shadowkat: (Contemplative - Warrior)
[personal profile] shadowkat
1. Took a brief walk in the hot humidity - the mask state was about the same. It's not really changed that much since well March 2020, to be honest. It's still 80% with, 20% without, possibly climbing to 60% with and 40% without, since I admittedly take mine off outdoors and indoors if there's really no one near me.

I kind of envy my brother on weekends, he can sit outside, and have barbecues, and watch his old decrepit kitties. Also he lives on the Hudson River Side up in the Catskills.

I'd visit him - but it's not worth the energy. Also I haven't exactly been invited, and COVID. We're all still being careful around COVID.

2. Mother asked if I wanted her to call me when she was with father today.
I said it didn't matter. Mainly because I can't understand half of what he says, and I'm not sure he hears me.

But she told me she'd be most likely calling around one. She didn't. Instead she called around 4.

Mother: Visited your father today and called your brother, spoke for a while.
Me: Thought you were going to call me?
Mother: I asked him, but he told me that he'd already had spoken to you today and had a long conversation. So I figured, I'd go along with him on it, and call your brother instead.
Me: I guess I'm time-traveling again.
Mother: Pretty much.

3. Television As posted previously, I finished the Nevers - it's okay. The plot for anyone remotely interested is: In Victorian England, a celestial event occurs (i.e. an alien space ship flies overhead and infects half the populace with spores, some people die, some are touched with special powers, etc.) Various factions are upset with this turn of events and handle it in different ways. There's Lady Lavina and Dr. Hague who are attempting to destroy the celestial spaceship and creature, they've discovered, and are conducting experiments on the touched. Lord Manson, who is building an army and forming an alliance with the Beggar King to get rid of the touched. Hugo Swan who has formed an alliance with the local inspector to employ them in his little club. And Mrs. True, one of the Touched who has created an orphanage of sorts for them with the financing of Lavina of all people.

It's kind of a Victorian Steampunk version of the first two-three seasons of Marvel Agents of Sheild, except without the Agents. Also reminds me a bit of Dollhouse.

It has a few plot twists here and there, but nothing shocking. The sixth episode is supposed to be a huge mind-fuck of an episode - but alas I've watched too many television series like this in my life time to be shocked or surprised by it. And the other series, films, were actually better done.

Kind of disappointing for an HBO series.

I also got caught up on Legacies - I like the characters, so am sticking with it. Also the writing is not bad, it's entertaining. And in one episode they actually referenced Vamp Diaries - by having MG and Josie staying with Aunt Elena and Uncle Damon in Elena's family home.

And caught up on Nancy Drew - which is better written than most of these shows. It's by Joshua Schwatz and Stephanie Savage - and features a rather flawed heroine in Nancy. Rarity that. See, The Nevers isn't the only series that does that. While I enjoy Nancy more, I will admit Molly True is a better written character.

4. Reading a historical romance novel that is kind of amusing. The heroine is an heiress who is being forced to marry a broke Viscount, who hopes to inherit a Dukedom. He's marrying her - so he can use her dowry to lavish goodies on his mistress, and buy properties. Scandalized by the turn of events, her best friends have decided to orchestrate a plan - where she will run out on her wedding, and be taken safely away by carriage elsewhere. Their original plan included filling the church with pigeons as a distraction - but the heroine talked them out of it. Meanwhile the hero, who is the song of a Marquise, whose also a spendthrift and a gambler, is desperately trying to find a means of setting up his independence from his father, and no longer pay off his father's debts. He's managed to save up 1,0000 pounds to help fund an expedition for treasure with his two buddies, the Hollander Twins, who have money, but aren't that smart. Unfortunately, he stumbles across the heroine's friends, Jane & Ellie, who are also writing a Lady's Primer on Scoundrel's and Rogues, and mistake the hero (Asher) for one of them. In an attempt to talk to him - they knock the poor guy out with the carriage door which slams him into a lamppost. Instead of leaving him on the sidewalk - they abscond with him, tie him up and put a sack over his head. Then urgently call the heroine to help them figure out what to do with him. The heroine's bright plan apparently is to rob the poor guy, unfasten his bounds, and take off. Furious, Asher, who overheard the three friends discussing their plans to have the heroine run away from her own wedding, decided he'll steal her and her fortune.

