Howdy y’all!

“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Walt Kelly once said through his character, Pogo, in his famous — maybe not so famous nowadays — comicstrip. Kelly was talking about what we call climate change nowadays, but was just the environmental movement, way back in 1969. It’s the first Saturday morning of the first week of the new school week, and, boy, does it feel like, maybe, it really is me.

Damn. I haven’t worked in 18 months, and I’m out of shape. This has been hard. I have discovered the scheduling of posts. I’ve done it before, but last week everything was written well in advance and scheduled to be posted during the week. If I’m going to post at least once or twice a week, I’ll need to do the same throughout.

It’s not like this week wasn’t without highlights, though: My birthday was last week for those who want to mark your calendars. I’m old. That’s how old I am. Luckily, the blog fee renewal comes in July, so I pay for it by claiming it is a birthday gift. Often, Ma Belle Femme, relents and we get something else I’d like to have. This year I got an industrial strength beard trimmer… just in time for me to shave the big beard for the start of the new school year. The blades on the old one got dull. Dull. Wouldn’t trim the beard no more.

A bat flew into the apartment. It was funny. I was reading on the couch and saw it out of the corner of my eye, then La Petite Fille saw it. She squealed — in a good way, she likes these things. It was fluttering over my head and I couldn’t stop myself from stooping fearing that it would… I don’t know. It is a bat. It is expert at avoiding things. I never got a good look at it before it flew out the door.

Reading? Who Reads Any More?

The Blogs

Not that I’ve had a lot of time to ago visiting the blogs this week.

Going to the dogs: We have had two dogs this August. Wednesday 25 August was National Dog Day! And, Thursday 26 August was International Dog Day! I hope you did something doggone good those days, and I hope you relive them by visiting Tengrain’s National Dog Day article on Mock, Paper, Scissors and NV Subbaraman’s Envius Thoughts. 

Love is a lie that your body tells you to produce a baby. That is truth, so I was amused by this piece in Psychology Today on erotomania, the delusion that someone loves you.

Neurological News

My go to site had two gems that caught my eye this busy week:

Cognitive decline is slowed, when retirement is postponed or so researchers found when analyzing data from the US Health and Retirement Study. We’ve all had a retiree in our lives who was just bored and driving everyone up the wall. If nothing else is stimulating and keeps you engaged, which keeps the brain working at its best. I remember a study from my uni days that found that housewives had the worst mental health, and the easiest way to improve their mental health: let them get a job. The protections of staying employed longer were independent of gender, income, education, or occupation. We’re social creatures. Jobs are the way most of us socialize.

Social learners can f-up group decisions, or so researchers found when they produced a mathematical model that tracked the influence of various factors on a group decision. Social learners are those people who look to the people around them for information rather than finding additional information on their own. If the number of social learners in a group exceeds a certain threshold, bad decisions often result. Under that threshold, the group can evaluate ideas and reject bad ones outright. Sounds like an effect similar to groupthink to me.

Cambodian News

There is serious reason to doubt the rosy picture the Cambodian government has been painting concerning the outbreak here. When you add up the numbers that the provinces are reporting, you get a higher sum total than the government reports. Hunh. Go figure.

Additionally, the reporting from the big cities and, therefore, the big centers are spotty sometimes being left out all together. The big three are Phnom Penh (the national capital), Siem Reap (the location of Angkor Wat), and Sihanoukville (the coastal paradise). How about that.

So, the news that daily totals have fallen under 500 has to be taken with a grain of salt. As does the reporting that most of the new cases are out in the provinces.

The government also reports that the number of delta variant cases continues to rise with most occurring in Phnom Penh.

The vaccination, according to the government, to the degree that they can be trusted, continues to go well with 90% of the adult population vaccinated and 70% of children over 12.

Huzzah!
Jack

Given my schedule, I’ve had to cut back on my reading, so I understand if you’re less than thrilled with this post, but give us a sign, anyway, okay?

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Image Attribution

“The Big Beard” by me! so it’s licensed as use it however you want.