Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

More and more convinced

That I’ve already had the virus. Since I don’t know if I’m still shedding, I’m staying indoors anyway. I do feel physically better than I did last week in almost every way, although psychologically…. I mean people looking at Hitler couldn’t believe him, because he was so outside the norm of politicians, and now I’m pretty much the same with the Orange Twitler. My disbelief keeps hanging me up. I want to wake up. There is no waking up. There is only living through this.

Nathan Vincent’s ‘Manly Doilies’ (there are others, have fun)

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Helen Branswell, one of my twitter gurus since Ebola (she’s Canadian, makes sense, lives in Boston, good science writer) has a thing or two to say.

I hope that the health care workers get more PPE soon.

I have a horrible horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, that this time next year most of the disabled people I follow on twitter will be dead and I’m pre-crazy with grief about it because they’ve taught me so much and I’ve only made donations to a couple of them.

I did donate to anti COVID efforts on the DTES yesterday.

In other news, snitch-taggery rhymes with douche-baggery.

England is changing who is being assigned as cause of  death coronavirus on the basis of three of the flimsiest reasons

 

my email of today to some fuckwit at Kent State U whose name I shall redact. It is a variation on the modern standard: Were you FUCKING HIGH??

 

Are YOU the dean who sent out an email this week…..

demanding that your staff ACCELERATE THEIR RESEARCH during a pandemic which has forced every academic into distance learning?
If so, I would like you to tell me what you’ve been prescribed that makes you so disconnected from reality. I would like to provide the name of the drug, or drugs, to my physician, as damn, they seem to be working well.
If not, perhaps you can pass the message along to senior officers of the university that demands like that are ludicrous, insensitive, unrealistic and are NOT going to look good on anyone’s academic resumé.
Yours truly,
Allegra Sloman
Vancouver Canada
Tom Humberstone drew this for The Nib this past week:

 

today’s status

Image result for images pink fairy armadillo

But first, a pink fairy armadillo

Virtually everyone in my novels is suffering from a major mental illness, I only just realized that now, and alien hero George veers between coldly civil rationality/urbanity, and florid, bug-eyed, narcissistic, consensus-reality-evasion.

Well, he didn’t start off knowing that his bug-eyed crazy mother had DRUGGED HIM and his mate-to-be, to sequester them so they couldn’t breed with anyone else. Or that he had two occult siblings living inside him, only one of whom he could actually communicate with, and that poorly. And he went wackdoodle IN SPACE when they left him; and then his mate shoved him out the airlock in the equivalent of a rhinohide drop ship with a gumwad for a parachute.

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Processed using calibrated polarized near-infrared (CB2, MT2) filtered images of Saturn taken by Cassini on November 17 2012.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill from twitter today

 

shift start

one of the people I follow on twitter just posted that her ER nursing shift in a major American city (she doesn’t specify)  started with three COVID-19 cardiac arrests (deaths)

The great dying has started.

allocation of resources in a time of plague

which inevitably looks like eugenics – disability twitter is watching the approach of death with narrowed eyes and one last curse for the Republicans

In Florida alone half a million will be sick by the end of April. Guns, crappy info from Fox and worse info from Trump will make it all incredibly worse and no help is coming.

No help is coming. The Americans who aren’t in the health care system already as workers don’t know that. There’s not enough supplies.

It all started with Reagan.

Remember on his watch it was okay to let thousands of Americans die of HIV.

In Canada we’re going to have the same issue, but it will take longer because we’re a bigger country relative to our population, but eventually almost everyone will get sick. Yes, Canada’s working on a vaccine. Yes, I bless the people who have already volunteered for vaccinations. But no, we’ve got a year of hell in front of us.

I have a very mild fever again, like I did a couple of days ago, and my eyes feel sandy. No breathing problems at all, no congestion; could still be allergies, could be a mild case.  I’m no longer leaving the house; Jeff has to for work, although not much.

In after times will people be angry with me that I wanted to catch it early in the outbreak? I want to be immune so I can actually help people instead of being stuck in my fucking house.

