Update

      Things have changed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing. OK, I mean, duh.  But I, we all, started out with this inconvenience and it has now turned into a kind of low-grade nightmare. I'm following all the rules, and will continue to do so. One day, if it comes to that, I will be unhappy if I am made to not leave the house at all, but I'll comply.
      The one thing I can't bear, however, is listening to our President at his daily Coronavirus briefings. I won't go into a tirade here. It's too depressing/boring/irrelevant/etc., but one thing nags at the back of my brain, which is how normal it has become for him to say something stupid. I mean, watching him and pointing out stupid stuff he says has almost become a sport. (It could and would become a drinking game if 1.) we were allowed to congregate in bars or home parties, and 2.) if people could actually drink that much.) But it's a game now, of some sort. Reporters and journalists go to the briefings, listen to any new information that is imparted for that day (usually not too much) and then ask questions and all try to get Trump pissed off, trip his trigger, so he will say something extraordinarily and stunningly stupid and therefore "newsworthy," at least by the new standards of newsworthiness, it seems.  And we are never disappointed. Our government is now just like a reality TV show, a game. I don't think the Corona virus caused that.  It's been turning that way for awhile now. The recent emergency merely brought it out and made it easy for all to see. (By "all," of course, I refer only to the people who agree with me on this.)
      Meanwhile, downtown Kansas City where I live is a surreal landscape of empty parking lots and giant buildings with skeleton crews and sidewalks dotted only occasionally with pedestrians.  Oh, wait, that was before Covid-19. Well, it's even worse now.
      And just to make it interesting, we are in the process of buying a house. This process started before the virus, and while not impossible to stop, there was enough momentum that we decided to press on, banking on the likelihood that things will return to normal one day, which may or may not be wise. So, at any rate, that is about to finish up and we will be moving in about two weeks. So far so good.
      So that is what is happening nowadays.

5G Whiz

This might be sort of funny, except it is an actual quote from Karri Kuoppamaki, Vice President, Technology Development and Strategy at T-Mobile.

Don't get me started on how they all think one of the uses for 5G technology would be to help the operation of driverless cars. I mean, what could go wrong?

A Little Math

As bad as the Corona Virus must be--and I'm no expert on the subject--I feel compelled to point out a few things that might calm the general panic that had started to set in. Originally the mortality rate was said to be a frightening 2.0%.  I did the math, using the number of reported cases against the number of resultant deaths, and that number seems about right. I also looked up the mortality rate for "the flu" in the United States. It is only between .02% and .04%, more or less.  Much less deadly, it would seem, than the new virus.
However, an article I read said that it is typical for "new" outbreaks to show numbers that are skewed toward a greater percentage of deaths because only the most severe cases are going to be identified and reported. Mild cases of new viruses are often not reported at all, at first, because they may be thought to be the regular flu. So, no one in the medical community really believed, you might say, that 2.0% was accurate, and that the eventual number would ultimately be smaller.
Now, today in the news it was reported that the Chinese province of Hubei--thought to be the epicenter of the new virus--had been using testing procedures that were thought to be invalid, in effect not identifying enough patients with the virus. The criteria were change to include all who exhibited all of the symptoms, regardless of getting a negative result on the test, or having not been tested at all. The number of reported cases jumped nine-fold, but with reported deaths among that group doubling.
I'm no mathematician, but I believe this puts the calculated mortality rate at a new number, with fewer deadly cases per reported survivable cases--now around 0.5%.  Still ugly, but then very close to regular enfluenza-like numbers.
So there are my thoughts on the matter--not a scientific study, as those are too hard.

The Super Moon, or, Snow Moon

I came late to the Super Moon. One day after, I missed the rise in the east, but I did catch it setting in the west the next morning.
I took a picture.  Here, the city seems to be the main attraction, due to the fact that the moon is not near enough to the horizon to give the illusion of greater size, but, as they say, the moon don't care. It'll keep going round and round the Earth, possibly long after there is no one left to gaze up at it, just as it did before we got here.

