Enjoy the Moment

In two days it will be Super Bowl Sunday, and many couples will not be in the same moment together.

Some will gravitate toward watching the game, and others will revel in the social gathering. Perhaps everyone will intersect at the food table.

For the record last year's Super Bowl on February 7, 2021 in Tampa was not a super-spreader event. Hillsborough County chief epidemiologist Michael Wiese:

"While we didn’t really have a lot [55 cases] that was associated directly with the Super Bowl, we do know that the community kind of celebrated and got together in response to the events, which did show some increase in the transmission during the weeks afterward."

The transmission rate was low a year ago, and that was before vaccines were available.

Stay out of nursing homes, pop that Vitamin D, and enjoy the game.

Effective As But Safer Than Bleach

(WSJ gif)

Until the vaccine arrives [momentary flash on Didi and Gogo] we've been abiding by the recommendations of the health professionals, i.e., wearing masks, frequent hand washing, and social distancing. Yes,there's some dispute about the effectiveness of masks, but for us the discomfort and inconvenience are a small price to pay when measured against the potential benefit.

If in-person meetings are unavoidable, we hold them outdoors. We also take Vitamin D and zinc supplements.

Now arises some evidence that using mouthwash should be added to the list of preventive measures:

Reducing virus particles in the mouth could help fight against the pandemic, the companies said, because Covid-19 can be spread through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. Both companies [Unilever and Colgate] said the mouthwashes dissolve the outer protective layer of virus particles, preventing them from attaching to cells and infecting them.

But based on tests so far they can’t definitively say how long the benefit would last or what impact coughing would have.

The article is something of a let-down to those focused on coronavirus avoidance for themselves; the benefit of using mouthwash, even if it works, is to protect the people with whom the garglers interact, not themselves.

Your humble blogger gargles daily anyway to prevent infection from using a steroid inhaler.

Now I can say that I'm doing it out of care and concern for the health of others; in this Peninsula community of staunch recyclers and electric cars, I need all the virtue points I can get.

Making the Cut

Pre-COVID-19 Sport Clips (foursquare)

Apart from the occasional Zoom meeting there has been no social pressure to look presentable. However, it had been four months since the last haircut, and San Mateo County barber shops could be shut down any day. All other Bay Area counties had been closed because they failed the Governor's criteria . Sure enough, our hair salons were ordered closed this morning until the infection rate subsides.

And so it was that last Tuesday, when the Sport Clips app signaled that there was a less-than-30-minute wait, I hied over to the San Mateo location two miles away. I was seated immediately. Though the large reservation screen was populated with names, the stylist said that many people are late, or worse don't show up.

After taking my temperature, Henry asked me to set my eyeglasses and cellphone on the table. He pointed to a new plastic apron and had me don it myself.

Henry and I were each masked throughout the 20-minute session. When he got to the area around the ears, I undid the loop and held the mask over the nose and mouth. When we were done, I walked over to the back room, unsnapped and shook off the apron, and deposited it into a hamper. Physical contact between me, Henry, and the equipment was minimized throughout. "Contactless" payment was made via a credit card machine and a sterilized stylus. Hand sanitizer was available throughout the facility.

My point is that I don't see how we can make much improvement over Sport Clips' procedures. Maybe outdoors in the sun would be added insurance, but I felt safe enough.

Here's hoping, forlornly, that authorities could trust the vast majority of businesses to devise safeguards and the vast majority of customers to judge whether they can stay or should leave.

Coyotes, Toads, and Goats

With San Francisco Bay to the East and Hwy 101 to the
West ducks and geese are the only wildlife in Foster City.

It's been only a few weeks of hunkering down, but already the animals are coming out of hiding:

It turns out boar, deer, coyotes and birds have been right under our noses all along.

In dystopian science fiction the death of civilization is represented by deserted, crumbling cities. Fiction permits writers to bypass decades; in our current reality the empty alabaster cities aren't crumbling...yet.

(WSJ image)

(Digression: Horace Smith's Ozymandias is not as well known as Shelley's. However, the former does make explicit the impermanence of modern edifices, while in Shelley's version--the much better poem--it is only inferred.)

Among COVID-19's many lessons: film-makers, if you're going to depict a humanity-less future don't stop with dogs, cats, and rats in the city. You might want to add coyotes, toads, and goats.

A mountain goat in Llandudno, Wales, in March. (WSJ Photo)

Falling and Rising and Choosing

Like any punter, I brag about my wins. So permit me to chortle about the pick I made two weeks ago.

Winnebago (WGO-click chart to enlarge) has appreciated 31%, while the principal indexes have gone up 1-5%.

So I'm chortling away.

401(k): the amount lost is equal to years of salary.

