Multiple outlets are reporting that an employee of a Wisconsin hospital intentionally left 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine -- containing ~500 doses -- out of refrigeration, which required them to be discarded unused. The employee has been fired. From Forbes: Johns Hopkins published a good piece last week about Science in the face of fear: a commentary on vaccine hesitancy and public trust. There's a lot in there. While it is great news that we have multiple vaccines, much earlier than those in the field realistically hoped for, much more efficacious than the FDA had planned for... it's going to be a hard road back to anything approximating Normal. Approximately 1M doses got into arms over the last week. To get to ~80% immunity by July (and ~80% is what experts are now saying will be needed with a new more contagious strain moving around America) we would need to get 3.5M doses into arms EVERY DAY. And if what we're up against is not just HCW and first responders declining the vaccine... but people in hospitals actually sabotaging and ruining scarce and precious vaccine... ... very hard to see how The Economy!!! is going to be restored.

Isn't this... exactly why so many of us *got* oximeters over the last 10 months? Before March I certainly never thought of it as a basic first aid kit item for a generally-healthy household. But from the outset COVID has presented differently. Is she in an area where hospitals are at capacity? Even if that is the case, I'd agree with Carol that

This year, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (who also wrote Warmth of Other Suns, one of Carol's picks). Last year The Water Dancer was top pick, in other years Night Circus, Master and Magarita and Till We Have Faces all have been top picks. All of these look great, thank you... Here's hoping for a more sustained attention span in the year ahead...

A "logical fallacy" presumes that some sort of claim to "logic" is being made. I don't see any such claim being made by either person in this example. One person makes a claim (offering up neither substantiating evidence, nor logical underpinnings); the other person makes a retort (also without either substantiating evidence, or logical underpinnings). So to my mind, this is mere nyah-nyah insult-swapping, with neither logic nor even fallacy: just childishness. (It's been a long year, 2020; here's hoping to better news and better moods ahead....)

When I'm speaking seriously, to folks outside the intimate family circle: "COVID" or less often "coronavirus." When I'm speaking metaphorically, to folks I know in real life (usually within my synagogue/ faith circle, with whom it specifically, instantly and reliably evokes the Exodus story which has a particular resonance as a collectively endured shared experience): "this plague." I associate "China virus" with intentional xenophobic blamecasting, and I associate "the rona" with far-right eye-rolling contempt of masks and other public health measures. Significant negative associations for me with both terms (which I only encounter on line; I don't believe I've every heard either IRL though to be fair I'm not getting out much, LOL).

** blinking ** ETA and the winner is...

re COVID-line mismatches between branches of extended family Yes, it's so very hard. Our kids are a bit younger than yours -- not yet married with families of their own -- our eldest is mostly-launched, living in NYC; and the other two were off at college/boarding school until both schools abruptly ejected them and everyone, including the eldest, came back to the nest to quarantine through the worst of it (when NYC was super-weird and eerie). Since mid-summer all three have drifted back to their respective "real lives," where they are all *immensely happier* than back in their childhood rooms and (sigh) childhood roles... but now since Thanksgiving the younger two are back at least through end-January; and who knows if their schools really will allow on-campus classes then. It's an awkward age to be navigating slightly different COVID lines, because they really aren't children anymore; My Rules My House ultimatums will only increase the rancor level, and we're not REALLY going to eject them in a pandemic anyway. And they really were suffering from real anxiety, isolation, stress. So we've been forced into a lot of hard balancing-act conversations. It's all so hard, and it's been so long. If there is a sufficiently sized segment of the extended family willing to try it, we have regular game nights virtually, and it really does work. Scattergories and hearts seem to be the two with greatest staying power in our crowd, but we've tried a number of other ones. It's been a major way we've been able to stay connected.

@Carrie12345 and @Thatboyofmine holding your loved ones in the light. May their cases be mild and their recuperations complete. My husband and I are on more or less the same big-picture page. It's managing the lines with our nearly-adult kids that has turned out to be trickier for us. They're too old for My Way or the Highway; and this has hit them quite hard mentally/emotionally. We've all had to step up our communication / compromise games. We've also struggled with having to move the line as circumstances in our area have shifted. Our part of CT was one of the worst hit very early hot spots... then we inched down over the summer to be among the lowest incidence in the country... and now we've flared up to almost as bad as we were in April (sigh). So we've gone from total lockdown, to gradually getting to the point where we were doing outdoor picnics and patio gatherings and occasional indoor setting activities for the by-then-emotionally-basket-case-kids, to (sigh) back to near-total lockdown. And the pace with which some of us have arrived at the "Time to Readjust the Covid Line!" decision has varied across the family. This is all.so.hard.

re bringing family along into hearty soups and stews The trick is: excellent bread, big salad with some nuts or something to make it heavier, something to put ON the bread like good cheese or hummous or babaghanoush... and nothing else. They might look around expectantly for "more," but just smile pleasantly and blink. They'll get used to it. (I actually sometimes put out a bit of smoked fish, or canned sardines or something as well. But the key is to bribe them into a sated stupor with good bread.)

