Daily Archives: July 30, 2020
And Now . . . Goggles?
A couple of weeks ago during a online webinar, CDC Director Robert Redfield was talking about getting kids back to school as soon as possible. As part of this he said that school-age kids are dying from suicides and drug-doses at a much greater rate than from CoVid.
I think that the cost to our nation in continuing to keep these schools closed is substantial, and I’m hopeful that resources that are necessary can be made available. That’s obviously not… it’s way above my pay grade.
But there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID.
And he also stated that the death rate for school-age kids is 5 to 10x greater for seasonal flu than for CoVid.
But I think that’s important because what that means, actually, is the risk per 100,000, so far, you know, into the outbreak, six months into it, is, in fact, that we’re looking at about .1 per 100,000. So another way to say that, it’s one in a million. Now, I’m not trying to belittle that, I’m just trying to make sure we look at it proportional. Because if you do the same thing for influenza deaths for school-age children over the last five years, they’re anywhere from five to 10 times greater.
And if you’re thinking about not getting the supposed vaccination/shot when it becomes available, think again.
This recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine thinks that you should lose your job or be locked up in your home until you knuckle under.
In addition, state mandates should not be structured as compulsory vaccination (absolute requirements); instead, noncompliance should incur a penalty. Nevertheless, because of the infectiousness and dangerousness of the virus, relatively substantive penalties could be justified, including employment suspension or stay-at-home orders for persons in designated high-priority groups who refuse vaccination.
And now, according to the estimable Dr. Fauci, we should all start wearing goggles as well as a face mask, and maybe even a face shield too.
Can HazMat suits be far behind?
July 30, 2010
EnterTRAINment Junction…
We’re presently parked at the Little Farm on the River RV Park in Rising Sun, IN, about 25 miles from Cincinnati, OH.
This park is in the middle of a working farm that runs right down to the Ohio River and we’re surrounded by corn and soybean fields
About 10:00 am we headed into Cincinnati. Strangely enough, although Ohio is just across the river, we have to go through Kentucky to get there. Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky all come together right here in this corner of the country.
Our first destination was Quaker Steak and Lube, a hot wing place we first ate at in Buffalo, NY last year on our way back from Newfoundland. When we were there the big promotion was their “Atomic Wings”. These rate about 150,000 on the Scoville Heat Scale (a jalapeno rates between 2500 and 8000) and you have to sign a release before they will serve them to you. Jan and I got a sample order (5 wings) and we both thought they were pretty hot, hotter than anything we’ve eaten before. Jan could only eat one.
This time they have a new deal. “Triple Atomic Wings” with a 500,000 rating. Unfortunately they don’t offer a sampler of the Triples, and I didn’t want a whole order of 10, so we didn’t get to try them.
But Jan and I both agreed that either we had both lost a lot of taste buds, or these “Atomic Wings” today weren’t as hot as the ones we had last year. But they were good. We also had some regular Hot Wings and some Buckeye BBQ, which rates at about 5000.
One thing I really like about Quaker Steak is that their chicken pieces are a good bit bigger than either Hooter’s or Buffalo Wild Wings.
After lunch we stopped off for gas and car wash before heading over to the main course for the day, EnterTRAINment Junction. Yes, it’s spelled correctly.
EnterTRAINment Junction is a trained-themed attraction that has a railroad museum, and what I was really there for, the world’s largest indoor model railroad.
With over 25,000 sq. ft., 90 trains with more than1200 cars, 2 miles of track, and over 6000 handmade trees, it’s really something.
I had a large HO layout when I was a kid, and if we weren’t living in the RV I might think about building another one. But in the meantime I still like reading about them, and visiting large layouts when possible. Last year I visited the Model Railroad Museum near Lancaster, PA, but this one is much bigger.
As I said, my layout was HO, which at the time was the smallest scale generally available at 1/87 real size. The trains we say today were G scale, or 1/22.5
Now there are two smaller scales than HO N scale, at 1/160, and Z scale at 1/220. An locomotive in Z scale is less than 2 inches long.
We also enjoyed the American Railroad Museum, which had a lot of interesting displays and artifacts. One thing that I found funny was that when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific work crews approached their meeting from opposite directions, they passed each other by and kept on going for another 100 miles. They were getting paid by the mile and didn’t want to stop. Finally the Government stepped in and declared Promontory, Utah the meeting point.
Leaving the Junction we head back to the rig, but detoured through downtown Cincinnati to get some flavor of the city. It’s a very nice town with a lot of new big buildings going up.
I kept looking for the Flimm building, but never found it.
Getting back to the rig a little before 5 we decided it was nap time for an hour or so. Then about 6:30 we headed out for dinner at Skyline Chili, one of two chili-based restaurants in this area, the other being Goldstar Chili.
Everything is pretty much chili. Chili Dogs, chili burritos, salads with chili on them, and even chili spaghetti. And of course, all of it covered with grated cheese and onions.
And it was delicious. Hopefully we’ll get to try Goldstar some other time.
Tomorrow we head north about 135 miles to Celina, OH for the night before getting into Elkhart, IN on Sunday.
Thought For The Day:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. – Miss Piggy
July 30, 2017
Smooth and Cool . . .
We took our time getting up and on the road this morning, not pulling out until about 10:30.
I think the spaces here at Capitol City RV Park here in Montgomery AL are some of the largest I’ve seen. At 85ft x 45ft, you could park a couple of RV’s in each site.
Though these are their ‘Premium’ sites, I was given a free upgrade when, noticing all the Auburn University stuff on the walls of the office, I told her I had gone to Auburn. Of course I didn’t tell her I had also gone to Auburn’s arch rival, University of Alabama too.
It took us about 10 minutes to get out on I-65N, heading towards Athens, AL, about 180 miles away.
Based on past trips through Birmingham, I was expecting the same really bad roads, especially coming into town from the south, but they’ve obviously been doing some work since we were through here last year. Nice and smooth.
And being Sunday, there was really no traffic to worry about, so we just cruised right through, with the only slowdowns being the many hills.
We pulled into the Northgate RV Park in Athens and were met by my cousin-in-law, Helen, at the park office. After getting in our hello’s and hugs, we got parked and set up about 2:45.
It’s always nice to have an RV Park in the family.
About 4pm Jan and I headed to have dinner at Catfish Cabin, our regular ‘first night here’ restaurant.
One of the best things about this place is that pretty much every thing is homemade. From the salad dressings,
to the Hushpuppies,
it’s all made in-house.
And all of their catfish, shrimp, and oysters, are all fresh, and then breaded and prepared at the restaurant. The only thing bought pre-prepared are the stuffed crabs like on my Combination Platter.
Jan always gets the Cabin Platter, because she really likes the whole catfish on it.
Really delicious as always.
One thing we’re enjoying up here is the cooler weather, with highs in the mid-80’s, and lows in the low-60’s, temps we haven’t seen since Rapid City, SD back in May.
Cool.
Tomorrow we’re making a daytrip back down to Birmingham to drive around, and then have dinner with our old friend’s Bill and Carol Alverson.
Bill and I both worked as broadcast engineers at WBIQ, Ch. 10, the local Alabama Public Television station back in the early 70’s, before we moved to Montgomery. We also both worked part-time at WENN, a black radio station in town, also as broadcast engineers.
So we’ll have a lot to catch up on.
Thought for the Day:
“Men are ruled…by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.” G. K. Chesterton
