Hope you friends have been well. There has been a dry spell of articles and posts this past week as your host was under the weather- a bad cold and bike injury. I seem to be getting better on both fronts.
I found this Article which I think is good.
They also say not to raise our hopes about a vaccine coming out soon. A safe vaccine is still months or years away.
Keep safe every one and have a pleasant weekend.
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Look, man! Covid-19 is FAKE NEWS!!!! It isn’t real! Man, oh man! Why is it so hard for some to see this!? 🙂 (Hope you feel better soon, my friend.)
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Thanks Jeff. The worst seems to be behind me now.
I know this fake news concerning covid19 but at least we are sure trumpsky has no idea of this blog😁
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You are correct, Jeff. It’s “just a flu” and it will all be over and gone by November 4th.
And this (insane) remark came from my oldest daughter who I thought had good sense!!!
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How did she see it going by that exact date.
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I assume because it’s the day AFTER the presidential election. IOW, if a Democrat is elected (fingers crossed), the “virus” will all go away since it was all a “Democratic hoax” to start with.
I’ve commented elsewhere that I think her thinking (which is generally quite intelligent) is being twisted by her VERY RED dyed-in-the-wool Republican husband.
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In our case, most people doubt the government and I think it has led to laxity in the way people take the virus. But for Americans, it is strange that the response is divided along party lines.
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When it comes to U.S. politics … EVERYTHING is divided along party lines. Even the “Independents” lean towards one of the other, although they tend to be a bit more flexible.
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No wonder it is so difficult to have a unified approach towards addressing Covid19.
Here, we have good reason to mistrust the government, especiallythis government.
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“Mistrust” is too strong a word for me. But I think many of the proposals are not well thought out or logically consistent. There is also a lot of flailing about. It’s inevitable, but this contributes to the skepticism I think.
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That could be part of it.
When there is inconsistency, you become skeptic
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A CDC chart we all need to see: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/covid-crash-incredible-chart-msm-doesnt-want-see/ –
On CDC’s own website in a very graphic chart shows the coronavirus is truly dying out – when will we see, hear, or read this information in MSM?
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Intelligence per se does not seem to be the governing factor. My brother is extremely smart, but very prone to conspiracy theories. He thought, for example, that Hillary “sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign cash which is why the North Koreans have missiles.” He also went all in on the “carnivore diet” because he thinks that we don’t need vegetables or fiber. For example, the Big Mac is bad not because of the fake cheese-slathered meat product but because of the buns! He had a cardiac incident a short while ago, so I think he is reconsidering things.
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Your last sentence, Brian. That’s the bomb
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True enough … intelligence does not always mean clear-thinking.
I’ve been thinking about the November date … maybe it’s because Trump will get re-elected (*GAG*), which would mean the “Democratic hoax” would have failed and everything would go back to “normal.”
Who really knows what goes on in the minds of some people??!?! Hope you are enjoying Independence Day!
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So what happens when Trump loses on 4th and the virus is still there? Will it be a GOP hoax?
Happy Independence Day my friend, to you and yours
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I also gave thought to that and came up with the idea that since Republicans think all the virus “hullabaloo” is Democratically inspired, it (and the virus) will all die out once Trump is re-elected. But who really knows what goes through their twisted minds?
Thank you for the good wishes! It’s just too bad that the holiday will likely increase the virus numbers …
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That’s a strange way to deal with current issues. I can’t wait to see how they will twist the story in November.
That likelihood of a spike I think is high
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WHAT??????????
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Yeah … that’s what I thought when I read her text!! I keep inwardly hoping she was joking or being sarcastic … but she hasn’t given me any indication that’s the case. And she does lean Republican …
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Well my daughter got brainwashed into religion, so I know something about how it feels.
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Stunning. Absolutely stunning.
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Stay safe, & get well soon.
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Thank you
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Ok, you can’t just throw “bike injury” out there without any freaking details. That could be anything from stubbing you toe on the kickstand to going over the cliff. 🙂
I have had so many bike injuries… I remember once I just wanted to see how fast I could go down a hill. I started down the hill pedaling as fast as I could, then my pantleg got caught up in the sprocket, things quickly went umm downhill from there lol. Trying to free the pantleg at speed and my foot slipped off the pedal, where it dragged the ground for a moment, right up till I hit the ditch and wrecked down a slight embankment. I just laid there for a brief period, looking up at the sky, in so much pain, as it settled down I was able to get up, free my pantleg, and inspect the damage. My toes were really sore where they dragged the pavement, my body took some hard bumps from the ground/bicycle combo, but I was able to limp home with bike in tow. I didn’t get around much for a couple of days afterward, a lot of things hurt in a lot of places.