This sounds GREAT.

My nearly-launched daughter living in NYC, not so much, LOL. 325ish.

I do black bean soup regularly. I start with dried beans, save the soaking liquid and add veggie stock (either storebought or homemade). Add chipotle peppers, smoked paprika, separately-carmelized onions, a bit of tomato paste (more for color than anything else; too much bean turns sort of grayish). After a couple hours simmering I scoop out most of the beans & onions with a slotted spoon and run them through the blender so it's all thick and creamy and smooth. Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a bunch of fresh cilantro. I also do a chick pea version of a tangine that I also do with lamb -- I actually make the two versions simultaneously for the v and omni parts of the family. Start a whole mess of fairly large onion chunks carmelizing in olive oil with garlic chunks and lots of cumin. While that's going, make a YUGE savory-mash-up of olive oil, cumin, cinnamon, saffron, kosher salt and curry. Roll the chick peas in the mash-up until every bean is smeared and dripping; then set aside and do the same with the lamb chunks. Set the chick peas in a covered oven dish along with half the onions and a bunch of tomato chunks. Sear the lamb chunks until browned on all sides then set the lamb chunks up in its own oven dish with the other half of the onions and a bunch of tomato chunks. After they've been cooking for an hour or so, add a handful of sliced up calamata olives (THIS IS THE MAGIC INGREDIENT), the juice of a lemon, and the chunked up PEELS of a lemon (2ND MAGIC INGREDIENT) into both pans. The lamb dish is better the longer it cooks; the chick peas only need 2 hours or so. Serve on rice or couscous with lots of fresh mint and cilantro.

"doing" vs "making sense of" statistics You can't. You can't "do" statistics without distributions. You cannot become an econometrician, or an epidemiologist, or even a decent sociologist ( #PetPeeve) without the mathematical language of functions and sufficiently advanced calculus. But you can understand the basics of statistical distribution graphically, just as you can understand the basics of microeconomics, by plopping the data onto graphs and looking at the pictorial shape of the thing... if you know what it means, logically, that a bunch of data has a tight or wide distribution, a more-or-less symetric distribution or a lopsided one, fat tails or not, etc. (Much as you have yourself referenced the shape of COVID metric curves as you've been looking at positivity rates.) Not everyone needs to *do* the drug data research, or epidemiology studies, or the econometric work, or sociology #PetPeeve research. But all reasonably educated people should be able to to really understand what an article in a magazine means; and that includes the difference between a self-referring sample of 40 vs a randomized sample of 1,000 vs a controlled blind trial of 20K. I'm not a cartographer. I have not mastered the language and tools and mathematics -- neither the old nor the new ones -- of cartography. That said: I don't need to know how to survey and triangulate contours and draw maps to scale or produce that information digitally... but I really should know how to read a map. Same for basic probability, risk assessment and statistics.

Chlorox soft scrub first to get all the solid matter off, then regular windex to get the streak marks off. Every once in a blue moon when I melt something... ... one of those puppies. When we moved into this house ~20 years ago my city-bred husband wanted to swap it out for gas, but our town doesn't *have* gas lines so it would have involved substantial infrastructure investment... and I got used to how it cooks... and I've come to love how much easier it is to clean than any other kind of stove I've ever had.

He wrote it just as that iconic first photograph of the earth from space was taken, hanging there suspended in eternal vastness, neither central nor inconsequential but as we really are, riders bound together in that endless space. I return to it over and over; it is such a profound insight into the history of how humans have viewed ourselves.