Mike gets out of quarantine next Monday.

As I suspected they will be using SOAP Hall (Beacon rental location) as a place to stage the sick for RCH before they need intubation or supplemental oxygen.

Prince Chuck has caught it but if he’s like the rest of Royal Family he’s got the fucking immune system of a water buffalo and will sail through it.

 

and I’m still writing fanfic. There are hugs and possibilities and smooches and complications.

family news

Keith has been laid off. He started a whatsapp for the laid off workers as an act of mutual aid.

Katie is now the only working adult in her household. You know what that means! Well what I hope it means is that the menfolks start cleaning more, but what are the fuckin’ odds, eh

414k infected 18.5k dead, Italy using skating rinks for morgues.

A new resource.

A twitter exchange:
Social Distance Warrior
I am wearing a crew neck t-shirt, how in hell did I still manage to get crumbs in my bra
GrandmaOgre Washes Her Hands
@TheCorrection
Replying to

@vixy
how long is your hair? For oft have I known the mangled, wily crumb to abseil into lingerie unseen
1:20 PM · Mar 24, 2020Twitter Web App

Craig Spencer MD

From his twitter today. He’s the Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at Columbia Medical Centre in NYC. He’s also survived Ebola – he caught it in the field, helping people. This guy knows his shit about infectious disease.

When your shift ends, you sign out to the oncoming team. It’s all #COVIDー19. Over the past week, we’ve all learned the signs – low oxygen, lymphopenia, elevated D-dimer. You share concerns of friends throughout the city without PPE. Hospitals running out of ventilators.

Elevated D-dimer is a new clinical symptom, to me, but it’s a really gross & telling one one. It shows up in venous thromboembolism, ARDS and cancer. You have to be genuinely sick like you’ll die without intervention for D-dimer to be high.

 

Flatten the Curve song

lutte loose

‘Twas thirty-nine years ago this summer, that I first laid eyes upon the comic masterwork, ‘Green Tits and Fur’, a adult-oriented Suess rip-off, set at a furry convention. I thought it was hilarious. I have since realized it was arguably exploitative and totes appropriative. I have an appropriative and cruel sense of humour which I attempt to quell, so my fandom of that – and Crad Kilodney – makes sense. I don’t feel shame the way other people do (or so —— have you guessed this is 2020 talking —— 61 coddled years have shown me) but I make up for it by acknowledging where I erred, hopefully to make it easier for other people. Because… you know, this isn’t all about me, it’s in very minor part about helping people understand how they think, how they prune their own brains.

Better arts in the now soothe (in sooth!) the sting of not-that-great arts when you were young and impressionable. If you’re lucky you got older and stayed impressionable. I know I have. It’s what the ADD will do to you.

—–

I think I’ve talked before about mOm and pOp and brO as being my way of customizing my own family into English. I like the visual pop of the words. I find it amusing —–I found some evidence today that the design of a piece of my childhood might have had something with pOp’s moniker as in looooook belowwwwww. But as I was looking at them again today, and why not, my thought processes have galumph and will travel, I thought how Jeff and I were inside the ring of being cared for, so the m’s in mOm are hands, like one hand out for each of the kids or caring for them. And the p’s in pOp are arms. Also guns. Pew pew. Facing forward. mOm is books. When you look at the m’s can you see books open, being read, the curve of the pages in the m’s. brO is the comrade at your shoulder. I am next to him. And brO is for the solid unassuming wholeness that Jeff is. brO is a goofy looking word, and he is goofy, though that’s hardly his distinguishing characteristic. That O is the emblem and stamp and sigil and symbol and visual hug that says you can say bruh or brah or bro or mah brother but this is my brO and I set the words down to make that entirely clear.

Image result for pop shoppe logo

As for the goofy, I have recent evidence. They closed the playground equipment at the end of the street; Jeff makes his feelings known. Isn’t it a handsome hoodie she hinted hintingly with lollopping Monty Python eyebrows.