Covid-19 diary: Part 47

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 28, 2022

The United States has reached a strange pandemic crossroads.

On the one hand, new Covid-19 diagnoses have fallen by more than 90 percent from Jan. 14. Then, nearly 807,000 cases were reported daily. On Sunday, Feb. 27, that had dropped to roughly 65,285[1]. As the crush of cases has eased, hospitalizations have fallen dramatically. As of Feb. 19, 4.9 Americans per 100,000 residents were hospitalized with Covid-19, down from the all-time high of 30.6 per 100,000 for the week ending Jan. 15. The Feb. 19 hospitalization level is the lowest since late July.

On the other hand, the novel coronavirus continues to kill Americans at an alarming pace. Through the 27th, February saw 2,257 daily deaths, the third straight month that category has increased since November, when it stood at 1,181. Since the start of the year, the nation is averaging 2,112 daily deaths, far higher than what we saw in either 2020 (1,003) or 2021 (1,310).

When it comes to malice, longevity and influence on the global stage, Putin has few rivals

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 28, 2022

Yesterday, I wrote the following about Vladimir Putin:

Putin’s combination of power and malevolence has been unmatched in the world for most of time since the former KGB agent became Russia’s acting president on the last day of 1999. Putin has a well-known penchant for jailing or killing critics and opposition leaders, and he’s overseen crackdowns on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly while encouraging homophobic policies. Nor has Putin shown any compunction about meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, up to and including attempting to influence U.S. elections by underhanded means.

To my mind, Putin has only two true rivals for the title of most powerful and malicious world leader since 1999. One of them is Xi Jinping, who since 2013 has led the world’s most populous nation, overseeing a far more important economy than Russia’s. China is a repressive, authoritarian government, to be sure, and Xi’s genocidal persecution of Uyghurs is perhaps the most appalling example of 21st-century genocide; the continued oppression of Tibet is similarly atrocious.

The president of the United States is almost by the definition the most powerful person on the planet, even if he has not always been adept at marshaling and channeling that power. Donald Trump’s inherent corruption and lawlessness — note countless instances from his presidential term of self-dealing, attempting to suborn the 2020 election and violating the Presidential Records Act — far exceeded anything seen in an occupant of the Oval Office at least since Richard Nixon was president. It’s noteworthy that Trump was impeached not once but twice; while neither procedure resulted in a conviction, both efforts received more support from members of the president’s own party than any previous presidential impeachment.

Vladimir Putin’s aggression must be stopped, and he must be severely punished

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 27, 2022

I rarely blog about foreign policy, a tendency that I chalk up to my keen awareness of how little I know about other nations. (Sometimes, I feel as if I barely know anything about my home country.) However, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can’t go unmentioned.

Putin’s combination of power and malevolence has been unmatched in the world for most of time since the former KGB agent became Russia’s acting president on the last day of 1999. Putin has a well-known penchant for jailing or killing critics and opposition leaders, and he’s overseen crackdowns on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly while encouraging homophobic policies. Nor has Putin shown any compunction about meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, up to and including attempting to influence U.S. elections by underhanded means.

That’s a very serious record of malfeasance. But all those misdeeds pale against Putin’s dangerous venture into a neighboring nation’s sovereign territory. By assaulting cities in mainland Ukraine, the Russian leader threatens to plunge Europe back into an era of violence after the continent thrived during a largely peaceful 75-year-long period following World War II.

Short takes: ‘The Cabin at the End of the World,’ ‘Hard Landing’ and ‘Henry V’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 24, 2022

Just the other week, several months after I left North Carolina and stopped using my Durham library card, I registered for a new card with my local lending institution. That means that I’m back to reading novels after a significant hiatus!

The first book that I finished was The Cabin at the End of the World, a 2018 suspense novel from Boston author Paul Tremblay. The novel’s main action occurs in a remote lakeside cabin in New Hampshire that’s been rented by Eric and Andrew, a gay couple, and Wen, their adopted 7-year-old daughter. Shortly after the book begins, the trio are joined by a small number of outsiders — some friendly, others not. The outsiders claim that their intentions are wholly benevolent, but their frightening and bizarre array of jury-rigged weapons indicates otherwise.

Conflict ensues, both physical and psychological. A nasty stalemate develops. And as the standoff continues, some members of the family begin to wonder if there might be any truth to the fantastic claims that the outsiders are making…

Lessons from an uninterrupted Northern winter

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 20, 2022

This is the first winter that I’ve spent in its entirety in the greater New York City area since before I moved to North Carolina in January 2004. Here are a few things that I’ve relearned about the cold season over the past few months.

• It’s colder up here than down there. I’ve written previously about the temperature difference between here and my old stomping grounds in Durham, N.C. Over the first 19 days, February in these parts has been nearly two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the historical norm, with a cumulative average temperature of 32.9 degrees vs. the norm of 31 on the nose. For comparison, this month’s Westchester average is slightly lower than the typical low temperature around Raleigh (for which records are more complete than Durham) of 33.5 degrees over the same time.

