We had a dear family friend who always slightly messed up his recipes so that they wouldn't come out quite as good when you made them. Jim died of AIDS just months after the first protease inhibitors became available. I miss him, and his cooking, still.
Another Jim story--my mother once found out that his "secret" for making these great pork pies was to order them from Myers of Keswick. My mother had begged like four terrible recipes from him over the years. Watching the triumph and rage war on her face was absolutely delicious.
(These days, you'd think "Of course, Myers of Keswick", but it wasn't particularly well known back then, and I have the idea that it had just opened.)
My own family story is that no one ever got my Great Grandmother's recipe for suet pudding. She wasn't secretive about it. Just no one thought to ask, and it died with her. We've been trying to reproduce it ever since.
I have never experienced Great Grandmother Taylor's suet pudding, but I have googled up many recipes for my Mom over the years, none of which, apparently, could touch Great Grandma's.
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I sort of think that people still have a fundamentally cinematic view of pandemics--it is either the Walking Dead, or everything is basically fine. And on the health care side, they imagine labor shortages can be solved with a fundamentally 19th c surge of unskilled "nurses".
Giving a severely ill covid patient anything other than palliative care is a skilled endeavor--there's a lot of technology, including stuff you really, really need to get right like medication dosage and ventilator settings. This isn't Scarlett O'Hara mopping brows.
You don't acquire that kind of knowledge in a four-hour orientation, even if overworked and exhausted staff had time to give it. So to a first approximation, we're going into the second wave with the same amount of staff we had in the first.
Seeing a lot of this circulating on the right, so let me explain why folks are worried even though it is not literally true that every ICU bed in the country is occupied at the moment.
#1, the big worry is ICU space, not hospital beds, and as you can see from this very thread, ICU utilization is running well above hospital utilization generally.
#2 The constraint on ICUs isn't beds, it's staff. ICU beds are (relatively) easy to build. They're not much good if the only people you have to staff them are the cafeteria workers.
I'm back to writing almost exclusively about the pandemic, often with no very obvious political valence--how to think about testing, what sorts of things might change as a result.
One thing I've noticed is that many readers get really angry when I *don't* make it political.
It's like they cannot conceive of ever wanting to write about the pandemic through any other lens except Donald Trump's failures (Which are many! I have written about them!) They interpret any attempt to speak about anything else as some sort of crude attempt to evade The Truth.
The last nine months should have demonstrated that there's a lot of ruin left in our nation. If China cut off our supply, electronics would be scarce and expensive for a while, and then we'd build chip fabs here. We would not turn into Argentina.
There are plenty of ways America could enter permanent decline. "Can't figure out how to domestically manufacture semiconductors" seems very unlikely to be among them.
To expand on this thought: this is kind of a variant on what that Japanese managed in WWII, getting their hands on pretty much the entire global rubber supply. (Fun fact: we rationed gasoline less because it was scarce than because TIRES were scarce & rationing gas reduced wear)
I didn't like Hillbilly Elegy, the Movie nearly as much as the book. However: I watched it right after Queen's Gambit. And while QG is objectively better written/styled, I found myself thinking about it a lot, while QG dissolved like the cotton candy it is.
I've been wondering why that is. Part of it, undoubtedly, is that HE had the same struggle as all memoirs: real lives don't have clear plots. (Or rather they have too much; Howard struggled to pick out one clean thread.) But the people felt real, particularly Close/Adams.
QG, by contrast, was a superficial gloss that scrubbed away all the actual deep struggles of being neuroatypical and turned the protagonist into a too-pretty Mary Sue whom everyone leaps to help despite the fact that she's kind of miserable to be around.
Confronted with the past remarks of Clinton and Abrams, large portions of lefty twitter have started insisted that Trump's major violation is the lawsuit--which is the most normal, acceptable thing he is doing. It's his extrajudicial activities that are unprecedented and horrific
The problem is not that Trump is going to court. The problem is that he is stating, as a fact, that a vast electoral fraud occurred in order to avoid admitting he lost the election by the rules then in place for holding the election.
(And also that this vast electoral fraud did not occur, or if we want to go all "You can't prove a negative", that he has offered no good evidence it did.)
The duty to concede is separate from the structure of the system, in a way too few people seem to be appreciating.