I have done stupid things on motorcycles too. Motorcycles are much more difficult to get out from under. And a lot harder to push home.
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Glad you are on the mend 🙂
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I am, thankfully.
I still think I was lucky given the speed I was at
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My oldest daughter has taken up motorcycle riding. She had her first fall earlier this year … dislocated her shoulder and had to have surgery. Still going to physical therapy. Also dislocated a finger (that will probably never go back to normal), and of course many other bumps and bruises. Not to mention mucho soreness for several days.
And of course she’s already back to (limited) riding. I guess it gets in your bones (no pun intended).
P.S. She’s definitely no young chickadee!
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Bikes & bicycles are addictive. You get an accident check if your machine is still ok, then if you are ok to continue riding.
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The only way I know is to get up, dust off, and have another go. I like your daughter 🙂
(In a non-strange stranger on the internet way of course!)
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You dust off away from the public gaze.
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Sad story: My brother-in-law’s younger brother was doing the “silly young male” thing and he wrecked his dirt bike tooling around their farm. Of course, the proper response is to go out and buy another, more powerful dirt bike. which he promptly wrecked again. While wrecking (permanently) his brain. He now exists as a perpetual four year old dependent on his aging mother. 😦 😦
One reason I solo ride my bicycle is because I have become too…cautious…to ride with the hard core 50 mph downhill bombers. I slow drastically at railroad tracks and very gingerly cross them. I am never in a hurry.
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That’s too sad.
I prefer solo rides because of the dynamism. But my Saturday rides I do with a friend.
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Wow. That is sad.
While you might not think it as per my posts, but I’m very safety conscious. I have taught all my brats good bicycle habits. And they understand bicycles have every right to be on the roadway just as a car. Give the bike some respect.
Give the motorcycle plenty or respect too. They aren’t surrounded by a steel box.
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I think the problem is most motorists, here at least, don’t think cyclists have a right to be on the road. I have had some pass so close to me I wonder what their intention is. Or buggers just turning on your way like you are invisible
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A while back over near Nashville some asshole intentionally sideswiped a cyclist. I know they arressted the old bastard but I never heard how it turned out.
Their intention is anger for having to slow down and/or wait for an opportunity to pass. It’s the “it’s all about me” complex. And/or a certain amount of obliviousness. That and a lack of education about cyclists having the same rights to the road as a motorist.
Could not hurt a bit to wear a reflective/highly visible piece of clothing in crowded places. That would at least diminish the “I didn’t see the cylclist” excuse.
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There is a strange self-righteousness associated with car driving in the United States. Too much of our self image is wrapped up in “the freedom of the highway”, even when said “highway” is a neighborhood street with children and dogs (and bicycles…and elders in walkers) about. This problem is exacerbated by traffic engineering standards. I am amazed at photographs of European and Asian streets when compared to the typical modern American residential collector or local street. But I fall into that mindset as well. I am…annoyed…by a street that leads to my home because it is quite narrow, there are a lot of parked cars, and people about. But this old school street, which does not meet modern engineering standards, is probably safer than the four lane arterial which is posted for 35 mph but inevitably driven (because it is designed that way!) at 55 mph.
What further exacerbates the situation is driving, too, is politicized. There are actually people who modify their larger pickup trucks and Stupid Useless Vulgarities to emit clouds of poisonous black smoke when they see a cyclist or pedestrian (Google “Rolling Coal”). Even though it damages the long term viability of the engine.
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It’s not just the US of A. Even here, some drivers are just plain assholes. Even where they have room to drive safely past a cyclist, idiot still hits and passes so close to cyclists
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I very much dislike the SUV and they are everywhere!
I have seen the rolling coal darwin awarders here too. The new trend now seems to be dropping the suspension in the rear of their pickup trucks (or the redneck version is just weigh it down) so that the front of the truck rides significantly higher than the front of the truck.
