Covid-19 Rates Are Back to Wintertime Levels in the UK and Spain

 

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Sigh:

The California Highway Patrol responded Thursday morning to a car fire in Truckee that the driver reportedly started to try to scare away bears.

According to CHP Officer Carlos Perez, officers responded around 5:30 a.m. to reports of a car fire alongside Interstate 80 near the Farad exit. When officers arrived, they found that a man had lit a fire on the hood of his car in an attempt to “keep bears away,”

Perez said. No bears were found in the area and responding officers determined that the man was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. 

Officers were able to extinguish the fire before it spread beyond the hood of the car, but Perez said there was shrubbery in the area and the incident could have ignited a wildfire.

Dreaming Big Thoughts

At California Fitness, in Citrus Heights, July 11, 2021.

The Century Plant is Listing, But Still Taller Than Ever

Fourth of July, 2021

Watching illegal fireworks at the house with the Confederate display. The explosions made me irritable after awhile.

Jasper At Sierra II, Where The Dogs Gather

Today, Jasper got freaked out by a bigger dog and escaped through the bars of a fence in the corner of the park. A little dicey getting him on a leash again!

Trip The Hose Fantastic

Mixed feelings…. 

I was tending to the front yard, and laid a hose across a public sidewalk to water a tree on the other side. 

I wasn’t terribly worried about the hose as a tripping hazard. Most walkers, cyclists, and skateboard enthusiasts are experienced enough to spot hoses and adjust as necessary. 

Just then, two inexperienced girls, ages about 4 & 5, came hurtling down the sidewalk on scooters. They hit the hose and went flying, landing on the cracked sidewalk just across the property line in front of the neighbor’s place. The girls started to cry, got up, and ran back to their grandmother, whom they had outpaced. 

I came down my steps to accept blame for the hose, but never opened my mouth. Instead, grandmother patiently explained the dangers of cracked sidewalks to the little girls. And because grandmother said it, the girls accepted it, without analyzing their own experience. No one said anything about the tripping hazard of the hose. 

Feel like I dodged a bullet, but missed an accountability moment.  Fortunately the girls were all right - possibly some scrapes.

The World Of Fake Vaccine Cards

Paying real money and taking real risks to avoid a minor inconvenience:

I did a dive into what is advertised for sale on Telegram, and it turned out that it is possible to buy almost anything—from pizza to travel packages, to vaccine cards as well. 

It only took me several seconds to discover three channels—essentially, streams of information and updates that anyone can search for, and subscribe to—advertising fake vaccine records in English. One of them, “Covid19 vaccine cards certificate” has more than 400,000 followers. I reached out to the channel owner pretending to be a buyer and figured out that the CDC vaccine card, filled in with my information, would cost $200.

Why salad bars may never come back

Once common; now endangered:

Grocers and analysts say a combination of factors has kept stores from rushing to bring back their salad bars: Customers are now buying more groceries online and working more from home than they were before the pandemic, reducing the need for quick mid-day trips to salad bars. Some customers have also moved away from them out of sanitary concerns. 

Prior to the pandemic, salad bars and other prepared foods were becoming more important for grocers because they drove customers to shop in person, said Scott Mushkin, a retail analyst at R5 Capital. For salad bars to work, though, customers need to quickly use them or the food quality will deteriorate or spoil.

On Critical Race Theory

@antisocialstudies

PART 2 I love my fellow #tiktokteachers #history #teacher #imsoproudofyou #herecomestheboy

♬ original sound - Anti-Social Studies

"Après Moi, Le Déluge"

Opera Wednesday - Virtual Concert V // May 2021

I recently posted about how one DMTC YPT alumnus, Nora Unkel, was doing in her movie production career. Here is another such alumnus, Lisa Parente, in her chosen career, in opera.  Here she sings the 'The Silver Aria' from "The Ballad of Baby Dow."  (I was surprised to bump into her dad while I was walking Jasper - John's dentist is down the alley from me.)

 

Antelope Valley Earthquake - 07/08/21

This quake really shook things up in the Sacramento area:

An earthquake jolted Central California on Thursday afternoon, shaking up residents of the Sierra Nevada foothills and the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys.

The shaking struck at 3:49 p.m., revised to a magnitude 6.0, and was centered in the Little Antelope Valley about four miles south of Coleville in Mono County, about 150 miles east of Sacramento.

Seismologists dubbed it the Antelope Valley earthquake, during a 5:30 p.m. briefing.

As of 7 a.m. Friday, more than 100 aftershocks have struck, including temblors as strong as 5.2 and 4.6, have shaken the area near the epicenter, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“It’s a region with known active faults,” USGS researcher Austin Elliott said, referring to the remote area on the back side of the Sierra. “This is a classic place geologists go to study.”

There have been about two-dozen earthquakes of this magnitude in the region in the past 50 years; Thursday’s was the largest in the vicinity since a 6.1 quake in 1994.

Dozens of people across California — in Sacramento to as far south as Los Angeles, north to the Oregon border, the Bay Area and beyond — reported feeling the quake to the U.S. Geological Survey. By 7 p.m., over 23,000 self-reported responses were given to the federal agency’s website.

I certainly felt the rolling waves pass through the house. My house is unusually sensitive to shaking:  In the past, I've felt distant offshore quakes at the Triple Plate Junction near Eureka that otherwise escaped notice in Sacramento. 

There was some confusion in the first few minutes. USGS reported a second quake near Stockton just seconds later, but quickly decided the second quake was a mirage - a reflection of the first quake.

Preliminary reports indicated two earthquakes had struck 25 seconds but 100 miles apart — but the U.S. Geological Survey revised the shaking and removed the report of a magnitude 4.8 quake in in San Joaquin County.

Elliott and other seismologists said the glitch is not uncommon as seismic waves cause reflections as they propagate. One of those reflections just happened to center in the community of Farmington, about five miles southeast of Stockton.

Elliott said the mistake happened because “our instrumentation is sparse (in areas) away from the large population centers,” and once officials reviewed the data, they updated it along with the magnitude of the actual quake.

The experimental ShakeAlert network apparently sounded off, and even though the information the system was working with was incomplete, people appreciated the warning:

The system initially got the earthquake’s magnitude wrong: called it a 4.8; later, it was upgraded to a 6.0.

The system thought the rupture happened about 31 miles south of where it actually did.  And at first it presumed it was detecting three different small earthquakes, rather than one large one.

Such details didn’t matter to some California residents, who welcomed the warning in time to take action.

“It worked. The whole point is to give you a little notice,” said a Lodi-based wine industry consultant who asked that his name not be used. He rushed from his office to the safety of a bathroom when the system’s app issued a startling emergency alert. “It’s really worth it.”