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RE: In your locality – what’s it really like?
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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 RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to flyeogh)
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Here in Austin the City has put up barricades and posted guards to close “Barking Springs,” which was pictured in the photo posted earlier. The apartment and condominium buildings just west of the University of Texas campus have become a hot spot. Among 178 university students who took a chartered spring break tour to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at least 49 have tested positive for the virus. The number continues to rise.
The number of reported cases in this county is around 400-500, and continues to rise rapidly as testing finally gets under way. Only six deaths were reported as of yesterday. One was a 30 year old man, the rest were in their 50s to 70s.
So far only a small fraction of hospital space in Texas set aside for COVID-19 patients is occupied. Field hospitals are being set up in public spaces in Dallas and Houston. Here in Austin some unspecified number of ambulatory cases are quarantined in a hotel.
It seems clear to me that in Austin and in the whole state we are still at a very early stage of the contagion.
Last night the Austin Classical Guitar Society organized a video concert by Grisha Goryachev, who was in Boston. It was excellent! The view and the audio were even better than from a front row seat in a local living room—which seated 60. Grisha performed with his accustomed virtuosity and eloquence. He played pieces by Sabicas, Rafael Riqueni, Vicente Amigo, and Paco de Lucia. His guitar was a marvelous 3-year old spruce/satinwood Lester Devoe. Grisha said it was still developing, and ought to be really something in ten years.
There was a brief question and answer period after the concert. Grisha said he was composing some pieces, but he couldn't put them on his recordings or concert programs because they were always works in progress. He said he would have to write them down at some point and leave them alone so he could perform them.
RNJ
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Date Apr. 5 2020 17:16:43
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to Escribano)
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Here in the Washington, DC Metropolitan region it appears that most people are heeding the order to stay at home except for exercise walks and trips to the supermarket or pharmacy. There are exceptions, however. Yesterday (Saturday) the fish market located on the waterfront in Southwest Washington was open and throngs of people were there without regard to social distancing, as if they didn't get the word or didn't care.
Elsewhere in the US, the governor of Georgia issued a "stay at home" order" Friday, saying he had just found out the Coronavirus could be transmitted by people who were asymptomatic. One wonders where he has been the last three weeks. There are now nine states whose governors have not issued "stay at home" orders, Republicans all, and all praised by President Trump! This is the same Trump who issued the advice (from his Coronavirus team) that people who go out should wear a mask, but he (Trump) would not be wearing one! That's our president, leading from behind.
Perhaps Trump's most laughable statement was when he said he thought of himself as a "wartime president," thus associating himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt (World War Two), Abraham Lincoln (the Civil War), James Madison (the War of 1812), and others.
Thank God we've got Anthony Fauci.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 5 2020 19:29:31
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ernandez R
Posts: 737
Joined: Mar. 25 2019
From: Alaska USA
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RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to terry70)
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You know, I was really surprised when our governor let our state chief medical officer run the show. This comes as a big surprise because our governor has aligned himself with our president and all that implies but after a few false starts and removing some early appointments funded by outside interest seems to have a fairly even keel even if it does align with an oil tanker.
Our state was an early-er adopter of all the rational things that needed to be done including mandating cloth face masks for all outside social activity.
Our small hospitals have set up parking garages for screening and intake of less serious CV patients and we are as ready as they can be.
The numbers don't lie though and unless we really stay hunkered down up here we will run out of critical care beds before our peek.
One of our first cases was some googan who had to skiing at steamboat for spring break then brought it back, not some young kid but a man mid forties, he is some sort of celebrity now because he recovered but I think he is just irresponsible: science tells us exactly how many he will have infected and perhaps killed.
So in my little world. I got run down by a moose two days ago. Crushed my foot. I now have to go to our big city hospital for surgery in about 10 days, you know just as it starts to get busy.
The one know case of cov19 nearest us contracted it at the same hospital.
Fortunately they are doing everything to minimize my stay. Pre op stuff being done in an outpatient facility. Hopefully I go in early am and out late pm. Not a lot of trade in the surgery unit these days so there is that.
Was able to sit up half reclined and get some playing in this morning. Now I'm trapped and beginning to understand how city dwellers must feel. I'm taking half a dose of pain meds as little as posable, a small glass of red wine after dinner, you know, to take the edge off.
The Boss is digging through her fabric stash to make up a gross of fabric masks. I want to make up as many as we can with the elastic we have available to take to the hospital.
I'll keep scratching away: iami, iami...
HR
_____________________________
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy,
doesn't have to be fast,
should have some meat on the bones,
can be raw or well done,
as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
www.instagram.com/threeriversguitars
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Date Apr. 5 2020 20:20:43
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to kitarist)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kitarist
BTW Tim Urban from WaitButWhy had a great post a few years ago about family connections and different perspectives back and forth through time, both in the usual tree representation and where one is merely one of the countless fore-relatives of some unknowable person several centuries into the future: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-future.html Perhaps you've seen it.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen it. The phenomenon of "pedigree collapse" is not widely discussed, except perhaps by stock breeders. When I was much younger one of my ancient cousins informed me, rather breathlessly, that one of the Queen's 14-times-great-grandmothers was a Jernigan. I refrained from explaining to her that it was almost a statistical certainty.
