Howdy y’all!

It’s been a surprisingly busy week. So, busy, in fact, that I didn’t have time to work on posts. How’s that even fair? Anywho, here’s the news from around Ye Olde Blogge

• Trypanophobia: La Petite Fille has a fear of needles and has been increasingly difficult to get vaccinated. She was only five when we moved to Africa, so we could hold her down and given her her yellow fever vaccine. Now that she’s sixteen, we’re a little reluctant to do that. Luckily, modern medicine has a solution and even more luckily we found a doctor willing to work with us in implementing it. I’ll let you know how dosing her with anti-anxiety medication goes. Keep your fingers crossed.
• Omicron: Oh man, leave it to sCiEnTiSts to ruin eVeRyThInG. The last #COVID19 variant of any note was the mu variant, so logically, the next variant of note should be nu, right? So, what do the scientists do? They name it omicron. Omi-freaking-cron! Just when I had the greatest joke ready to go viral on Twitter:

• Spam: Just when you thought it was safe to dive back into the Ye Olde Spamme File, you find like twenty of pieces of this detritus stinking up the place! Can you believe it? They are spamming Ye Olde Blogge with offers of hydroxychloroquine? Obviously, they’ve never read the posts. Wankers.

ICYMI

• Birth Announcement: Scientists in Australia announce that the Great Barrier Reef has been birthing new coral and is recovering somewhat from the excesses of human occupation of the planet.
• Botulism News: Do your part to prevent botulism and other food borne illnesses like salmonella this Festivus season by following these simple guidelines. Remember, it is better to put warm food in the fridge than let it stay out on the counter cooling. Getting it below 40 degrees Fahrenheit as quickly as possible is the goal.
• migration news: In an absolutely fascinating article on the migration of foods and their names around the world, we learn that the lowly tomato doesn’t have the straightforward journey from Mexico to our dinner plates that we thought it did.
• Gratitude: During this season of gratitude — the Festivus custom of the Airing of Grievances is just another form of gratitude if you close one eye, squint, and tilt your head just right — it is important to realize we should extend that gratitude to ourselves as well.
• Nutrition and schizophrenia: Nutrition awareness continues to invade the world of mental health. Now there is an instrument to help clinicians to guide schizophrenics through improved nutrition. The gut-brain connection is really fascinating.
• Depressed Social Media: Apparently, social media use might could lead to increased depression in adults. I know that doom scrolling has left me angst ridden and excessively worried, so maybe there is something to it.

Friends of Ye Olde Blogge

• Fall has fallen: Robert has one of his own poems on offer this week celebrating the changing of the leaves during fall in the temperate climes over at Of Cabbages and Kings.
• Holiday Spirit: Okay, so it isn’t exactly a Festivus Feat of Strength or Airing of Grievances, but it is a genuine #JoeBidenMiracle! He actually WALKED around Nantucket — and didn’t even make a bad couplet in an equally bad limerick out of it, seriously, maybe Jen Psaki is losing her touch — buying stuff from small businesses with HIS OWN MONEY and didn’t grift anything off of the US taxpayers in the process. Thanks Tengrain for keeping us informed over on Mock Paper Scissors.
• Well fuck: Ten Bears at Homeless on the High Desert gives us a cartoon that reminds us that when a substantial portion of a democracy no longer follow democratic rules, laws, and norms, democracy just cannot be sustained. We all have to participate in it for it work. If enough people opt out of it, democracy ceases to exist.
• When dog whistles failed: It seems like a rarity nowadays that the inner racist of white people don’t enthusiastically respond to the racist dog whistles, but in the Burr reminds us that they did just that in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial when the defense trotted out such lines as his long and dirty toenails and the dog whistles didn’t bring a well-hung jury home.
• Hater Photo-Op: Now that all the racist trials are over (Rittenhouse, Charlottesville, and Arbery) we can sort out the score: 2 – 1. I suppose it coulda been worse. Scottie, though, points all this out in his usual deft mixture of political cartoons and commentary over in his Scottie’s Toy Box.

Huzzah!
Jack

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Image Attribution

“Trypanophobia” by Omnitarian is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0