Eric The Blue

Good riddance to 2021

This is pretty funny, but I think the apostrophe is misplaced. The inability to turn off one's inner copy editor must be a source of the psychological condition called anhedonia. 

It's funny because of two different senses of the word "sentence." Get it? Can't turn off my inner pedant, either.

Since it's the last day of the year, traditionally a time for a reflective backwards gaze, I should say that this was the year I learned it's not a penalty to tackle a guy by jerking him to the ground by the wad of hair hanging out the back of his helmet.

I have to thank my first dog for everything else I learned this year. When it's below about 15 degrees F., everyone else outside is also accompanied by a dog. Relatedly, I've lived in south Minneapolis for 40 years and it was in Year No. 40 that I fixed in my mind the fact that Pillsbury Avenue is parallel with and one block east of Pleasant Avenue, not the other way around. 

Why are the Rutgers Scarlet Knights playing in a bowl game on the day before New Year's? Since they were 5-7, 2-7 in the Big Ten, it must be on account of their unblemished record in nonconference games. Yes, I see now that they beat perennial powers Temple and Delaware as well as Syracuse, another 5-7 team, which apparently gave them the tie breaker for a Gator Bowl invitation over the Orangemen. 

I'm walking the dog while it's still above zero and the first national semifinal hasn't started. Happy New Year!

Joan Didion, 1934-2021

From the New York Times's obituary of Joan Didion, the writer who died last week:

Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from "The White Album," she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

It read, in part: "In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure." This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.

[Snip]

The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of "Miami" (1987), another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying. Everywhere Ms. Didion went, it seemed, she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in cliched language indicated by quotation marks.

In an Introduction to a collection of Didion's nonfiction, John Leonard, who did not grow weary, nevertheless limns the same sensibility. He alludes to the critic (Randall Jarrell) who thought T. S. Eliot would have produced "The Wasteland" if assigned the task of composing a poem about the Garden of Eden. Similarly, indicates Leonard, with Didion. Elizabeth Hardwick's essay about Didion is called "In the Wasteland." No one "likes" the world according to Joan Didion, and few would agree that she's even describing the world they think they know, but she makes her case. The title of the aforementioned collection is We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. The phrase occurs in one of her essays and, out of context on the cover, has an air of vague uplift such as might have been approved by someone in marketing. But if you read through even a fraction of its 1100 pages you'd see that an apt gloss is more along the line of "we lie to ourselves in order to feel good." 

 

Watching TV on Christmas Eve

Arriving back home last night from my family's Christmas Eve gathering, I turned on the TV, mainly just to see what's on when no one's watching, and after clicking past "It's a Wonderful Life" (predictable) I came to "The Godfather" on a cable channel, POP, I had never heard of. It was the scene in which Vito Corleone gets shot multiple times while making a purchase from a fruit vendor. I thought I'd stay up till Michael commits his first and second homicides, at Louis' Italian American Restaurant in the Bronx, but of course by the time that happened I'd settled in and I watched to the end.

The Christmas Eve airing had me debating with myself which scene in the movie is the most "Christmassy." There are several contenders, but I think I vote for the one in which Carlo beats his wife, Connie, who moves through the house, breaking dishes, brandishing a knife, and trying to get away from him as the camera trails behind. Finally she retreats into the master bedroom, and then into the bathroom off the master. Now there is nowhere else to go and when Carlo follows her in there the camera stays back in the bedroom. You can hear, but not see, what's happening in the bathroom while the camera dwells for one or two seconds on the perfectly made bed and, propped up on the pillows, a smiling stuffed animal. 

The movie had begun with the wedding of Connie and Carlo. Probably a sly announcement of genre since it's said that comedies end with weddings and tragedies begin with them.

Overrated?