I miss the day when hot rods with Craigers was cool…
Here, the self righteous get the hell outta my way types, are a simple by product of right wing, R, Faux news drinking, uber religious, conservatard, aint murica great!, upbringings.
Oh, I forgot to say “yeehaw!”
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Ugh, shelldigger. I have been very, very lucky because I ride a lot of miles, and I have been doing it for decades now! I broke a little finger once when I was a teenager. I went down after hitting a rock and cut right below my eye. But the worst and really only serious incident was about three years ago when I was riding calmly along a perfectly well-paved suburban street when bam…the bike suddenly and completely stopped, and I did not. Broke my collar bone badly, and it still aches. To this date, I have no idea why. I don’t even have the excuse of doing something reckless but fun. It was just a boring cruise gone wrong!
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Arthritis will often develop in a injured area.
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I was on r/cycling and some guy said how he fell at almost 0mph and ended up with bruises and sprains. Bikes can be quite strange
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bikes are actually very simple machines, Maka. It is the human body that is strange. 🙂
My favorite crash story is I was riding through an industrial area near the Bay a few years ago. The whole area is a monument to the World War II effort (Rosie the Riveter) so the City invested in separated bicycle lanes. For no real reason, but hey. So, I as riding along, wasn’t paying attention, and mentally read the curb separator as asphalt. Down I went! No SERIOUS damage either bike or machine, but it still ached!
When I went back, the City had painted the miles of curbing bright white. I’m guessing I am not the only absent minded rider, and someone else had a lawyer on retainer! 🙂
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Bike accidents can be strange. But I guess it’s the nature of accidents to be that way
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I’m the sort of guy that has to know why the bike stopped with no warning. I literally will be lying in bed tonight going through all the scenarios that might cause such a thing.
Locked up bearing? Chain breaking and somehow wrapping up a tire? An internal failure somehow of the rear brake? (depending on the bike) A freaking stick through the spokes?
See what you did?!!
Thanks for sharing 🙂
That’s just weird.
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I have spent the week just thinking what would have happened last saturday and there are only two culprits; i) something caught onto my pedals bringing the bike to a complete stop and leading to me being thrown over
ii) I braked so hard I flipped over the bike. I have ruled this one out because then I would have gone down holding the bike which i wasn’t. I cleared the damn thing.
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Nothing. No mechanical faults at all. Which is so frustrating!
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For some reason I didn’t see a handcart that was bang in front of me. By the time my buddy raised alarm, I had only seconds to spare. My bike stopped abruptly & I flipped over landing on my shoulder. I ended up with a sprained wrist, shoulder and a hurt finger
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ouch
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You can say that again.
It’s not so bad now.
I have done three rides on it & I think it’s getting better
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Ouch! A moments distraction can hurt ya man.
I had another bike wreck that was a bad one. I had been a paperboy for a few years as a young lad. Had the biggest route in the area, and I used a bicycle to deliver. I figured a way to wrap my paperbag around the handelbars in such a fashion I could carry a lot of papers to maximize my time. Well at the end of one street there wasn’t an adjoining street to get over to the next block, and I had permission to cut through a guys backyard and get to the next street without having to backtrack.
Well there is a ditch maybe 2 feet wide and 2-3 feet deep in my path. I brought a piece of appropriate length 2×6 one day and made myself a bridge. I must have went across that thing a thousand times with no issues. Then one day I hit the bridge and it gave way somehow, the front wheel hits the ditch and I went flying over the handlebars. With the weight of the papers and the speed I was moving, I hit with enough force I had no time to react, I landed on my face, on a concrete drive littered with small loose rock. My glasses were busted, I was bleeding profusely, I managed to walk up the drive to the next house on my route. I knocked on the door, and I knew this guy I had bought a dirt bike from him maybe 6 months prior, he saw me and his face went white in front of my eyes. I explained best I could I had wrecked and needed a ride home. He wasted no time getting me loaded up.
Well I got home and went inside, and I witnessed my mothers face going white at the first look of me. Then she immediately went into panicked mom mode, she sat me in a chair in the kitchen, and the very second she poured the hydrogen peroxide on my face I saw one of my friends jump up on the front porch and he was about to knock when I screamed bloody murder. He in one motion pivoted on one foot and went back the way he came. Despite my pain I thought that was hilarious. Yeah, I’m a strange one lol.
