An anniversary outing
Happy wedding anniversary to Karin & me – our sixth. My Aunt Ruth and her husband, my Uncle Tim, visited from Spain; they looked after Daniel and Samuel so that Karin & I could go on a little date. We went to Kroger and Goodwill. Because of the latest COVID surge, we got takeout instead of eating in a restaurant. We would’ve eaten at a park, but today was rainy. We took our food home and ate it in front of our guests and sons.
Uncle Tim liked Samuel’s murals (wall scrawlings). He kept talking about the pictures he saw in them. (Whenever he looks at a Rorschach test, he immediately sees dozens of pictures, I gather.) He wanted to take Samuel’s crayons and draw his own embellishments upon the murals, but we wouldn’t allow him to; Samuel can do with less encouragement.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m reading The Premonition, Michael Lewis’s COVID book, another of his tales of “mavericks” outperforming “experts” by looking at statistics and ignoring red herrings, social pressures, etc. The previous book I read by Lewis, The Fifth Risk, was about how the government keeps disaster at bay. The Premonition, so far, is about how it’s a wonder that the government prevents disaster at all, so unbudgeable is its bureaucracy. If a few brave statisticians didn’t do their statistics in obscurity, on their own time, in defiance of CDC orthodoxy, the country would crumble to pieces. The book has a couple of nice stories about George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the mid-2000s, Bush read John M. Barry’s history of the flu pandemic of 1918, decided the country needed to prepare for another pandemic, and set wheels turning which generated a containment strategy. Then, in 2009, a swine flu was detected in Mexico, California, and Texas.
Uncle Tim liked Samuel’s murals (wall scrawlings). He kept talking about the pictures he saw in them. (Whenever he looks at a Rorschach test, he immediately sees dozens of pictures, I gather.) He wanted to take Samuel’s crayons and draw his own embellishments upon the murals, but we wouldn’t allow him to; Samuel can do with less encouragement.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m reading The Premonition, Michael Lewis’s COVID book, another of his tales of “mavericks” outperforming “experts” by looking at statistics and ignoring red herrings, social pressures, etc. The previous book I read by Lewis, The Fifth Risk, was about how the government keeps disaster at bay. The Premonition, so far, is about how it’s a wonder that the government prevents disaster at all, so unbudgeable is its bureaucracy. If a few brave statisticians didn’t do their statistics in obscurity, on their own time, in defiance of CDC orthodoxy, the country would crumble to pieces. The book has a couple of nice stories about George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the mid-2000s, Bush read John M. Barry’s history of the flu pandemic of 1918, decided the country needed to prepare for another pandemic, and set wheels turning which generated a containment strategy. Then, in 2009, a swine flu was detected in Mexico, California, and Texas.
What’s the worst case? asked the new president [Obama].Bush was a terrible president, but I’m grateful that he read books.
Nineteen eighteen, said Carter [Obama’s lone holdover from Bush’s pandemic containment team].
What happened then? asked Obama.
Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died, said Carter. In the current situation, you’d be looking at two million dead.
