brooklynite
brooklynite's JournalCOVID scare redux...
My niece went hiking with a friend yesterday. While in the car the friend got a call that her brother had tested positive. If the brother is positive, potentially the sister was, in which case she could have infected my niece who’s coming with her family to Christmas Dinner here with 10 others, including someone who’s asthmatic and would likely need to be hospitalized if infected.
The first Christmas as a layperson: Burned out by the pandemic, many clergy quit in the past year
Washington PostBut this Christmas Eve day, Aldape was in her Van Ness apartment, in a green turtleneck and jeans, drinking iced coffee and getting ready for her shift at the retailer Madewell. She’d clock in, then spend the afternoon folding sweaters and greeting last-minute holiday shoppers at the door with her big smile and “Hi! Welcome!”
“At the store they’re like: ‘You’re so good at welcoming people!’” said Aldape, her smile shifting into a chuckle and then into tears. For the first time in a decade, the 34-year-old wouldn’t be pastoring a congregation on Christmas Eve.
…snip…
Aldape is part of an exodus of clergy who have left ministry in the past couple years because of a powerful combination of pandemic demands and political stress. Amid fights about masks and vaccine mandates, to how far religious leaders can go in expressing political views that might alienate some of their followers, to whether Zoom creates or stifles spiritual community, pastoral burnout has been high.
"A Christmas Carol"
"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
The Worst Political Predictions of 2021
Source: Politico
There are a few reasons you might recognize the name Scott Adams. Perhaps you know him from his repeat appearances on these annual “worst predictions” lists (e.g. that Trump, Biden and Bernie Sanders would all contract Covid by election day 2020 and one would die). If you’re of a certain age, maybe you remember “Dilbert,” the ’90s cartoon icon he created that satirized corporate office culture in the years before “Office Space.” Or, if you’re part of the political cognoscenti in the broader Trump era, you might know him as a self-described expert in the rhetorical dark arts who has spun that ability into a second act as a MAGA-adjacent political commentator with a large online following.
But unlike many prominent voices of that persuasion, he exudes a calm clarity in his thinking — as if what he says is the natural outgrowth of a deliberative process — which gives his predictions a certain dispassionate confidence, as if they are closer to scientific fact than wishcasting or doomsaying.
For instance, on July 1, 2020, Adams made this prediction about American life in 2021 with Joe Biden in the White House: “If Biden is elected, there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year.” Lest you think he was talking about, say, the potential mismanagement of the pandemic or some natural disaster, Adams clarified what he meant in two further tweets: “Republicans will be hunted. Police will stand down.”
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/24/worst-politics-predictions-2021-525853
And, that's a wrap...
After my friend contracted Covid, my wife and I did two home tests, followed by a PCR test from a nearby testing site (nb: no wait whatsoever). All negative.
All family members (all vaxxed) are having tests done before gathering together for Christmas.
NYC Scales Back Times Square New Year's Eve
Source: WNBC
As eye-popping as the numbers have been in recent days, Thursday afternoon's report from the state was still stunning -- 38,835 positive tests in just one day, an increase of 10,000 from the day before. Of those, 22,208 were in New York City alone, orders of magnitude greater than anything either the city or state faced before omicron.
...snip...
Against that backdrop, Mayor Bill de Blasio was under heavy pressure to do something about the city's New Year's Eve plans. The mayor said Thursday that viewing areas will be filled with fewer people to allow for social distancing.
Visitors will not be permitted entry until 3 p.m. on New Year's Eve, which is much later than prior years. Proof of full vaccination -- meaning the last dose of the regimen was at least 14 days before New Year's Eve -- with valid photo identification will remain required as the mayor had previously announced.
Read more: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/times-square-nye-scaled-back-and-could-be-limited-more-as-omicron-nyc-spike-intensifies/3462688/
Santa was always a tough gig. Then COVID came.
Seattle TimesLorang, who, with his snow-white beard, gentle baritone and bearish mass looks like an escapee from a colorized version of “Miracle on 34th Street,” is retiring this year from a part-time gig he has (mostly) relished since answering a Craigslist ad a decade ago.
But the swan song of Santa Tim has had its sour notes, as one might expect of a public-facing seasonal worker during a resurgent pandemic.
Lorang, an e-commerce and marketing consultant, purposely underbooked the window from Black Friday to Christmas Eve, the traditional busy season for professional Santas, so that he and his wife, Linda Parker, aka Mrs. Claus, could gently wind things down.
New Jersey Redistricting map...
https://twitter.com/redistrict/status/1473688735216713728There's No Way Americans Will Cancel Their Travel Plans
The AtlanticOmicron introduced itself to the world only a few weeks ago, but it’s made quite an impression. In the United Kingdom, COVID-19 cases hit an all-time record on Thursday. And Friday. There’s much we still don’t know about the new strain, but as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, we know enough to see that Omicron is about to tear through the United States. Here, Omicron cases are now doubling every two days, and the variant’s contagiousness—and knack for duping our vaccines—is ratcheting up breakthrough infections. Sports leagues have started rescheduling games, restaurants are closing for a little while, and some schools are going remote.
All of this has left many would-be travelers nervously glancing at their calendar and asking themselves another round of terrible pandemic questions: How bad will things be by Christmas? By New Year’s? And when do things get so bad that I need to cancel my holiday plans?
Whether you should travel over the next couple of weeks is not something Americans are getting an easy answer to at the moment. So far, the CDC is plowing forward with the same old guidelines: If you’re fully vaccinated and not experiencing any COVID symptoms, mask up and off you go. Anthony Fauci and other public-health figures, while urging caution with Omicron, have been reluctant to tell people to stay home. Unlike last year, when virtually no one was vaccinated and the CDC point-blank told Americans not to travel, the fuzzy messaging comes in part from the fact that so much now depends on people’s individual situations—whether they’re vaccinated, what precautions they’re taking, and whom they’re going to see. This year, everyone has to make a choice all on their own.
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