Not very pleasurable is the status of the 401(k). Allocated to the stock of a former employer, there's a lot more invested in the 401(k) than in Winnebago and a lot more to lose.

Ever since the pandemic cratered the stock market it has been painful to look at brokerage statements.

On the bright side stock market analysts say that we have seen the bottom and the market is rallying because the country is re-opening for business.

I don't feel the confidence. The infection rate is down but we don't know why. For people who do become severely ill, there's no vaccine and no guaranteed treatment (remdesivir is only somewhat effective). The lockdown did "bend the curve" so hospitals weren't overwhelmed like Italy, but it seems to your humble blogger that we're re-opening and crossing our fingers that the second wave won't hit.

Everyone will have to judge for themselves whether and how much to go out and practice social distancing. Everyone will have to judge for themselves how important it is to work and how much health risk to accept.

Perhaps that's what America is all about----not locking down or opening for business but giving people all the information and letting them decide for themselves what's right for them.

Have Faith, Father

The lady minister wishes the rector a Happy 66th.
No social distancing is required for married couples.

The coronavirus has forced everyone to cancel, downsize, or convert to streaming video life's celebrations.

Graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals (nowadays a celebration) have all turned out not to be the social occasions that organizers imagined.

Neither has the "farewell tour" of the rector, who retires on August 1st after 23 years of leading the congregation.

April homilies were presented to nearly empty houses over YouTube, and instead of an organ and full-throated choir, the music of Easter was sung by a soloist to pre-recorded accompaniment.

Today was his last sermon, at least until the lockdown is lifted. He turns 66 this week and, according to both the Diocese and the County of San Mateo, cannot attend even small gatherings.

Thank you, father, have faith that it won't end like this. Things will open up by summer.

Past, Present, and Future Tents

Last week's world-has-changed table has an unexpected addition (in red):

World 1.0	World 2.0
Police: uncover your face	Police: cover your face
Take mass transit	Cancel mass transit
Reusable	Single-use
Urban	Suburban
Specialist	Jack-of-all-trades
Supermodels	Computer models
Senators	Governors
Interdependency	Self sufficiency
Medical insurance	Medical supply chain
Moisturizer	Sanitizer
Homeless tents bad	Homeless tents good

The Chronicle explains:[bold added]

18th Ave., SF (Chron photo)

From the Tenderloin to the Castro to the Richmond, the shelter-in-place order has caused an explosion of homeless tents popping up on sidewalks all across San Francisco — and it comes with the blessing of the city.

With the city’s already crowded shelters unable to provide the required social distancing, city officials have decided tents are the next best thing. So for now the tents that the city worked so hard to remove in recent years are back and pretty much untouchable.

“I know of about 600 tents that we have helped give out. But there are probably a lot more that have been given out by community members, small businesses and shelters that have no room,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

“Tents are actually part of the Centers for Disease Control recommendations and the recommendations of the Trump administration,” Friedenbach said.

The effect, however, has been like rolling back the clock.

“When we started out working on addressing tent encampments in August 2016, we estimated there were about 1,200 tents citywide,” Jeff Kositsky the city’s Healthy Streets Operations Center manager. “We got it down to under 400. Now, I estimate it is over 750 and rising quickly.”

The City seems to be operating under the same logic that gives free needles to drug addicts. The policy may improve the population's health, but it also subsidizes the bad behavior and does nothing to reduce it.

Afterthought: Christians who wanted to worship together on Easter Sunday should have set up tents on church lawns, since civil authorities apparently bless this method of maintaining social distancing.

A Day of Quiet Contemplation

Daylight Savings Sunday, 2015

On a day when many Christians feel a need for communion, the irony is that churches--and secular authorities--have prohibited Sunday gatherings. (Note: over two dozen churches in the Diocese offer remote Episcopal services.)

It's turned into a day of quiet contemplation for many of us. It's an opportunity for solitude, free from the unquiet and disquieting world.

Another consequence of social separation is loneliness, the subject of extensive sociological and psychological literature since the mid-20th century. Both loneliness and solitude are aspects of alone-ness, a fundamental human condition.

Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote how communion with God can grow out of solitude:

We have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of another being. We are always alone, each for himself. But we can reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from Him to the other self. In this way man’s aloneness is not removed, but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we love than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity.

And perhaps when we ask -- what is the innermost nature of solitude? we should answer -- the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal. It is the experience of being alone but not lonely, in view of the eternal presence that shines through the face of the Christ, and that includes everybody and everything from which we are separated. In the poverty of solitude all riches are present. Let us dare to have solitude -- to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves.

The concept that God is present in the sacrament of marriage, in the church ("when two or three are gathered together"), and other human relationships is found in the Bible.

Paul Tillich's insight is that God breaks down the alone-ness that separates one from another and is the means by which human beings achieve true communion with Him and with each other.