Note that the average high temperature so far this month has been 42.5 degrees in Westchester County, 3.3 degrees higher than normal, and 59.3 degrees in Raleigh, 4.5 degrees over the usual.

• It’s drier up here, too. On some days, the texture of the skin on my hands changes. I attribute it to the drier air. I’ve been trying to moisturize regularly, but at times, it seems as though there isn’t enough lotion in the world to relieve the dehydrated feeling of my parched epidermis.

Geekery: How automated short weblinks and a cloud-based spreadsheet didn’t quite prevent an easily distracted writer from finishing a recent blog post

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 17, 2022

To say that I am easily distracted is like saying that the pope is a notable religious figure: It’s an understatement.

Let me try to give you an idea of where my brain wandered over the course of preparing my previous blog post.

That item, entitled “Vignette: The empty pocket,” was a simple story about leaving the house without a wallet on Thursday, Feb. 10. Early in the course of writing it, however, I decided that I should link to a previous post. Here is the relevant excerpt from the third paragraph of “The Empty Pocket”:

[T]he phone is also useful for tracking my activity, determining my position, navigating my journey and entertaining my ears while I’m walking.

Now up until a few weeks ago, linking to a previous post on this blog was a simple matter. I’d search my WordPress blog for the post in question, go to the web browser tab that always displays my Bitly account, enter a few words from the title of the post in the search box, copy the shortened Bitly link of the appropriate search result and past that URL into my new blog entry.

Vignette: The empty pocket

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 16, 2022

On Thursday morning, I patted my pocket and swore aloud.

I was driving to a nearby spot, where I planned to start a roughly eight-mile-long hike along part of a local state road that I could not remember walking on before. Unfortunately, I’d left my wallet behind.

I hate going anywhere without my keys, phone and wallet. I don’t want to be locked out of my home, which yes, has happened before, although not in more than a decade.

If I need help of some sort, a mobile phone is often the easiest way to get it, especially if I’m away from home and by myself, as is typically the case when I hike. What’s more, of course, the phone is also useful for tracking my activity, determining my position, navigating my journey and entertaining my ears while I’m walking.

A brief cinematic history of Spider-Man

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 8, 2022

Even if for some reason an American over the age of five does not know Spider-Man by name, she or he almost certainly recognizes this Marvel Comics superhero’s distinctive red-and-blue costume. The friendly neighborhood wall-crawler gained incredible strength, agility and psychic sensitivity after being bitten by a radioactive spider. As the wonderful cartoon theme song goes:

Is he strong? Listen, bud:
He’s got radioactive blood!

Despite the character’s having been created in the early 1960s by Marvel writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, Spider-Man didn’t debut on the silver screen until the 2002 Spider-Man, which was directed by Sam Raimi and starred Tobey Maguire as the hero, Kirsten Dunst as a fetching fellow high-school student, James Franco as Peter’s friend, Harry Osborn; Willem Dafoe as Harry’s industrialist father, Norman Osborn; and J.K. Simmons as cigar-chomping newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. The movie made more than $400 million domestically and spawned two sequels with the same director and core cast.

‘Hey, kids, get off my lawn!’ (Part 1 of many)

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 6, 2022

The older I get, the more I find myself having cranky-old-man “Hey, kids, get off my lawn!” moments.

This weekend, a focus of my petty ire has been Stanford basketball uniforms. As I began writing this post, I was watching the first half of the game between the Cardinal and the University of Washington men’s hoops teams. The Huskies are wearing black uniforms, while the Cardinal are wearing gray uniforms. A casual fan tuning into the broadcast would have very little idea that the colors of these schools are actually purple and gold for UW and cardinal and white for Stanford.

On Thursday night, the Stanford women’s basketball team played on UCLA’s home court. The Bruins wore blue duds, while the Cardinal was outfitted in black. In this case, only one team, the hosts, were true to the school colors — blue and gold.

Covid-19 diary: Part 46

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By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 5, 2022

I was idly glancing at my Covid-19 spreadsheet on Friday morning when I noticed something truly startling.

The U.S. recorded 20,301,167 new Covid diagnoses in January of this year, exceeding the 20,024,800 cases that were found here throughout all of 2020. Just one month into the new year, 2022 has seen slightly more than 58 percent of the total Covid-19 cases recorded in 2021 (34,664,556).

The cause for this is pretty obvious: Omicron, the novel coronavirus variant that was first detected in November. The strain propelled December 2021 to what was then the third-highest monthly total for new infections, with 6.168 million, behind December 2020 (6.4 million) and January 2021 (6.196 million). But January 2022 shattered all records for new cases; those 20.3 million infections were more than triple the high mark set in December 2020[1].