns privately owned in the United States.
That genie is out of the bottle and its accomplices on the sidelines, in addition to Republican politicians, are the violent forms of entertainment– movies, video games –that studies have shown desensitize us to the real thing when it happens. Democrats in Hollywood and the video gaming industry, if any are even asked, will also hold up their heads and deny any of their own contributions to our metastasized societal cancer.
I remember reading a book titled Future Shock fifty years ago. Its author predicted that much of the world would be overwhelmed by too much change in too short a time. I for one believe that’s indeed happened but there was one example that Alvin Toffler gave that has morphed into something else.
Toffler predicted that there would be so much passenger air travel in the future that we’d get used to having a serious crash with substantial loss of life every couple of weeks. He was wrong. Flying in a plane is today significantly safer than driving your car. Mass shootings in America are what have become a weekly event.
Oh, and Governor Abbot and Senator Cruz? I’m guessing they won’t be going to comfort any of the families in Uvalde. They’re scheduled to appear at an NRA event in Houston on Friday. They’ll send their thoughts and prayers though. And double OH! These are the same men who call themselves pro life. I’m having a brain freeze trying to comprehend how that’s possible but I guess Jeb Bush said it all when he was running for president and asked that question after a school shooting in 2015. His answer, “Stuff happens.”
Please listen to Steve Kerr. You may need to unmute him by clicking on the tiny speaker on the right bottom of his screen…
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I took this picture over the weekend. The sky does get to weigh in on what’s going on beneath it.
As I’ve mentioned before, my first job out of college was at CBS News in 1970 where I became the low man on the totem pole at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. News people, myself included, are cynics, at least that’s my observation but I submit the following as evidence.
On holiday weekends 50 years ago and as far as I know still today, the American Automobile Association would predict how many of us might be traveling in their cars. The AAA called it a travel advisory. At the CBS Evening News the number was wagered on. Well, not exactly. On a holiday weekend we bet on how many traffic deaths there would be. It was called the “Blood Pool. “Cynical, callous? Yes! I rest my case about me and my brethern.
Contributing to the number of those deaths was the fact that, although in 1968 federal law had mandated that seatbelts be required in all new cars made in the United States, it wasn’t yet mandatory to wear them. It took until 1984 for any state to pass a law requiring their use. By the late 1980s fewer than a dozen states had passed mandatory seatbelt laws.
So, what if we had no seatbelt laws today? Do you think Trumper dominated states would pass them? I don’t believe I’m being cynical or callous to say not a chance. We were a different country then. But would traffic deaths skyrocket without seatbelt laws? Don’t answer that so fast. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, in 2020 51% of those in the United States killed in passenger car accidents were not wearing a seatbelt. That year seatbelts saved an estimated 15,000 lives and another 2,500 could have been saved if they had been used.
Unfortunately, we now have a pattern in our country of too often not doing what’s safe or sane and we pay mericessly and continually because of it. Which could be the setup for a rant about gun control but no, it brings me next to the subject of a COVID memorial. There’s a movement to do this and I don’t doubt it’s well intentioned.
Over a million Americans have now died from COVID. But recent research by Brown University and Microsoft A1 Health concluded that since vaccines have become available over 300,000 COVID deaths could have been averted if their victims had gotten vaccinated.
Memorials are for people who died in wars or disasters in which those killed had no way of foreseeing or protecting themselves. A memorial for a third of this pandemic’s victims who could have avoided their own deaths by simply getting a shot in their arm is senseless. It’s foolish.
And when it comes to shots, the number of us in the nation who have been vaccinated is outnumbered by guns possessed by Americans by two to one. I don’t need to rant about how stupid we are not to have done or likely are not going to do to tackle this insanity but I’ll just add this. American exceptionalism sure looks a lot different to the rest of the world already so why not just go on arming ourselves with machine guns, not wearing seatbelts and build the COVID memorial.
Cynical, callous? Maybe, but more just angry and sad.
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