Departing the Sensory

Source: CDC / WHO There are two ways to beat the novel coronavirus. One is to take sufficient social steps to get R0 (reproduction rate, or "r naught") down low enough so that the virus burns itself out for want of new hosts. Estimates vary wildly, but current data suggests an R0 of around 2.5. We need to get it down to somewhere as low as 0.3, from what I understand. Doing so requires meaningful testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. The other way is to achieve herd immunity, either via vaccine or via acquired immunity after infection or some combination of both. It's pretty clear at this point that the U.S. is going for herd immunity rather than suppression of R0, given the Trump Administration is doing literally nothing that suggests the latter (and is in fact advocating for the former, albeit not explicitly). Basically the U.S. is doing what Sweden is doing, but without the honesty and without the social safety net and national healthcare system. Herd immunity requ...

Elmwood in a Queen Atlantic Now this is a stick of unsplit elm, damn near taking up the entire firebox, just added to a bed of elmwood coals. Elm is the perfect burning wood for this lowery spring. Despite what has been written about elm burning "like churchyard mold," I have found that if you cut your elm standing dead, and when the bark has just begun to slip, but not yet falling off in sheathes, and you cut it stove length and put under cover, you'll have the perfect cheery spring fire, enough to drive away the dampness, but not enough to drive you out! In 1976, we joined Bertha O'Brien, her granddaughter Grace, and their boarder Leland Smith, a retired teamster who had spent the better part of his life doing the field work for farmers in the area. Bertha had lived in the house her entire adult life and was about 94 at the time. She was in charge of the cooking. It was a ham dinner, from one of their own pigs. The only cooking stove in the old low po...

I wasn't thinking about the massacre at Kent State when I woke up this morning. (Although I think I would have told you it happened in 1970 if asked, I don't think I have ever known what the precise date was.) Then I saw on Twitter and elsewhere a breaking story, that the Trump Administration is internally predicting that deaths per day from C-19 will double by mid-June, at the same time it publicly advocates for "reopening" of the economy and ending stay at home orders. Those headlines reminded me of something my father once said. I've been interested in 60s counter culture for a long time, and I once asked what it was like to live thru that galvanized period -- particularly Kent State. I'm sure I was listening to Neil Young at the time. One of the things he told me (paraphrased somewhat) is that during the 60s the Vietnam War allowed activists and society generally to focus on foreign policy. But Kent State was a turning point, because "now, they...