Someone, trying to start a row on social media, asserts that the four most overrated musicians of all time are, in alphabetical order:

Dylan
Elvis
Sinatra
Springsteen

Got my attention, as I like them all, and love, A D O R E , two of them. I therefore read on and see that the troublemaker has added a bauble. Three of them, he says, are merely overrated, while the fourth is "straight up bad." His entrapped readers are supposed to guess which one that is. I guessed Dylan, only because the Nobel Prize seems like it might open up the most space below. (On the theory that "overrated" is "longest distance from pedestal to true estimation of merit.") Turns out, though, that he has in mind Elvis. Guy's a philosophy professor so of course he has an argument—it's that The King, whenever he recorded someone else's song, unfailingly failed to come up to the level of the original. I don't think that can possibly be true, but I have to say that, regarding the only example he cites, he might be right. Here's Big Mama Thornton singing "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog." It's for a woman to sing, right?

 

 

Sen. Manchin has a concern

 

Scanning the news, I see that, reportedly, a source of Sen. Manchin's opposition to Biden's Build Back Better legislation is his suspicion that direct payments for the child tax credit are sometimes used to buy drugs. I at first thought this was a little lame since, when taxes are cut on high earners, and on the idle rich, no one worries over much about what they're going to do with the extra dough. In many cases, I doubt they even know they have it: just different numbers on pieces of paper that come to them in the mail. Therein, perhaps, lies the weakness with my take. The affluent are already buying all the drugs they care to ingest, so there is no moral taint associated with giving them some financial relief. 

Full disclosure: since summer, I've been getting $250 for the child tax credit deposited directly into my checking account each month. You better believe that I felt the weight of Sen. Manchin's indignation when, opening the fridge while working on tonight's supper, I saw a few Miller Lites standing in the corner behind the milk. Thank God that program will end.

Sorry, sorry, sir, I am not worthy, let the yacht owners and coal barons have it!

Pleasures of hating Kristi Noem

 

Inspired by William Hazlitt's essay "On the Pleasures of Hating," I googled "Kristi Noem" and was soon enjoying the endorphin rush generated by the above clip. Probably I could "eliminate the middleman" by watching Fox News directly but that seems potentially inefficient. There is no cost  connected with using a middleman to hone in quickly on things you love to hate. Though it's possible, I suppose, that I'm depriving myself of new discoveries. 

From an altitude, the most enjoyable thing about the interview is the way in which it careens madly between matters of genuine import and the beaten-up hobby horses of right-wing fever dreams. I take it that there is not currently a "caravan" of brown-skinned people advancing on Texas because, when the governor appears to be getting bored with the COVID discussion, blondie-in-a-bright-dress adroitly (if somewhat abruptly) turns her to the grave matter of a transsexual having won a race in a high-school swim meet somewhere in Pennsylvania. Horrors! And, as if that were not shocking enough, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are on the outs! At this point, it seems a reasonable question might have involved an invitation to compare and contrast the Biden-Harris partnership with the famously close-knit one between Trump and Pence—but, yeah, this is Fox News, I get it, that's why there were also no questions about the governor's daughter's rising career prospects appraising South Dakota real estate. 

When, however, one descends into the details of the governor's COVID answers—that's when my pleasurable disgust meter gets a real jolt. The president is such a bummer! He's focusing on the negatives! The country needs hope. People should focus on the promise of Christmas, the love they have for family and friends, and enjoy the season. It's as if only Scrooge would be distressed by waves of disease, suffering, and death. The Fox host says, "The numbers are rising. The president is concerned. Are you?" You should reassess when a Fox host feels the need to call you back to reality. Asked about "commonsense steps" to take, the governor has some bullet points. People should wash their hands. People should stay home if they feel ill. They should do the hard work of caring for one another. The list is growing, is she going to say the one obvious thing? Can she bring herself to do it? Wait, wait, here it comes, the last bullet. People should

choose to get a vaccine if they'd like to. If they don't, they go into this knowing that they should focus on exercising, taking their vitamins, and being very healthy people.

She's ridiculous, a disgrace. 

Books of the Bible: Habakkuk

The Book of Habakkuk begins like one of the lament psalms, or a cry from the lips of Job:

O Lord, how shall I cry for help,
and thou wilt not hear?
Or cry to thee "Violence!"
and thou wilt not save?