By the time you go back 16 generations there are 32,768 female branches in your family tree. Around six hundred years ago there were nowhere near that many marriageable women in the entire European aristocracy. In fact English pedigrees, as far as foreigners go, slant heavily toward France, the Holy Roman Empire and what is now northern Spain--mostly women.
Say there were 500 marriageable aristocratic women in the 16th generation of the Queen's ancestry. Then on average the same person would inhabit 64 different branches of her family tree. Not only is it not at all remarkable that the Queen has a Jernigan ancestor, it would be quite remarkable if she did not.
Sixteen generations back from the Queen the English aristocracy still addressed one another as "cousin"--because they were.
As far as family stories go, last Easter at dinner the 20 or so guests were mainly my brother's family and mine. Afterward one of my grand-nieces approached me, switched her iPhone to "record," and asked me to recite some family history.
I began, "I have vivid memories--and there is no one left to contradict me."
At age 82 you are sometimes--perhaps not often, but still sometimes--reminded that those vivid memories have gradually evolved considerably over the decades.
Nabokov wrote a novel whose form was a handwritten memoir by an older man. Occasionally in the manuscript there is a slashing comment in an imperious female hand, such as "No! Natasha was not at Marienbad that year. She remained in Saint Petersburg the whole summer."
We remain well. I am unaware of any COVID-19 cases in the immediate neighborhood, but I am also unaware of anyone who has actually been tested. Our only friend who has shown symptoms has not been seriously ill, and has been steadily improving while staying at home. He runs the IT installation of a hospital, and expects test results in the next few days.
One negative development is that it has become essentially impossible to snag a time slot for delivery or curbside pickup from the two major grocery chains. I have an N-95 mask which I bought at the end of February and a box of latex gloves, so I may suit up and head to the grocery store if supplies begin to run a little low in a couple of weeks. But if push comes to shove I have 25 pounds of pinto beans and an equal amount of rice. In 1961 two friends and I subsisted on beans and rice, and the few birds we shot during six weeks in the high jungle of southern Yucatan and northern Guatemala.
We kept careful track of what was eaten by our guide, translator, and soon our friend: water and corn tortillas. We only camped in the forest a few nights, since there were villages scattered throughout that country. Each morning Jorge would make the rounds of women fixing breakfast, and return with a two-inch stack of tortillas he had bought for very little money. He tasted beans once out of curiosity, but never again accepted our offer. By the time we were ten miles from the road, children in the villages had never seen beans before. No one had ever even heard of a pressure cooker.
On Facebook I have been deluged by advertisements proposing to sell me face masks. Some are fairly obviously scams. Despite its elegant visual design, one betrays itself by tin-eared English, both in the body of the ad and in the enthusiastic "comments." Since more than half a dozen ads have appeared for the first time in an hour of Facebooking today, I have my doubts about all of them.
On the other hand, five pounds of spaghetti I ordered 2 1/2 weeks ago from a previously unknown source turned up yesterday.
RNJ
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Date Apr. 7 2020 3:32:08
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
When I was much younger one of my ancient cousins informed me, rather breathlessly, that one of the Queen's 14-times-great-grandmothers was a Jernigan. I refrained from explaining to her that it was almost a statistical certainty.
It has long been known that everyone of European descent today is related to Charlemagne. Besides beginning the Carolingian line as King of the Franks and in the year 800 becoming Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne had 18 children, three of whom inherited his empire when he died in what eventually became France, Alsace-Loraine, and Germany. Rejoice in your royal genes.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 7 2020 15:23:51
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: In your locality – what’s it... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
It has long been known that everyone of European descent today is related to Charlemagne. Besides beginning the Carolingian line as King of the Franks and in the year 800 becoming Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne had 18 children, three of whom inherited his empire when he died in what eventually became France, Alsace-Loraine, and Germany. Rejoice in your royal genes.
Bill
If you have Charlemagne you are automatically entitled to his grandfather Charles Martel, who was born in 688. Charlemagne's great-grandfather Pepin of Herstal was born about 635. Odoacer, the first barbarian Roman Emperor overthrew Romulus in 476. So you can get back to within a couple of centuries of the fall of Rome.
But I think there's some sort of Charlemagne society in the USA where you have to have a pedigree--presumably with some kind of validation--to get into it. I wonder why this is seen by some as a valuable attribute?
My former wife emailed me a few months ago looking for a marriage record of my maternal grandmother. She said she was working up papers for my daughter to get into the Daughters of the American Revolution.
To my surprise I came across the actual marriage license in a trunkful of memorabilia I inherited from my mother. I didn't relay what Granny had to say about the D.A.R.
In the mid-1920s the D.A.R. penetrated as far into the hinterlands as the small town in Oklahoma, near where Granny lived. My grandfather had recently passed away, and Granny had seven children to raise on a 320-acre family farm. The D.A.R. in town sent her a note inviting Granny to join.
She replied with a note, "Since I now have the family business to run, I'm afraid I don't have the time to devote to your organization that it would deserve."
"How much time did it deserve, Granny?" I asked.
"About five minutes," she replied.
I read somewhere that James Catto, the inventor of blended Scotch whisky, traced his ancestry to Cato the famous Roman, but I haven't seen a pedigree.
I doubt that Cato foresaw the acclaim his descendant would bring upon the family name.
RNJ
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Date Apr. 7 2020 23:56:29
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