There are no bad ideas: July 2020

Friday, July 31, 2020

Weekly DP Wrap Up

WEAR A MASK – WASH YOUR HANDS – WATCH YOUR DISTANCE

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Sometime maybe in March I decided that I would use my email .sig to try to make a little bit of a difference in the general awareness to the pandemic. I had heard something on TV and I had decided to write the phrasing on the sidewalk, and then I decided that I had access to way more people via email than I do via sidewalk and so maybe I should use my .sig.

So sometime in March I appended this to my .sig:

STAY HOME - STOP THE SPREAD - SAVE LIVES

I think one of the NBC shows was signing off with it or something and it just resonated with me.

That .sig was very much in line with the instructions we were getting early on: that people should stay home. Don't travel, don't go to playgrounds or parks, don't eat out; stay home to "flatten the curve."

Sometime in the last couple of weeks I started to feel like I was the only person trying to deliver that message. Locally they've opened the parks, people are eating out, and they are talking about in person school within a month. Although the infection numbers are as bad as they were months ago, authorities have very much abandoned the "Stay home..." message.

That's too bad. From my own vantage the message in that .sig is still exactly what we ought to be doing.

Other folks must have also come to the conclusion that there was nobody following behind where they were leading and so I heard a new pandemic catchphrase: the 3 W's. The message seems more in line with the strategy being espoused by leadership. So I changed my .sig:

WEAR A MASK - WASH YOUR HANDS - WATCH YOUR DISTANCE

There's part of this I like better than the old one: it seems critical that any messaging include "wear a mask." Even under the old rules many people were going out, and it was important for those people to wear masks - often they did not (often they still don't). I guess the old phrasing could have been "Wear a mask - Stop the spread - Save lives" but the WSS isn't as catchy as the SSS even if the "Stay home" part was always mushy.

It does sound like experts believe we could bring the virus under control with the measures in the new message without needing the greater restrictions of the first one. I hope so. Still it feels like we've softened the response at a point where we should have been becoming more restrictive. The new phraseology seems far more economically friendly than the old one. I am unsure that's where the priority should be.

But I'm not in charge. I'm just playing around with my .sig.

And occasionally writing on the sidewalk.

And maybe changing the name of my wireless network.

And blogging about it:

Stay home

Wear a mask

Wash your hands

Watch your distance

Stop the spread

Save lives

Thursday Ride

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Get Into This Century

Remote teaching has... encouraged me to put several of the lectures I have been giving at the whiteboard for decades into PowerPoint decks. See anything you recognize? Can you name the class?

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Ellipses...

I joined a whole bunch of new groups on Facebook. Remember when Facebook was for keeping in touch with friends? I guess it isn't so much for that anymore... Whoever first said "its all downhill from here" probably lived in Squirrel Hill. The second half of these evening bike rides are requiring a lot more PAS than the first half... I tried to watch some of the Attorney General appearing before Congress today but I had to turn it off. Listening to Jerry Nadler admonish committee members about wearing their masks just didn't convey the high level discourse I was anticipating... I am out of hot ramen. I ordered more... Gib5on did a mini-Snapology at Camp Corona today, just using his one bin of Legos. I told him that maybe before the end of camp they could do a Snapology day using all of the Lego. That will require rearranging the house. I'm not sure they will appreciate it enough to make it worth it... I emailed a used bookstore in town about buying some of our departing stock. I don't have a lot of confidence it will yield much in the way of revenue, but maybe it will help move the process along... The COVID snag that MLB found itself in today has me really thinking about in person teaching next month. I'm slated to be in the room for TD1 and TD3. Thinking about content I am not sure it is necessary. "Necessary" is not the index they asked us to use in making the decision. Maybe it should be... We're losing the dental students that have been cutting our grass for two years. They finished school and are becoming dentists. Doesn't seem fair to hold that against them, but I'm not sure we're going to find a replacement that will meet their price... If I keep up the bike riding I am going to need a different seat. I believe I am heavier than the person they think is riding the bike... Basketball starts up again on Thursday. I like Basketball, but I don't know if I have the bandwidth these days... Speaking of sports, how is it they get hundreds and hundreds of fast response COVID tests while people who don't get paid to dunk are still being triaged in order to get a test at all and those tests take way too long for results? Might be time to light up your Congressfolks... Converting my existing lecture notes into PowerPoint decks isn't too steep a hill. I don't think I could have a Grad Assistant do it though. Just enough judgement involved to mean editing would be harder than composing. Might make sense to have someone look for or generate better visuals though...

Tuesday Ride

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Monday, July 27, 2020

Four Things

Social Media

For as long as there has been Facebook and as long as there has been Twitter - and more recently as long as there's been Instagram there has been a tension between being accessible to students and preserving both their own and my own privacy. My Twitter is unlocked. When a student friends me on Facebook I typically accept. Generally I don't accept requests from summer students as they are somewhat younger. But my regular year students are adults and it has been my STOP to accept those requests. My Instagram is open. As a weird hybrid between Facebook and Twitter I really can't wrap my head around who I should be following and who should be following me. For a little while last Spring access to the Frosh common Instagram account became a cause of sorts with my finally getting access after the Critical Path project. I am apparently locked out again, but I don't have the oomph to follow up. Yesterday was a lousy day to have access to students on Facebook. It is often a really good backdoor into student discourse. In this particular case I probably would have been better off without. No way of knowing if it was directed to me personally, but I was part of a "they" called ignorant and insensitive among other things. I should meter my reading better.