The complaint goes on for several more lines, very direct and high-pitched, so that one is tempted to quote the whole thing—but, as Habukkuk is only three chapters and four pages long, that would soon tend toward reproducing the whole text of the book, and if that's what you want here you go. As one proceeds, it becomes evident that the first half of the book is a dialog: Habukkuk  questions, God answers; repeat. It isn't evident that Habukkuk is satisfied with the answers, or that he ought to be. The first answer, 1:5-11, is a promise to send the vicious Chaldeans as agents of God's justice. That is, "Don't worry, I've got the guys for the job, they'll fix things up"—and he (God) describes, in the manner of an admiring HR manager, the ruthless efficiency of his designees. 

In the top half of the next and last inning, Habukkuk restates the complaint, perhaps with more vehemence than before:

Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil
and canst not look on wrong,
why dost thou look on faithless men,
and art silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?

Does Habukkuk hurdle past God's promised solution, as if it weren't worth discussing? Has time passed and the Chaldean solution proven deficient? I don't know, but God's answer is this time more predictable:

For still the vision awaits its time;
it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come, it will not delay.
Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail,
but the righteous shall live by his faith.

One recognizes the answer that Job finally received out of the whirlwind. It's not your job to ask such questions. It's your job to be faithful and righteous. Things may now look bad to you, but what do you know? In addition to being righteous and faithful, wait.

The HR manager has mounted a high horse. 

The text I'm using—The Oxford Annotated Bible, which I had to buy for a college course about 45 years ago—includes a headnote to all 66 books. I assume these editorial introductions represent something like a consensus of mainline, prestigious divinity-school understanding of the work at hand. The one devoted to Habukkuk concludes: 

The author is confronting honestly the profoundly disturbing problem of why a just God is "silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he" (1.13). To this perennial question the prophet receives an answer which is eternally valid: God is still sovereign, and in his own way at the proper time will deal with the wicked; "but the righteous shall live by his faith" (2.4).

One might timidly advance the notion that there is to this a dose of double think almost comical in its effect. The reason the "answer" is "eternally valid" is that the "proper time" never comes. In other words, the validity of the instruction to be patient terminates only if the burden requiring patience is lifted. For the answer to be eternally valid the burden must also be eternal. Yet God promises to lift it. Yet it never lifts. This it seems is ever and always the result of wrestling with what the editor calls a "profoundly disturbing problem."

That is the first two pages of Habukkuk. There are actually three parts to the four pages. The dialog concerning theodicy ends at 2:5 and is followed by a section of five formulaic "Woes" directed against some unidentified tyrannical nation. The third chapter, called in its first verse a "prayer of Habukkuk," brings the book to a close. Much of the scholarly commentary on the book takes up the question of the relationship between three plainly distinct sections. The consensus is that there is no relationship. The book, according to this view, is a collection of disparate texts. That the three sections belong to different literary forms is the strongest evidence for this conclusion. The "prayer," for example, appears to have been intended for liturgical use and would not be out of place in the psalter. According to the aforementioned headnote, scholarship has also detected in the three sections historical allusions that indicate quite different dates of composition. This raises the question of the identity of Habukkuk and the degree to which he was responsible for any of the work attributed to him in "The Book of Habukkuk." The only references to a Habakkuk in the canonical works of the Old Testament are within the book bearing his name. "Nothing," notes one scholar*, "is known about the prophet outside this book, except in legends which arose at a later time." I wonder whether these later arising "legends" might have resulted in the attribution of written material to a character of legend. It seems that there may or may not have been a Habakkuk, and that, if there was, he could have been responsible for at most a part of the biblical book called "Habakkuk." 

*J.P. Hyatt in Peake's Commentary on the Bible

I hear America singing

Osterholm on omicron

The coronavirus prognostications of Michael Osterholm, Minnesota's leading epidemiologist, have been mostly grim and then validated by events, so I perked up my ears when, interviewed recently on MPR, he offered a tentative, hopeful guess about how things might play out with the omicron variant:

"If a lot of people get [omicron] but it's not causing, on [the] whole, severe illness across the population, this would be incredibly good news," Osterholm said.