Anyway I learned that hydrogen peroxide, while ok for small cuts, will burn you alive when one side of your face has deep lacerations and the rest looks like hamburger.
Well mom loaded me up to go see the family Dr. The Dr. finally gets to see me, he took one look and said right away I can’t touch him. Take him to St. Francis!
So off to St. Francis we went. We got there and they looked at me and fast tracked me to a room, the Dr. on call came in and said, I cant touch him. I’ll call a plastic surgeon.
Well the plastic surgeon gets there and tells the nurses to scrub my face. That was excrutiating. Well I though so at the time, when the plastic surgeon started injecting my face with a local to deaden the area, now that was EXCRUTIATING!. I was wishing I had a leather strap to bite on like in the cowboy movies. Damn that hurt.
Once it was all scrubbed up and numbed up the plastic surgeon went to work stitching me up. I had a lot of subdermal stitches and a helluva lot of external stitches, somewhere around 100 stitches in all on my face. The guy was good though the stitches were very small and close together, very uniform, I spent the next two weeks lying on the sofa with a damp towel over my face.
As it turned out I wound up with a few scars, nothing Frankenstein-ish, you can see them though if you look. But all in all I’d say the guy did a bang up job considering the mess I was in.
I went back to the paper route and continued using my bridge once I got where I could. Only I was damn careful every time crossing that bridge…
Be careful out there Mak 🙂
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My friend, this is ouch! I have not had anything close to this and I have had many a bicycle related accident.
I try to be careful. It is the microsecond that I am not that shit always happen
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Wow! Horrific! Nothing like that, thankfully
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WOW. Sounds to me like you were very, very lucky that it all turned out as well as it did.
Oh the stories we can tell …
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Well I told one of my stories, what you got Nan?
😉
I suppose I was lucky there was someone around who could do a superb job with stitches. Or I’d be a little harder to look at now, and I don’t need any of that sort of help!
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You would be in a movie cast acting horror movies without a mask
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Hell things might have turned out for the better if that were the case! 😉
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I’ve been pretty lucky most of my life. Only a couple of “episodes.” Got a fractured hip when a horse reared up and fell over on me. I was probably around 8-9 yrs old. More recently — probably about 10 or so years ago — I decided to try roller-blading with my grandkids. HA!! We were doing it on a sidewalk, and when I got to a driveway, I tried to turn around. Bad idea. Ended up with a hairline fracture of my elbow.
Of course these weren’t the only incidents, but I’ve been fortunate to walk away with mostly bruises and scratches and sore muscles.
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You have been lucky.
I think generally I have been too and I don’t want to push my luck anymore.
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I rode horses as a kid, got barned once. Another time I was pretty young, my mom had me on a horse, for some unknown reason it spooked, my mom fell off rather quick, leaving me hanging on for dear life, that was a long fall to the ground when I finally couldn’t hold on anymore. (we were riding bareback) No real damage done save for a few bruises and a new respect for horses.
Roller skating I was never really good at. I got to where I could roll my way around a rink, but couldn’t get past noob status.
I can’t imagine a horse falling on me, you were lucky there.
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I think we survive many accidents as kids
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Some of us were dropped on our heads when we were born, and we still came out right and we still came out right.
😉
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You crashed, or were hit?
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Crashed
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You OK?
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I am alright, John. I think I got lucky
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Hope you feel better soon!
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Thanks Mike.
I tried a ride yesterday and it wasn’t so bad.
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Also look at this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632800-700-what-four-coronaviruses-from-history-can-tell-us-about-covid-19/ (if you are not a subscriber, maybe you can get hold of a paper copy somewhere).
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Curious, nannus … are you a subscriber? I get their daily synopsis in my email but have never signed up as a regular subscriber. I’ve mostly held off because I’m not sure if I have the time to read the many and various articles I might be interested in.
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I have been a subscriber for decades. I just like it and it contributed a lot to my English (I am not a native speaker).
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I am not subscribed. I will see if I can land a copy somewhere. It does look like a good read though
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“Coronagrifting” Designer Corona products!
You might find this amusing? Maka, as an architect.
https://mcmansionhell.com/post/618938984050147328/coronagrifting-a-design-phenomenon
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This is amusing
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