Week 4

Maybe about three and a half weeks have passed since the first symptoms of shingles appeared. This was just the aching, which was mysterious at that point. It was a week after that that I got the rash. Statistically, it's not surprising I'm not completely over it yet, but I think I have improved and am on the fabled Road to Recovery. So much about that, except, maybe, thank God for Gabapentin and Ibuprofin.

The Kansas City Chiefs football team won the Superbowl. A parade was held a few days later, going right past my apartment and through downtown and on to the Union Station about two miles south, where a rally was held. Lots and lots of people came and observed one or both. Some say about one million. The population of the Kansas City "metro area" is about 2.3 million, so, something less than half of the entire population of Kansas City came to celebrate the Chiefs' victory. Football games generally take place in cold weather. The day of the parade it was 25 degrees (F) when people began to assemble on the streets to get a good spot to see the parade, fully six hours before it started. A hardy lot.

My partner and I went up to the rooftop of our building to take a peek at the parade route. There were already three dozen or so people up there already. We stayed about twenty minutes before wimping out and returning to the apartment. Some pics:

That is all.  Still waiting for spring.

But What Have I Done Lately?

The answer to the question, what have I done lately, is, nothing. Nothing much. In a way, killing time. I plan to move to a larger apartment this summer, and meanwhile caught shingles. Here I must highly recommend the shingles shots if you have not had them yet, unless you somehow had the chicken pox vaccination--in which case you would be too young to know the likes of me, but anyway.
Shingles is painful. I had a very mild case of it when I was around twenty-one years old, and it was painful even though I only had one little area of rash. This time, many many years later, my whole right side, front and back, was covered in rashes and . . .  I had no idea there were so many varieties of pain. Good grief. I'm better but still on the pain meds.  It can take weeks and weeks to get over this.  I had the anti-viral meds so I hope I escape that. So, to summarize, get the shots. Word to the wise.  'Nuf sed. And so on.

You may or may not know that my hometown football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won the Superbowl last night. I have jokingly been telling people I just hope both teams will have fun, but last night the San Francisco 49ers were not having fun after the game. Tons of people in Kansas City were, however. I live downtown so from out my third story window I saw the streams of people and cars leaving after watching the game on giant TV screens in a few places downtown. Happy screams and woo-hooooos filling the air, horns honking, streetcars stalled in place, flasher on as they gave up trying to move up and down Main Street, occasional sirens. Good for them. I'm not a football fan, really, but it's nice to see an entire city the size of Kansas City in good spirits and all in accord.

Even President Trump caught the fever and Tweeted his congratulations and in his own inimitable fashion said the Chiefs represented the great state of Kansas in their victory--except of course as I've said many many times, KANSAS CITY IS IN MISSOURI---NOT KANSAS. (If you mean Kansas City, Kansas, then you must say: "Kansas City, Kansas.")  The tweet was corrected almost immediately of course, but the damage is done. You Missourians and Kansans who live in at least two states that "went Trump" during the 2016 election would do well to realize that the man doesn't give a flying f**k about either state along with many of the surrounding states in the center of the country, as he demonstrated last night when he revealed not only his ignorance but his unwillingness to inform himself for lack of . . . a flying f**k.

But I digress.

That's about all from Missouri, now in the middle of the oddest winter here that I can remember, for it's frequent freaky warm spells--not that I'm complaining. Anyway, spring is coming, as it always does.

Note: Kansas City was named before the Territory of Kansas was a state and named Kansas. Hence the confusion for all of us who do not have a staff of highly intelligent and well-informed aids at our disposal.

The Sun is UP

As I write this morning, the sun, uncaring of the calendrical round numbers that we humans find so intriguing, is rising from last year's horizon. It is a good, cloudless day--if a little chilly. This is Kansas City, so it will get colder from this day out until the planet rights itself a little bit later this year.
No New Year's resolutions. I'm still working on 1998.
To use a phrase from the 60's, I just flashed on something: there are plenty of people walking around right now who regard the 20th century--the Nineteen-hundreds--as history. What the. 
More to come. The 1998 resolution was to pursue writing.
Keep flossing.
-Roy