Jan 4, 2021
poor georgie’s almanack
The virus makes brain-like decisions on who and how to attack. Apparently, when it feels threatened it cleverly mutates. Covid-19 acts like it has a goal. Is Covid the super-intelligent alien Sci-Fi told us to fear?
poor georgie’s almanack
2020
1:10 PM, New Years Eve Day, tripped on sidewalk, fell, broke glasses, scrapped my nose, couldn’t stop bleeding (blood thinner).
7:10 PM, left the ER, having passed relevant tests and all cleaned up.
Without specs, I can’t see 2020 anymore.
GOOD RIDDANCE!
poor georgie’s almanack. december 25, 2020
It was a haunting image. The flag-draped coffin starkly alone in what looked like a deserted cemetery.
Then around noon, December 24, 2020, Christmas Eve, it slowly was lowered into the awaiting grave.
It was cold. Temperature hovering around Zero. A devastating Minneapolis blizzard, on the horizon.
Jerry Rotman, the ebullient, articulate, entertaining, caring, patriot, was put to rest. Because of the pandemic, the funeral played out on Zoom. The former Marine, Ivy League graduate lawyer, the kind of father you want, and a damn nice man. He was my 87-year old cousin.
Louise, his dear wife died earlier this year of Covid related issues.
The country is dying All countries do. All people do. All leave a legacy.
Some are positive.
Jerry’s was, and even today remains, a positive force.
To me, the ultimate test of a man is if he is strong enough to laugh at himself.
A short story.
Jerry knew I was writing a series of essays trying to figure out what was going on in our ancestors’ minds and in their lives. I wanted an explanation for the decisions they made that still affect us today. Jerry said he long had wondered the same things.
So, as a young man coming home to visit his family in Iowa from his New England classes, Jerry decided to go via Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. He wanted to see what his father saw many years earlier as a new world, a new life, was about to begin. He wanted to experience the emotions.
And he did.
Over the phone, even 60 years later I could feel the powerful impact of what he absorbed.
The intensity must have been exponentially more dramatic as he sat in the family living room, next to his father, displaying his heated sensations in great detail. An act of extreme empathy.
Slowly his father reached over and put his warm hand atop Jerry’s and gently whispered in the Eastern European accent he never could lose, “But, Jerry,” he said. “We came through Canada.”
nov 29, 2020
poor georgie’s almanack
Probably.
Stick with me for the next few seconds and you probably will be right.
There actually are people who know about "things."
Some of the really smart ones say no “thing” is a “thing” until you can measure it.
They, and equally smart "thing" people, say no “thing” is real because when you measure it you really are measuring the probability that it is real. Sure, they say, the Sun will rise in the morning because it has for millions of years. So the Sun is real.
But, the realist has a teacher who says, "It depends on how you measure it. When and where you measure it. Even why you measure it."
For instance, those satellites high above us see “things” differently than we see “things.” So their reports to our GPS are adjusted so we can know where we probably are, or are going, or have been.
This is no small “thing.” Human time is different in space. That astronaut who spent the year in space no longer is the same age as his twin brother who stayed on earth.
So try to remember some of this when your friend, or former friend, is talking about the election.
S/He may be right. The probability is that Biden won. The probability is that the Sun will rise.
But, who knows, the Sun may not rise tomorrow morning.
Because, someday it probably won't.
Re: Trump.
“It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told a New Yorker reporter.
poor georgie’s almanack
Published in 1879 … but it could have been about the first ten months of 2020
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”― Charles Dickens
poor georgie’s almanack
Repeating what I said before.
Since the first day of isolation every day is Wednesday.