I'm also reading The Rules of Civility by Amor Torres - or rather listening to it. It's my audio book - which I've taken up since the pandemic. Rec'd by college buddy. It's about a young woman living in NYC in the 1930s, she starts out as a legal secretary, and eventually becomes the assistant to the publisher of a glamour rag or magazine. I'll give Torres credit for nailing the publishing industry. At one point the heroine points out that in her editorial assistant job for an editor at a publisher - she's making next to nothing, and those around her are very well dressed and well fed for having such low salaries - because they are from well-to-do families. Basically they got their jobs via their parents connections, and are either living at home still or being put up in an apartment by their parents. Hence the reason that publishing jobs and magazine jobs are known as "glamour" jobs. They make no money. People who do them - usually have rich husbands, or parents, and do it as a kind of hobby.

That's not changed in 80 some years. Sad but true. The publishing industry is still in-breed, favors nepotism, and basically nothing but glamour jobs.
I found that out in the 1990s, every time I think it has changed, I talk to someone in it - and realize it hasn't. It's actually why most of the literary books that have come out of it - feature white well-to-do waspy women or men.

The author clearly isn't any more enamored of it than I am. This book is a bit more biting in humor than the previous Torres book that I read.

I've kind of given up on Good Reads yearly challenges. I honestly don't care how many books I read a year, nor do I care how many books other people read. It doesn't matter. It's not the amount you read that matters, it's whether you enjoy what you've read or how it enriches your life , etc that matters.

[I'd say quality of the read - but who am I kidding. I don't care about that either.]

5. The Governor went from sending Corona Virus emails every night, to just five days a week, to now twice a week. This is good news - it means that A) there's less to report and we're improving, and b) he's getting bored of the updates.

6. Mother keeps wanting to talk about the Middle East - or what is happening is Israel and Gaza. (I don't.) We both agree its been going on for forever. And both sides are wrong in different ways. They also have more in common than they know. But they have managed to broker a cease fire via Egypt, and Biden managed to get them to do this by bringing in Egypt and the surrounding countries to the table - to put pressure on both. And he did it quietly without fanfare, allowing them to save face. (See? This is what a leader without a monsterous ego looks like.)

The death toll is rather monsterous however.


In total, the Israeli military killed 248 Palestinians in Gaza, including 66 children, according to officials there, and thousands have been displaced during the 11 days of fighting. The rocket attacks launched by Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, killed 12 people in Israel, including two children.

Gaza is a sea of rubble, and the scale of the destruction will not allow a return to normalcy for some time. The fighting may be over for now, but for millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war and has controlled through decades of failed peace talks, the routine indignities of occupation are part of daily life.

7. Hmmm...depending on your point of view, this could be seen as potential good news, assuming of course its true.


Maternity wards are shuttering in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in China. Hundreds of thousands of properties in Germany have been leveled and the land turned into parks.

The world’s demographics are changing, pushing toward more deaths than births. Though some countries’ populations continue to grow, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else as women have gained more access to education and contraception. Demographers now predict that toward the middle of this century, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. Above, a couple in Acciaroli, Italy.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow climate change and reduce burdens for women. But the data also points to changes that are hard to fathom: Fewer workers could upend the ways societies are organized and our ideas about family and nation.


I was thinking at the start of 2020, and towards the end of 2019 - that there were far too many people on the planet. But I didn't want a pandemic, with a rising death toll. I don't like seeing people in pain. Every person matters.

Also a lot of people have come down with cancer recently - folks I know. My mother has four friends with cancer now, I've a friend with cancer, and she also has a friend/acquaintance who is still suffering from long-haul COVID due to a family gathering last year. The grandkids visited from England, both had COVID, she's the only one who got a severe case - and is still on oxygen over six months later.

I feel kind of numb now with all of the stories. The numbers seem surreal.
And I wonder how many deaths are too much. 26? 30? 159 is that a lot of people dead? Is a thousand? Two thousand? Fifty-two thousand? How about Six Hundred Thousand? Or One point Three Million? They may seem meaningless or distant if they aren't personal to us? Or our dead? Just numbers. We don't know the names. We don't know what they did. Or who they were. Like flowers in a field, each plucked before its time. Life is so precious, and yet we reduce it to numbers on a chart or on a map or dashboard. It feels so...empty somehow.