In an ideal world, omicron might even outcompete delta, infecting more people with a milder illness and leaving them with additional protection against SARS-CoV-2, Osterholm added.

"That could be Mother Nature's way of helping us out of this pandemic," Osterholm said. "But at this point, again, that's all just hypothetical." 

He didn't spell it out, but the "Mother Nature" Osterholm refers to is essentially the mechanism described by Charles Darwin. The virus mutates and, happily for us, on the question of a strain's fitness for survival lethality to host is not a particularly desirable trait compared to ease of transmission to a new host. Thus a comparatively benign strain, such as omicron may prove to be, could, if it's also more contagious, "outcompete" a killer strain like delta. And the effect of this might be to boost the level of resistance to disease among the stubbornly unvaccinated. Omicron's high transmissibility would mean they'd get infected, though not in a way apt to cause them or their contacts to get dangerously sick, and after mild illness "resolved" they would have acquired resistance to the virus. In this way, the virus that had won the biological competition for survival would get squashed. 

It's pretty to think so, but awful to contemplate how many lives have been lost by people declining to receive highly effective vaccines. The pandemic could have been squashed before omicron evolved. We're still losing more than a thousand people a day and are poised to surpass 800,000 deaths from COVID in the US. I have relatives who take the view that since before they were born God knew when they'd die and they trust in him, not vaccines. To me, this seems like an argument for not getting out of bed in the morning (or getting out of bed in order to drink a bottle of wine for breakfast). They reject evolution, too—though, if we're lucky, its implacable operations may be about to work in their favor. 

Gomer Pyle goes to Washington, signs up for Twitter

When politicians are unintentionally funny, it's often not benign, which is why the Twitter feed of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the 88-year-old Iowa Republican, deserves recognition. Yesterday, he tweeted:

Just spent 45 mins finding out why I don’t hv history channel Negotiations btwn 4 channels incl history & Direct tv Results: if I want history channel my bill go fr $65 to $99 I’m not paying $34 for history ch when not much history /or should I change from Direct to DISH??

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 11, 2021

This caught my attention and has spurred me to collect a small miscellany of the senator's social media work. His dissatisfaction with the History Channel is a theme but let's try to keep this positive by paying particular attention to objects of his affection, like Dairy Queen:

 

Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) November 3, 2014

I don't want to reveal too much about myself, but, reading this, it seems to me sufficiently cryptic as to suggest an inside joke among boys at school on the Monday morning after the Saturday night that something went down in the DQ parking lot. That must be part of why it's funny.  On the day he tweeted this the senator was 81 and I'm fairly confident the "u kno what" refers to soft serve ice cream. About a year later he tweeted, self-referentially:

 

I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen doing "you know what" !!!

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 16, 2015o

One of his constituents replied: "Whoa! Whoa! What happened to Windsor Heights?" I've researched it, and Windsor Heights is in the exurbs of northwestern Des Moines, whereas Jefferson is around 45 miles west of Ames. The senator gets around Iowa, but he's also a man of the world, and an ambassador for Twitter:

 

Welcome to Twitter Pope Benedict. U will find it useful and interesting

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 3, 2012

Couple of hip eldsters working their thumbs. But you can't take the boy out of Iowa farm country for long:

Fred and I hit a deer on hiway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled fender rubbing on tire we continued to farm. Assume deer dead

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 26, 2012

 

If you want to keep up with the Iowa geography lesson, Dyersville is in the east central part of the state, about 30 miles west of the Mississippi River town of Dubuque. The senator soon appended:

@ChuckGrassley Followers legitimately asked about condition of dear that attacked our Prius I didn't hv a flashlight to check on critter

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) October 27, 2012

 

Which inspired another of his constituents to create a Twitter account, "Deer in Iowa," just so s/he could reply, "I'm alive and well but a little sore, because that was most definitely not a Prius." Here is probably my favorite specimen of the senator's constituent service via Twitter:

 

If u lost ur pet pidgin /it’s dead in front yard my Iowa farm JUST DISCOVERED here r identifiers Right leg Blue 2020/3089/AU2020/SHE ///LEFT LEG GREEN BAND NO PRINTED INFO. Sorry for bad news

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) September 19, 2020

What some people call "haiku." The senator's style is inimitable. If he ever tweeted something impolitic, it would be impossible to blame a staffer. Like the Bible, the story of Senator Grassley's Twitter feed commences sublimely:

 

I now h v an iphone

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) February 13, 2012

It has a flashlight, senator. For next time you might want to check on a wounded critter in the night. 

Trump Team PowerPoints

This news story, concerning Trump's bitterness toward Benjamin Netanyahu after the Israeli prime minister congratulated Biden for having won the election, seems so out of character for our ex-president that I can scarcely credit it.

"Fuck him," Trump is quoted as saying. See what I mean?  As if!

Seriously, though, Trump is finished. Once his followers hear what he had to say about their favorite indicted Israeli fraudster, and then see his administration's PowerPoint on how to coup, the Trump Train will derail for sure. These people love America, it's not like a cult or something. 

The photo above is of a slide from the coup how-to. I've been contemplating the gradated emphases in the last bullet point, not that it's the only curiosity on display.  First word, "legal," gets the full treatment: all caps in bold font, underlined. Slowly peters out after that—no special effects at all after "counts." What any of this busy-ness might signify is anyone's guess since the words together, accented or not, cohere into no particular meaning. The author is likely a putz, but, considering the document was produced by or for the Trump Administration, this would be of little use for purposes of identification. I guess it was Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who turned the PowerPoint over to the Jan. 6 Committee and, from what I can tell, he's not smart enough to be embarrassed enough to say someone else did it. 

Hardwick on Nora in the doll's house

When I wrote, here, about Elizabeth Hardwick, I took note of the vivid openings to many of her essays, and I set a couple of them down. Now I have one to add. An essay on Ibsen's A Doll's House begins:

Ibsen could never be agreeable for very long. He seemed to have the fat of choler in his bloodstream, all of it collecting there from a youth as bitter, homely, and humiliating as a man could endure. Fate kept this large mind and angry ambition working as a druggist from the age of sixteen to twenty-two in the freezing cold of the little town of Grimstad. Well-named. He was sore at his family because they were worse than poor; they had gone from being well enough off to a great diminishment—the kind of reversal that stood out like a birthmark in the nosy, petty provincial world of Ibsen's life, and of his plays.

The Ibsen family had to move from town to a miserable little farm on the outskirts. Father Ibsen had the inclination to bankruptcy and shadiness Ibsen used over and over in his work, and along with it the sardonic wit of a small-town failure who drank too much. . . .

And she's off! There is no "great diminishment" as she proceeds, maybe just an imperceptible modulation from panache to acute intelligence as she delves into the details of the subject at hand. Maybe it sounds slavish or unduly worshipful, but I've read certain books mainly just to find out what Hardwick had to say about them. Scan the Table of Contents. "Ibsen's Women"? Okay, I'm reading A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm. One knows, dimly, that Nora, in A Doll's House, is regarded as a feminist hero for leaving her family in order to find herself, or whatever, and it's a relief to feel one's own discomfort endorsed at the end of Hardwick's essay:

Nora's children—this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen's day one actress refused the part saying, "I could never abandon my children."

[Snip]

When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, "Millions of men have done so," and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior. Nora seems to be saying that she cannot raise her own children in the old way and that she needs time to discover a new one.

Nevertheless, the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora.

Whew! Would have hated to disagree with Elizabeth Hardwick!