We Just Don't Know

There's a lot of angst in the community about what things are going to be like in the Fall. On top of that there's a significant amount of anxiety around what the Spring is going to be like at the school. The truth of the matter is that we really just don't know. The situation in terms of information is nearly identical between the student body and the faculty. That information vacuum is filling with speculation and misinformation. Much of that comes with accompanying attribution of intent that is just science fiction. I have my own ideas about why things are going one way and not the other, but I am doing my darndest to keep those thoughts between Mrs. TANBI and myself. You won't be reading them here. We just don't know and we're just not going to know for quite some time. Based on what I've observed to date even if we did know something today we might not know again tomorrow, and then again the day after that. Today there was discussion of a Spring production calendar and I had the thought that there ought to be an announcement that the next Spring production calendar would not be released until mid-October. At least that would let some of the air out of the balloon as folks wouldn't think there was a calendar and we were just keeping it a secret. When we know something we say something. We just don't know.

Books

We're trying like crazy to get out of the storage unit we rented when we redid the basement last Spring (like Spring of 2019). A not insignificant percentage of the volume involved are moving boxes full of books. Carton after carton of scifi and fantasy books of mine and a far more diverse range of titles that are my wife's. In the old house there were a lot of book shelves and so all of these books had a home (although some of them actually made the trip here from my folks house in Chicago). When we moved into the new house we decided we weren't going to make bookshelves a prominent decorating feature, deferring the decision of what to do with them until we solved the basement. Now that the basement solution is in process there doesn't appear to be a significant amount of space for books. So now we need to figure out what to do with all these books. Due to the new normal the library hasn't been taking donations, and anyway, like so many things, this volume was a significant investment at purchase. It feels like we ought to be able to recoup something at liquidation. A long time ago I brought four cartons of books to a Half Price Books and left with $6, so that doesn't seem fruitful. I've been thinking about a sidewalk book sale: $1 per paperback, 3 for $2 & $2 per hardcover, 3 for $4. Mrs. TANBI thinks that's a wasted effort. One of the local churches does an annual book sale. I'll have to look into their donation rules. Anyone want a bunch of books?

Where is the Soup?

For a very, very long time now I have been on a 5:2 fast diet that limits my calories two days a week to 600 overall. Also for a very long time a staple of my getting through this limitation has been Progresso Chicken Tortilla soup. A can of this soup is 200 calories, so the soup with a handful of saltines fits into 300 calories which is the meal allowance I am working with. For more than a year my dinner twice a week was a can of this soup. But now I have a problem: the world is out of soup. The tortilla soup is not available to begin with at the local grocery chain. I reup at Target. But for the last, pretty much as long as I can remember now, neither of the Targets that are close has had it on the shelf. I actually just looked and it says it is there at the SLiberty store - but truth be told I have seen it on the app and then gotten to the store and had it not be there. Canned soup is apparently a staple of everyone's pandemic planning, and the Chicken Tortilla is apparently pretty good soup to more people than just me. I've expanded the plan to cover more varieties. The governing principle is that the whole can needs to be less than 300 calories. There are multiple Progresso varieties that meet the need as well as a few Campbell's Chunky soups. But even with a broader list results on a given trip to the store are hit & miss. I have questions... Why can't stores keep up with demand? Why can't I order a case? The Target app won't ship to my location. Amazon has soup by the case, but a case is $30, for 6 cans; in the store that would be closer to $12. That's a healthy markup. Gonna have to look for more options I guess.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Sunday Ride

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Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Breaking Down The Legacy Of Race In Traditional Music In America

90.5 WESA: The symbols of America's racist past have been under intense scrutiny since the protests against police brutality erupted nationwide. The confederate flag and other monuments from that era have been disappearing from public spaces — both by force and legislation.
Posted by David at 7/26/2020 10:36:00 AM

We Experienced the First West End Show Staged With Social Distancing. Here's What It Was Like.

TheaterMania: Four months on and, though social distancing measures have been altered, the circumstances are still desperate for the arts sector – even with a £1.57 billion package announced by UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, questions still remain about whether or not any shows will be possible this side of 2021. The countdown is on to see if the annual holiday season pantomime shows are a no-go.
Posted by David at 7/25/2020 05:43:00 PM

SLEEPLESS Musical Will Use New Fast COVID-19 Test Backstage

www.broadwayworld.com: SLEEPLESS, A Musical Romance, which announced last month it would begin socially distanced indoor performances at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre from 25 August, will begin using a new accurate COVID-19 test on cast, musicians, crew and theatre staff on a daily basis during rehearsals and during the run of the show. The test is called FRANKD (Fast, Reliable, Accurate, Nucleic-based Kit for Covid19 Diagnostic Detection).
Posted by David at 7/24/2020 09:47:00 AM

Stage Union Releases COVID Safety Guidelines For Broadway Return

Deadline: Theatrical stage union IATSE has issued a 27-page set of safety guidelines for the still-to-be-determined reopening of Broadway and other live performance venues, with recommendations including the employment of COVID-19 “compliance officers,” paid sick leave and diagnostic testing of workers.
Posted by David at 7/24/2020 09:45:00 AM

IAAPA continues campaigning Congress for critical changes and aid for attractions industry

InPark Magazine: IAAPA estimates nationally the COVID-19 pandemic will cause $23 billion in economic losses for attractions in 2020. With more than 50% of attractions having to make staffing adjustments and many facilities not reopening in 2020, more than 235,000 jobs have been lost across the U.S.
Posted by David at 7/22/2020 02:13:00 PM