I heard at my Zoom UU services today, that the Ministers this week are holding a prayer vigil/memorial to honor George Floyd. And I thought, perhaps uncharitably, what about all the others? What did this man do to deserve so much attention? Is it how he died? Unable to breath, in a year so many died for similar reasons - unable to breath, but due to COVID not a cop. Or the fact he died with witnesses filming his death, and sending it to everyone else? Look - see - this is happening, please help us stop it. But I keep thinking of Breonna Taylor, who still breaks my heart. The woman in Kentucky, who came home after a tough day saving lives from COVID as an EMT, only to get shot by cops in her own home, after they had mistaken her boyfriend for a person of interest. Her boyfriend lived. So did the cops. She died. And she had no Justice, they were acquitted. Why aren't we praying for her and her family? Or the 589,000 who lost their lives to COVID? So many too many. Not that George Floyd doesn't deserve our prayers, he does. But alas...he's not the only one.

The Johns Hopkins COVID MAP OF DOOM that I've been intermittently checking since roughly January 20, 2020 has now morphed into the Johns Hopkins COVID DASHBOARD OF DOOM - prior to that I was following it in the NY Times Corona Virus map and briefing - but the Times, I found out in January, was getting data partly from Johns Hopkins. I don't check it as frequently now, maybe once or twice a week if that. I stopped checking it constantly sometime in December or November, when I finally hit the proverbial wall. I couldn't do it as a regularly...the numbers stopped making sense to me. And I found myself just very tired and worn out from the looking.

The Dashboard shows that over 1 billion vaccine doses have been administered world-wide, and the good news, if there is any - is the number of vaccines administered is higher than the number of cases or deaths. The US has over 285 million administered to date, with 33 million cases. It's leading everyone else, but that has more to do with the fact it likes numbers. The UK has administered 61 million doses, and has 4.4 million cases. (Keep in mind the UK's population is closer to 66.5 million, and the US's population is 338 million. We're almost there, just have roughly 100 million to go for US, and 5.5 million to go for the UK.)

Meanwhile, my Zoom Service UU Minister advises us to engage in Sabbath Practices, and do a daily meditation of 100 blessings, leading into a year of letting the land rest - or "The sabbath year" (shmita; Hebrew: שמיטה‎, literally "release"), also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it (שביעית‎, literally "seventh"), is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Bet HaMikdash. Yes, my Minister is a practicing Jew. I was raised Catholic, attending a Unitarian Church, with a Jewish Minister. When I joined it had a former Catholic as Minister, now the former Catholic is in the UK and has contracted cancer.

I feel like I have whiplash. Also the church services made me feel lonely. One was about how we couldn't do anything alone, and needed each other. The other was about how we should honor the sabbath, take a day of rest, go off the computers, etc, and just be with family and friends, and have long conversations. I wonder if either Minister realizes there are folks in the congregation who can't do that? The Ministers don't relate to those who most need their help, it's always been my issue with religious leaders in certain faiths. Maybe I need to find a Hindu or Buddhist monk?


On that sad note...here's a picture.

Date: 2021-05-24 02:07 pm (UTC)
cactuswatcher: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cactuswatcher
Maternity wards are shuttering in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in China. Hundreds of thousands of properties in Germany have been leveled and the land turned into parks.

I came to the conclusion there were too many people, decades ago, that people are not just the source of pollution, but effectively pollution itself. But I felt helpless to do anything about it. The population of the U.S. has close to tripled in my life time, but birth rates here have definitely dropped...

The ghost cities in China (if you haven't heard) are actually a giant investment scam. Scams are so common in China that one of the few investments people trust is real estate. With much more money floating around China than a generation ago, prices of apartments for sale in real cities where people live are getting crazy. So developers build whole new cities. Folks with money to invest, rush to buy in before the prices go up, never intending to live in the new city, never even taking a look at it, not realizing the buildings of the new city may be so shabbily built that they may start falling down before the whole sham city is finished. China watchers are amazed this has gone on as long as it has. No one knows what will happen when the people realize their investments are literally turning to dust... The result of the One-Child-Policy in China is the nightmare, with more old people to support than there will be people of working age in another decade. It's worse than it sounds because, for reasons you can guess, there are too many men and too few women of child bearing age. It's now a two-child-policy but the change may have come too late... (I've seen projections that India will become the most populous country in the world this century...)

The properties in Germany? I doubt the population of Germany is collapsing. It's just a guess but I think that's about East German communist era buildings that people don't want to live in any more getting torn down and replaced with more comfortable apartment buildings more spread out with green spaces in between.
Edited Date: 2021-05-24 02:08 pm (UTC)

Date: 2021-05-24 05:13 pm (UTC)
jesuswasbatman: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jesuswasbatman
The situation in Eastern Germany isn't so much the low birth rate, as old industrial cities in the region still being economically depressed and young people moving to other regions where they can find jobs.

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