Bring out your dead!

Reading the news from Italy is depressing. It might be us a month from now.

Now I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies. All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country.

For many Italians, the normal warnings about this virus were simply not enough to change behavior. Denial comes too easily, perhaps. It was more convenient to blame some foreign germ-spreader, or pretend that the news was unreal. Then came a reality check: Last Sunday, Pope Francis gave a benediction not from his normal window at the Vatican but via video, in part to avoid the crowd on St. Peter’s Square but also to send a message. That was the first strong sign to snap out of it.

In contrast, here’s Devin Nunes (and by proxy, the entire goddamned Republican party). The concern isn’t about keeping people healthy and alive, it’s about keeping the money flowing in the economy.

Hey, Devin: if you care so much about the “working people and their wages and tips”, why isn’t your party working to guarantee a living wage? Instead, you demand that they get out, sick or not, and service the people who are still going out to restaurants…where, if the workers are not infected, they will be by all the selfish people carrying the disease who are out there transmitting it.

Can we please not get to the point other countries are reaching, where the dead are kept with the living because no one wants to deal with the bodies?

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

Quick, everyone, get to the Wal-Mart before all the body bags are off the shelves!

A help-me-out hangout on the pandemic experience

As part of the response to moving our course content online, my university provides all the faculty a licensed copy of Zoom, which I’ve used as a client before, but have never hosted a meeting myself. I’m throwing myself into it this weekend, ironing out my awkwardness by setting up a conversation, to be held at 3pm tomorrow, 15 March. Anyone want to join in? Email me, I’ll put you on a list and send you a link. Depending on the response, I may not be able to add everyone, so tell me a few words about what you’d want to talk about. You don’t need to have licensed Zoom to be able to use it.

The subject: what we’re doing to cope with the pandemic. Fellow educators are welcome, but this is affecting everyone, so everyone has a place in the discussion. Let’s not make it a piss-and-moan session, but talk about the positive actions you are taking.

This conversation will also be streamed to YouTube, I think, if I’ve got everything figured out. Student discussions will be private in the future. You’ll be helping me to master all the details of the technology! Which also means I may fumble stuff up and the beginning might be glitchy. It’ll be fun!

The Cutty Sark has fallen on hard times

In that post about building models as a kid, I mentioned how my old models were left behind at my grandparents’ house, and later demolished (with my permission!) by younger family members. I forgot, though, that there was one rescue, and it came home with me. My grandparents asked me to build a decorative model sailing ship for their mantel, and they bought me a kit.

I worked hard on it, since it was to be a gift for them, and it had to look good and classy. I spent months on it, and remember being a real perfectionist in getting all the shroud lines perfect and taut, staining the sails to get that perfect tone, painting every little detail. I’m proud to say that it was gloriously displayed in their living room for many years afterward, until their deaths. That was the one model my family saved from destruction and brought home for me.

It wasn’t exactly perfectly preserved.

The bowsprit was snapped off, the spars have been torn away from the masts, the rigging is sagging, it’s dusty and stained. I’m thinking, though, that it might be a pleasant project to repair over spring break…a little superglue, some delicate forceps work, I could maybe get the major stuff back in alignment and get it looking battered but presentable. I wouldn’t want it pristine, though — it has a history.

Also, when I lean in real close and sniff, I can still smell my grandfather’s cigars. They added some patina to the sails.

Nerdy nostalgia

OK, I’ve got to put up something light just to relieve my stress. Years ago, long before video games, before Dungeons & Dragons, what did stereotypical young male nerds do? One acceptable answer would be model railroading — there was a gigantic subculture of that — but I was poor and living in a family with six kids, so there was no space for the layouts. The other answer would be building model kits.

You might not know it from my current suave air, but there was a time between 12 and 18 years of age when I was building and painting all kinds of models: model planes, model rockets, model movie monsters, all that stuff. I also branched into balsa wood models in high school. I had these things hanging from my bedroom ceiling, on my dresser, on the floor. Because of the aforementioned lack of space, I did a lot of the crafting in my grandparents’ attic, which had the dual benefit of a large amount of storage room, and that my grandmother would come up every once in a while with cookies and milk.

So it was nice to stumble across this video summary of the various model companies that dominated the 60s and 70s. I swear, I recognized half the models shown and remembered building them.

You might ask what happened to my vast cluttered collection after high school. I abandoned them. They were left piled up in my grandmother’s attic, and then she died while I was living far, far away, and the house was sold and the old memorabilia had to be cleared away, and some of my relatives asked if they could blow them up with firecrackers and set them on fire. I said yes. Sometimes you just have to let go of childish things.

I do wish they’d at least made video recordings of the carnage. Those big old balsa models in particular would have been spectacular in their fiery demise.

This is my life for a while, isn’t it?

I just got out of class, which was part explaining science, and part negotiating how we’re going to continue from here to the end of the semester. The students had questions, I have questions, and we have relatively few answers.

Next up, I’m coordinating a biology faculty meeting which may get eaten up with addressing the multiple questions we’re going to have about how to suddenly switch to teaching online. We’ll have questions, I hope we have some answers.

Then I’m teaching a lab, which will be very short, because I’m just going to abort the experiment we were about to start and tell them we’re going to switch to me doing online demos and getting results, which they’ll have to analyze and interpret.

Finally, I’m just going to lie down. I didn’t get much sleep last night, trying to figure out how I’m going to have to revamp everything in both my classes. I expect I’ll be spending spring break trying to cope with this headache.

Nothing makes sense any more

I did it. I watched Trump’s address last night. It was painful. Somebody told him he couldn’t mug for the camera and that he had to hold still and not rant, but only read from the teleprompter, a completely unnatural behavior for him, and it showed. What’s with all the loud sniffing? All the speech did was highlight the unsuitability of this man for a crisis. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nothing he’s saying makes sense, except as an incoherent reaction to a problem that motivates him to reach out and help…his fellow rich people. We keep getting whipsawed by inconsistent policy decisions.

Makes sense:

  • Much as I hate it, shutting down face-to-face interaction at our university is a smart move. We have to slow this pandemic down.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Closing down universities, while still allowing massive sporting events to go on. Tens of thousands of people, shoulder to shoulder, eating hot dogs and drinking beer?
  • Megachurches holding massive services. Jesus won’t help you.

Makes sense:

  • The NBA suspending all games.

Makes sense:

  • Putting scientists and doctors to work to come up with sensible policies.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Trump waiting for Jared Kushner to make a decision about the virus.
  • Cutting funding to the CDC and NIH.
  • $50 billion in loans to small businesses, and cutting taxes.

Makes sense:

  • Coordinating internationally to prevent the spread of the disease.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Banning travel from Europe. Just Europe, not Asia. Later amended to exclude the UK from the ban.
  • Calling this a “foreign virus”. Viruses don’t have nationalities.

Makes sense:

  • Universal free healthcare.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Relying on the charity of insurance companies.

Makes sense:

  • 54% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall performance.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • 43% approve of how he’s handling the pandemic! Only 49% disapprove.

The president’s address was preceded by this phenomenon, which was perfectly representative of how America works.

And on that note, I have to go work with students who I may be seeing personally for the last time to figure out how we’re going to finish up this semester.

As expected…University of Minnesota closes in-person classes

And here we go…

We are suspending in-person instruction, including field experiences and clinicals, across our five campuses and are moving to online, or alternative, instruction. Students on the Morris and Crookston campuses will have in-person classes through this Friday, March 13.

I guess my spring break will be spent trying to figure all this out.