Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Game Over

Stay Vague
Control the Media
Save Myself

I took a walk yesterday around the neighborhood, just to get out of the house, and found some fun coronavirus-related street art on Blackberry Path around the rugby fields near the cemetery.

Happy New Tier

We don't get a huge amount of street art here in West Hampstead, so it was kind of interesting to find these stencils. I think the one above shows a person in a gas mask, but I'm not 100 percent sure. It probably needs to be on a smoother wall to be clear.

Game Over

I walked all the way up to Cricklewood, so I got a decent amount of exercise. Olga didn't go with me because she was with her dog-walker.

I finished two Newbery books: "Kira-Kira," which I loved, and "Last Stop on Market Street," which took about five minutes to read. (It's basically a picture book -- not typical for the Newbery Award.) This year's Newbery medalist was just announced, so now I'll add "When You Trap a Tiger" to my list. Two steps forward, one step back!

Dave surprised me by including Doom Bar ale in our grocery order, which was delivered yesterday evening. We never buy beer at the grocery store, but having been deprived of a pub outing for almost a year now, I'd been craving a pint and as it turns out, so had he. So we toasted with Doom Bar last night as we watched "Perry Mason." It's the little things, right?

I just realized it was almost exactly a year ago that I first (dismissively) mentioned coronavirus on my blog. Oh, how naive we were then.

Our recent snowfall has entirely melted.

38 comments:

  1. As there is not much street art around the mean streets of West Hampstead, perhaps you should take it upon yourself to create some of your own. With dark clothing, a balaclava and a bag of art materials you could set out early on quiet Sunday mornings to fulfil your mission. Regarding subject matter and style, I must leave that up to you.

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    1. There was a time when I considered making my own street art, but I'm past that now! LOL

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  2. I'm glad the badly stencilled art on the green wall isn't nearby; it would drive me crazy not being able to decipher it.

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    1. It IS frustrating, isn't it? They're not the greatest stencils in the world.

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  3. I just bought a Book on Paris Street Art/Graffiti, it was fascinating.

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  4. We watched an old Perry Mason last night. The one with Raymond Burr, black and white, etc.
    God. It was horrible.
    I wonder when I first mentioned the virus. And yes- we were so naive.

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    1. Yes! That's the one we watch. I don't think it's horrible at all. I'm impressed at how well it stands up, actually! We watched one last night that featured a black judge, in the early 1960s -- I was pretty blown away by that. In later years they made an effort to have a diverse group of people in the courtroom gallery, though seldom as the main focus of the show.

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    2. I think for me it is the formulaic way each episode is laid out. And the acting is so dated. And Perry ALWAYS gets his courtroom confession. But he was a very handsome man.

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  5. I don't think I talked about it on my blog for a really long time in the hopes that it would magically disappear - ha!

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    1. Well, at first it was just in China, and we all thought it would be like SARS or MERS.

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  6. so is the guy in the tank shooting at coronavirus or shooting coronavirus?

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  7. Whenever I see cool street art and graffiti I think of you!

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  8. I think we were all a bit dismissive about this virus. I really thought it would be like Ebola and we would keep it away and under control. How wrong I was. Even when March rolled around and we were sent home to work from home, I still thought it would just be a matter of weeks.
    Which brings me to that last photo above. Oh how I wish we could blast the virus away just like that!

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    1. I remember saying in mid-March, when we got sent home indefinitely, that I thought the whole thing would be over in six weeks. Even at the time I knew that was optimistic, but I never expected it to drag on THIS long.

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  9. Sadly many people are still dismissive about the virus.

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    1. I think a lot of people just don't want to deal with it and go into denial.

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  10. I was just telling Carlos that a year ago we were both saying, 'Coronavirus? It's nothing. Two weeks and it's gone'

    And here we are,

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    1. Exactly! I thought the same thing -- that it would be a transient inconvenience.

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  11. There was a lot of being dismissive going around. "It's just a flu", "I'm so over it", ant etc. It's unfortunate that public health in the US was gutted over the years after Ebola. Things really did not have to be quite this awful. The Asian countries were much better equipped to handle this after they experienced SARS-CoV-1.

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    1. Trump's attitude toward science and public health definitely poisoned the US response. (For the record, though, I AM so over it! LOL)

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  12. We had so much disinformation here concerning the Coronavirus as you can tell by our 400,000+ deaths. It is still in a mess that hopefully our new president and his team can get under control.
    My dental hygienist who was cleaning my teeth this morning - said she is waiting on the vaccine to see how others react to it. Yikes! While she was cleaning my teeth!! Yikes! I encouraged her to get it... ?!?

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    1. I don't know why anyone would wait if they had the opportunity to get that shot. I'd get it today if it were offered to me.

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  13. Our snow (12 to 14 inches) is just beginning to melt. C'mon, sunshine! Salud! Or should it be Prost! Or perhaps Bottoms Up! Whatever, enjoy.

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    1. I guess it depends on which country you're in, right?!

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  14. At this point last year I thought COVID would turn out like SARS, no big deal really and contained to geographic areas.

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    1. Me too. I thought it would be contained and then dissipate.

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  15. I was dismissive, too, and thought my neighbor was crazy when I took a small gift to him and he wouldn't open his door. He understood what was happening far better than I did.

    Love,
    Janie

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    1. That must have been a bit later, though, right? Surely your neighbor wasn't that cautious way back in last January. We didn't even know it was in the states by then.

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    2. That's true. It was probably early March--whenever we got the first warnings about wearing masks and social distancing. I lose track of time easily.

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  16. having had AIDS take so many friends and loved ones, we took the corvid 19 virus very seriously from the get go. Better to be overly cautious, which we have been. virus's are like
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=box0-koAuIY&ab_channel=xLegend0fZeldax

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    1. It wasn't that I dismissed the seriousness of it, I just didn't think it would get here. I thought it would be like SARS and MERS, its closest cousins.

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  17. No one showed the slightest interest in commenting on the virus a year ago. At that time news was coming to us out of Wuhan but the virus hadn't arrived on our doorstep.
    How things have changed!
    Alphie

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