Cooperstown calling Twin greats Oliva, Kaat

Twins players Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva, who it was announced over the weekend have been voted into baseball's Hall of Fame, possess opposing claims to the honor. Kaat was on a level below such contemporaries as Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson, and Seaver, but he was a reliable, top-line pitcher for most of his 25 big league seasons, finishing with a 3.45 career ERA, 283 wins, and 4530 innings pitched. The innings-pitched figure places him 25th on the all-time list. The players who pitched more innings than Kaat are all either already in the Hall (20 of the 24), or from a different era (pre-WW II), or tainted by steroids (Roger Clemens), or named “Tommy John.”  Knee injuries shortened Tony-O's career and kept him from compiling eye-popping numbers on his bottom line at BaseballReference. The bookends of his productive career are the 1964 and 1971 seasons. He was a rookie in '64, and I'm not sure any rookie has ever had a better year: he led the American League in batting average (.323), doubles (43), total bases (374), hits (217), and runs scored (109). Of course he was Rookie of the Year. The question is why he wasn't the league MVP (he placed fourth, behind Brooks Robinson and two Yankees, Mickey Mantle and Elston Howard). In 1971, his batting average (.337) and slugging percentage (.546) both led the league. The next year, 1972, he required season-ending surgery after playing in just ten games, and he was never the same after that. But during those eight brilliant seasons, he led the league in hits five times, in doubles four times, and in batting average three times. 

Back to Kaat. Scanning his career numbers at BaseballReference, I'm surprised by a few things. For one, I was under the impression that his career was in eclipse when the Twins traded him to the White Sox during the 1973 season. Au contraire! He won 21 games for the White Sox in 1974, and 20 more in 1975. He had won 25 games for the Twins in 1966, and at the time his 20-win season in 1974 set a mark for most seasons between 20-win seasons (with none in the intervening years). This record was subsequently broken by David Cone, who won 20 games for the first time in 1988 and then not again till 1998. It's a quirky little stat but indicative of Kaat's effectiveness over a long period. I'd also forgotten that back in the mists of yesteryear there was only one Cy Young winner each season, a fact that prevented Kaat from claiming the award in 1966, when he finished second to National Leaguer Sandy Koufax. He might have had another chance in 1972, when through the first half of the season he sported a 10-2 record with five complete games and a 2.06 ERA. Then, in a July 2 game in Chicago, his season ended when he broke a bone in his pitching hand while sliding. It's not surprising that Kaat was on base. When he wasn't pitching the Twins often used him as a pinch-hitter, and in fact he was 13-for-45, a .289 average, when his 1972 season abruptly ended.

Oh, yes, Kaat also won the Gold Glove Award an astounding sixteen times. 

There will be six new inductees this summer, and Kaat and Oliva, both 83, are the only two still alive. On hearing the news, Kaat said, "This is truly a gift. I truly never thought this day would come. But the added happiness I have is I get to share it with my teammate Tony Oliva, who I have known for so long since he came up as a kid and developed into a Gold Glove outfielder. For us Minnesota Twins, it's going to be a great summer." Another thing I'd forgotten!—Tony O earned a Gold Glove for his outfield play in 1966. He also batted .307 that season, with 25 homers, 32 doubles, 87 RBI, and 99 runs scored, but leave it to a pitcher to hone in on his fielding. 

Bob Dole, 1923-2021

 

 

Thanks to Trump, Republicans who die on schedule over the next few years are all going to look like statesmen. Bob Dole, who died today, was 98, and it's not even funeral fudging to say that he had some good traits, like a long record supporting voting rights and a sense of humor. He's great in the above clip with Norm Macdonald, who played him on SNL. On another occasion Dole, seeing ex-presidents Carter, Ford, and Nixon sitting together on a dais, quipped, "Look, it's See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil."

After leaving politics he did some work for Pfizer and even participated as a subject in some early Viagra trials. If you're reading this, you have access to the Internet, and can verify that I am not making this up. In a CNN interview, Dole said Viagra was a "good product" and he wished he'd invested in it right away, causing Jay Leno, in his monologue later that night, to observe, "Leave it to a Republican to think that making money off Viagra is the best thing about Viagra." In Dole's defense, he did say that his wife, Elizabeth, was "startled."

