Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Expert advice for Thanksgiving was to stay home. But I've been ignoring most experts' health advice for ten years and enjoyed good health for it; we'll see in a few weeks if this latest decision was sublime or ridiculous. I drove 300 miles to Cleveland. I hugged my cousin and finally met her husband. I ate food I shouldn't have. The three of us went to restaurants and attractions. We didn't do anything ridiculous or illegal--we all wore masks in public places and none of us were sick. Nobody I encountered seemed ill and nobody formed a crowd. I hung out with people for the first time in almost a year, relaxed and slept nine hours a night. It was health food for the soul and I'd do it again.  Sublime? Ridiculous? It can be hard to tell. Photo from Amazon . The day before I left, I made vegetarian collards from the garden and low-carb pumpkin pie. My cousin is a vegetarian, but she cooks meat for me when I'm there and I bring vegetarian food when I visit. I al

What Gov. Newsom & top doctors really think of California's COVID restrictions. Thanksgiving alone is too much even for someone like me. I'm secular, I'm a loner, I don't keep in touch with many family members. But a family holiday alone ( alone together is nonsense) is too strange even for me. A month and a half in quarantine last spring was tolerable because I was ill and too tired to do much after work. Summer and fall, I rehabbed my garage. Now? I ruminate over the sort of things that get worse when they're picked at.  I spent my first Thanksgiving in Indiana with a friend and her family and subsequent ones with a few members from my meetup group. This year, I'll be at a cousin's house. The weather in Cleveland, where she lives, is supposed to dry--something of a Thanksgiving miracle.  Risks? I'm about as likely to die of COVID as I am to get shot in Indianapolis: a few chances in ten thousand, at most. I don't have risk factors like diabetes

The Badlands of South Dakota. An article today in The Spectator ( US and UK ) decries the lack of regulations in South Dakota to deal with the coronavirus, calling it a "failed experiment." The author compares South Dakota's response, or lack of it, to Sweden--and then calls Sweden a failure, too. From this, he concludes that lack of coronavirus regulation allows rampant spreading of the disease, and implies that strict regulation controls it. Does it really--and are those devil-may-care Swedes and South Dakotans about to drop like flies? Let's look at their numbers and compare them not to perfection, but to some places that have had strict regulations to get an idea how well the regulations might be working. The article doesn't specify which measures should be mandated, so let's assume lockdowns.  I'll avoid using out-of-the-way places and epicenters, since they would have low or high numbers no matter what they did. And since there's been so much v