Yes, starting with elementary math first; and also Fractions and (the substance, if not the mathematical language) of functions are also necesssary to basic tasks of ordinary living, like figuring out sales discounts, halving or doubling a recipe, cutting out fabric for a sewing project; and Back in the BeforeTimes, our family did lot of homestays with families with whom our language skills were rudimentary at best... and always carried around a bunch of card & dice games that can be played non-verbally. The ability of people to cotton on *very quickly* to basic probabilities and risk is one of those underlying street smarts that IMO our education system has actually made us stupider. (Ditto: map skills and directional awareness, generally.)

re vaccination as a prisoners' dilemma That is so.on.point Let me count the ways, that basic high school education would do far better to require basic probability, statistics and risk assessment -- which are essential to EVERYONE's capacity to function in the ordinary world/make sense of current events; and leave calculus & physics to the subset of students aspiring to fields in which they are necessary. Also, the economists' language of "the tragedy of the commons" is IMHO unfortunate marketing -- it connotes a quaintly local and faintly socialist artifact of a Shakespearean age. We're all atop the same d@mn marble hurtling through the eternal cold, whether we'd choose each other's company or not if we had any choice in the matter, is to my mind more on modern point.

and if it still feels unbearable then what? Keep trying. (I know you know this but) medication is an art not a science; it often takes a few runs to get the right fit and the right dosage; and sometimes even after things are working reasonably well for a reasonable while, either a physical change or an exogenous event or just some mysterious unknown can knock the person off again and the dosage needs re-calibration or the medication needs to be swapped out again. Same with therapy -- there are plenty of good people, good therapists, and bad fits... there are also some bad therapists... and there are a lot of good people who aren't ready for truly productive therapy. It's *hard* to get a good fit. If the fit still feel off after a few sessions, try another therapist. Yes, exhausting, just when there's not enough oomph to get out of bed. Figure out one person in your life who will ALWAYS tell you, without any other words or conditions or platitudes or any of a zillion other mixed messages: Please. Stay. Alive. Tell that person some signal, that you'll use to convey you need to hear it. And then actually tell the person when you need to hear it. And then hear them, as they do. Please. Stay. Alive. These are dark times. The light will return. We are not alone; do our best to hold each other up.

Was this already posted? If so I missed it. Well done, VP. More like this, please.

re king of the fruits yes, do, please... 😎 Pam in CT whose brother lived for 15 years in Singapore...

I think what's off-putting to me is the high-gloss varnish, more than even the color. Floorboards, indeed. Also, if the varnish really is as glossy as it looks, painting over it will entail very thorough prep. +1 on Zinser, though I probably would try to figure out a way to run a belt sander over it as well. Prep is all. On color, I really like the idea of gray. Not dark gray, something like the color of the band of the "6 hours ago gardenmom5 said" band below. with the beam either the same gray, or a darker shade.

Yeah, I have dreams more or less like this about once a week. I remember them when I first wake up, but if I don't do something RIGHT AWAY to keep on holding on to them, like tell my husband or write down a few jog-the-memory images, I usually lose them by the time I'm in the shower. re being able to change the course of a dream mid-stream When mine get tense -- I often dream that someone is chasing me or stalking me -- I can change the course of the dream by "remembering" oh yeah, I can FLY!! (because turns out, in my dreams, I can fly). And then as soon as I remember POOF I fly away and all is good, and then usually I wake up. Dreams are awesome.

re Pfizer vaccine sitting in a warehouse awaiting instructions on where to send it Maddow did a segment on this *two nights ago* with on-the-record Pfizer corroboration.

YES, the only truly appropriate response from him to you is "thank you." And, The bolded, and the Elephant in the Room parenthetical to the bolded, is a crucial insight to your own mental health. Which you're right to recognize is coloring how you're managing through this blip -- I do think it is only a blip -- in an otherwise pretty well functioning family doing a laudable job supporting one another through an interval of quite a few quite significant difficulties. (I "liked" this for the bolded part. I think I'd stay away from the "research" rec of the second part, because... ... it's pretty rare that a person on one side of a divergenc-of-views is really very persuaded by another person's "research." Danae's response gets him through to the answer to his (real) question, and leaves him able to respond in his way. He can nuke up a chicken nugget later in the evening, or start chucking chicken nuggest or deli meat or whatever at them at lunchtime, or whatever *he* believes will get "adequate protein" into them. The more details come out of this, I really don't think it's about differences in what particular food items "count" as what "category" -- much more about differences in parenting styles. you rock. THANK YOU.

I do think that's an issue that affects how stable is the "denominator" of the positivity rate. Self-referred / free testing is still *available* here an in NYC, but lines are markedly longer; so people doing it just cuz, or because they'd like to visit an elderly relative, are less likely to do so. As those folks self-select out, the rate would presumably rise a bit. A *lot* of employers around here with IRL work are now requiring weekly tests, so something of a bifurcated testing market has arisen, where you can get tested for free (and wait and wait and wait...) at community health centers, v pay at CVS/ other sites and go through much faster. Like with congestion pricing on toll roads, folks have mixed feelings about it.