I remember reading somewhere that, while everyone knows the injury Dole incurred in World War II resulted in a withered arm, it was less well known that he could not raise the hand on the other arm above around shoulder level. For about the last 75 years of his life, he needed help dressing and brushing his teeth. Elizabeth deserved some fun. 

Math and media

With concern high about the ability of the Omicron variant to dodge existing vaccines, it's too bad the Guardian newspaper had to run an article beneath the headline, "More than half Omicron cases in England are in the double jabbed." The graf in the story containing the details reads:

Twelve of the 22 cases occurred more than 14 days after the individual had received at least two doses of vaccine. Two cases were more than 28 days after a first dose of vaccine. Six were unvaccinated, while two had no available data. 

Let's set aside from consideration the two cases for which vaccination status isn't known. The first and most obvious thing to be said is that a sample size of 20 is so small as to be practically irrelevant. The networks don't call New Hampshire for one candidate or the other after the ballots have been tabulated from that one village that votes at midnight. They report the vote totals but don't pretend they are significant. But the Guardian's headline, the linguistic equivalent of wild hand waving, pretends that the very first returns are significant. 

The second thing to be said relates to the so-called base rate fallacy, which I've written about here and here. If everyone were vaccinated, so that every Omicron case was a breakthrough infection, this would not prove the vaccines were worthless against Omicron, right? What if universal vaccination reduced the total case load by 90 per cent? You have to take account of vaccination rates. When you do that, the scary-sounding results from the absurdly small sample size aren't that scary. Here is how I think that works out:

A chart in the Guardian story indicates that, in England, 69.3 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. But the fine print acknowledges that people under 12 aren't yet eligible. According to this BBC story, 90 percent of the eligible population have received at least one shot, and 80 percent have received two. Let's run some numbers using the 80 percent figure. Out of every thousand people, 800 will have been fully vaccinated, and 200 will be either unvaccinated or partly vaccinated—almost all unvaccinated. Of 20 positive Omicron tests in the population, 12 are for fully vaccinated people, and the other 8 are from the unvaccinated group. For purposes of gauging vaccine efficacy, then, the numbers that matter are 12-out-of-800 among the vaccinated, and 8-out-of-200 among the unvaccinated, or 1.5 percent versus 4 percent. The disease is more than 2.5 times more prevalent in the unvaccinated group. Yet the headline, while technically true, encourages people to conclude that, based on what is known so far, existing vaccines are essentially worthless against Omicron. "More than half the cases are among the fully vaccinated!"

 

Day in the life

Sitting here in a neighborhood coffeeshop nursing a latte and my COVID fatigue. I'll alter my habits when Omicron starts sending the vaccinated and boosted to the hospital. 

Played golf yesterday in the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities. The above picture is of a water hazard on the seventh hole, which was iced over—a potential stroke saver. I think it was 42 degrees when we teed off and fairly comfortable until it became overcast and windy on the back 9. For the record, I made a double bogey on what will be my last hole of the "season": good drive within a few steps of the 150-yard marker planted in the middle of the fairway; clunked a 6-iron about four-fifths of the way to the green; chipped it on; blew my first putt around 4 feet past the hole; missed it coming back.

Q: How'd you make a 6 on that easy hole?

A: Missed my putt for a 5.

Had a coffee, two tummy ticklers and some good cheer on the 19th hole before driving home. I've driven home from golf courses in the dark before but this might be the first time that it was also rush hour. 

Younger daughter had a half-hour piano lesson at 6:30 and a 7:15 appointment for her second COVID shot at Mall of America, which is a bad place to be in a hurry. I try to watch my tongue around her and she was delighted when, on the way out, I let down my guard enough to refer to the Mall as "a hellhole" to which I would never return. We stopped by the house to pick up two other kids before going out for hamburgers at our favorite neighborhood spot (the LowBrow). The unexpected upside to the early evening activities is that the clock turned to Happy Hour while we were there. Half-price nachos! Two dollars off rail drinks! A fully vaccinated 11-year-old! Compensations for being "shorter of breath and one day closer to death."