Sunday, August 9, 2020

 

Quarantine Day 145.

Last night I went to bed at 10:45, got up once during the night, again at 5am, had a headache, got up at 7am and took an Excedrin, went back to bed, finally getting up at 8am.

Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning 2 and losing 2. My new rating is 1257. I was winning in one of my losses but again lost on time. In the other loss I thought I had a mate in 2 but I didn’t see his bishop and I ended up giving away one of my knights. I soon resigned.

Juan Castro mentioned that he solves puzzles on Chess.com, so I’ve started doing that also. He mentioned his rating is 3000. I started at 1400 and I’m now up to 1706.

 

Three months ago, the Republican governor of Missouri chose not to wear a mask in a shop, because he said he wasn’t going to let the government tell him what to do. Mike Parson visited a hardware store to celebrate its reopening after he lifted Missouri’s coronavirus lockdown over the objections of health professionals and mayors of major cities.

Parson said the worst of the pandemic was past and the economic impact of the shutdown was worse than the virus. As for masks, the governor dismissively claimed “there was a lot of information on both sides” over whether to wear one so he wasn’t going to require people to do so.

Three months later, Covid-19 is surging in Missouri and in many other parts of the midwest that imagined they had escaped the worst of the pandemic.

Health specialists predict a sharp increase in deaths across the region in the coming weeks that will be made significantly worse in some states by the politicians who followed Donald Trump’s lead in undermining medical advice and in questioning the value of masks.

Anthony Fauci, the president’s lead coronavirus expert, recently warned the midwest’s political leaders to follow the science.

“Some states are not doing that,” he said. “We would hope that they all now rethink what happens when you don’t adhere to that. We’ve seen it in plain sight in the southern states that surged.”

Coronavirus deaths in the midwest remain a fraction of the nearly 160,000 recorded during the pandemic across the US. But Missouri is second only to Oklahoma in the number of new positive tests for the virus over the past two weeks. The state has recorded more deaths than Japan and several European countries, and more new cases per day than Germany. Earlier this week, the White House coronavirus task force named Kansas City as a primary area of concern.

 

Today I beat Teresa in parcheesi 6 games to 2.

The guy selling obleas (“beer here”) comes by several times a day. I told Teresa I would pay for them if she would go down and get them. She did not accept my offer.

Teresa intends to get up early tomorrow and go to eps to find out why she hasn’t received an appointment for her injection.

 

The US has 4,932,093 ð 5,003,607 ð 5,052,168 coronavirus cases with 160,500+ ð 161,900+ ð 162,400+ deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 367,196 ð 376,870 ð 387,481 cases with 12,842 deaths.  Medellin has 25,991 ð 26,889 ð 27,883 cases, an increase of 993 from August 8^th to 9^th. Envigado has a total of 1,587 cases, an increase of 57 from August 8^th to 9^th. New cases are back on the rise.

 

Joke of the day

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" 

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
         
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. 
           
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
      
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his
hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."        

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. 
               
Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"       

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter.  This is a herd of sheep.

Now give me back my dog.