Big Boys

For all the times when Huck would pounce on Rannie, hoping she would play, and Bobbi and I would muse to each other that what Huck needed was a young and spry tom who was just eager to play all the time, Holden's arrival has taken some getting used to.

I'll be sitting here at my desk in the office and hearing the thumps and bangs of two big tomcats rasslin' around in the hallway...

...and when I stand up with a spray bottle in my hand and lean into the hall to see what's up and what sort of fight might need breaking up, the two of them will stop what they're doing, perk up, and stare right toward the spray bottle nozzle inquisitively.

It's very much a "What?!? We were just rasslin' around out here!" reaction.
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Emergency Meme Resupply

This is obviously a joke. In real life you'd use OC and not Mace.

Zero Thought, Zero Logic...

The bobbies in some UK jurisdictions are getting way overzealous in their enforcement efforts...

Overnight 6 people have been summonsed for offences relating to the new corona virus legislation to protect the public:

These included;

Out for a drive due to boredom

Returning from parties

Multiple people from the same household going to the shops for non-essential items pic.twitter.com/FstjlfdEkD

— Warrington Police (@PoliceWarr) March 29, 2020

"In North Yorkshire, police published a photo showing a group of officers stopping a car. "This driver was making an essential journey, unfortunately others are not," they wrote."

Stop Checks at Catterick.
This driver was making an essential journey, unfortunately others are not. GOING FOR A 'RIDE OUT' IS NOT AN ESSENTIAL JOURNEY.@NYorksPolice @richmond_today @CatterickGSM @The_Black_Rats @1RegtRMP pic.twitter.com/zYCcBoHta4

— NYP Catterick Police (@NYPCatterickSNT) March 30, 2020

Did you catch that? Some dude is "out for a drive due to boredom" there in Warrington and the po-po disapprove.

Suppose I'm in living in Warrington (because, I don't know, I've taken complete leave of my senses and moved to England) and I decided to take the Mustang for a spin due to boredom.

Gratuitous Mustang picture to debug a Facebook image grab issue.

Assuming I remembered to drive on the wrong side of the road like they do over there, how many people would I come in contact with...within the magic six feet of... if I drove a twenty mile loop out from the house and back with no stops? Absolutely zero.

There would be zero chance of me picking up anyone else's germs, or giving anyone mine...unless I got pulled over by a platoonlet of snooping coppers who insisted on getting all up in my grille.
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Information Overload

First, a couple pics.

Actually, I'm doing better today than yesterday, and better yesterday than the day before. This is where adopting a bit of Stoicism comes in handy. Stoicism isn't "don't care about things" or "don't have feelings"; it's about understanding which things you have control over, and controlling those things, and then just letting go of concern over the rest.

There's a lot of stuff going on right now that's outside of your control. Whether it's pandemic stuff or the associated legal or economic stuff, there's bad news aplenty to keep you busy reading all day. You can sit and press F5 on the CDC or DJIA  or $NEWS_SITE and get more info in real time all day while you're sitting at home. Right or Left, TV or Internet, news and editorial sites are a seething roil of panic and/or outrage, bad news and anger.

Here's some advice from a friend, dispensed in an online discussion sparked by that first image up top.

"So I’m spending half my time working right now reassuring people that a lot of what they are experiencing is totally normal. Anxiety prone people are biologically predisposed to be much more attentive to stimuli they find threatening and it feels superficially empowering to compulsively engage information about this crisis. 

But obviously it ultimately just exacerbates the anxiety and distress and then it’s this vicious loop of thinking more information is the answer.  

The information is all the same. You can learn everything you need to know with about ten minutes of reading per day. Everything else is just media doing the media thing. 

Also, the stress is just a background radiation right now so even if you aren’t dwelling on it, you experience it bodily through increased fatigue, restlessness, issues with concentration and short term memory, joint and muscle pain.  

I’m mostly telling my patients to be mindful of the line between being informed and just indulging a compulsion and to try listening to what their body is trying to tell them. Get plenty of rest. Move around. Get fresh air and sunlight. And find things that get you out of your head for a while. And navigating the stress of this while taking on the stress of hundreds of others is exactly as much fun as it sounds." -Michael Tichy, CNP

Ride your bike, play a game, read a book, binge watch that series you've been meaning to catch up on. But don't alternate hitting refresh on some news site or social media page and seething in the comments sections. Take care of yourself and yours and chill.
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L.A. County Blinks

After the California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation, National Rifle Association, and Firearms Policy Coalition turned the sky over California legal pad yellow late last week, it seems that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has revised their opinion of the vitality of firearms businesses...

QotD: CoronaTiger Edition

From Jon Hauptman on Facebook:

"Y’know, we look at Chinese wet markets and wonder when the next insane disease is going to jump from animals to humans.

And then you realize that some unsupervised speed freak is feeding diseased cow remains to inbred tigers in Oklahoma, as fast as they can shovel the meat into the cage."

Tiger King on Netflix has been the most amazing train wreck to watch during these trying times. Every time you think it can't get weirder or more awful, it does.
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From a conversation elsewhere...

A friend was trying to puzzle out the manufacturer of a (probably Wish.com-sourced) compact light/laser combo in a picture. Having time on my hands, I tried to help...

"I actually went and poked around on eBay, which means that now my search algorithms are all jacked up and it's gonna start emailing me "Hey, we noticed you like meme-tier garbage light/laser combos, so you might be interested in...""

That could have been sporty...

While the media made it sound like all the places in which we were sheltering were going to be sucked up into the clouds by tornadoes, this seems to not have happened.

Round One in the early afternoon missed us entirely, passing by to the north. Round Two, 'round midnight, was noisy but lacking in tornadoes or hail.
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Meanwhile, in California...

Frickin' everybody...(CGF, NRA, SAF, FPC, and a partridge in a pear tree)...have filed suit against California for essentially cutting residents off from their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms by closing gun stores as nonessential.
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Ancient Weapons

A grad student who specialized in Bronze Age weaponry made a pretty cool discovery in a monastery's museum...

"During a guided tour of the monastery's museum, in the last display case before the exit, something caught Dall'Armellina's attention: a metal sword, about 17 inches long, resembling those she came across in her studies as a Bronze Age weaponry specialist."

Like many swords of that vintage, it's a size we'd consider a largish dagger. You can find a guy in Britain making replicas of these weapons on this page. Every now and again I get tempted to buy one of those "carp's tongue" ones, or maybe one of the ones with the "antenna" hilt...
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Spooky!

A pretty cool bit of spooky science fiction writing right here, if you need some reading to occupy the time while sitting at home.
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Feline Update...

The catlock between the front and back halves of the house has been open all day.

Huck and Holden seem to be fairly amiable toward each other. There's have been a couple of minor, brief slap fights but judging from the sound effects and body language, it was more just play and sizing each other up than anything else.

And so far nobody has found it necessary to pee on anything, so that's good.
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Just another day at the office. Literally.

I'm a self-unemployed freelance writer. What these people are calling "quarantine", I call "Tuesday".

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 26, 2020

Planning ahead...

A friend wrote this in a discussion elsewhere:

"I'm thinking if I were told to stay home, and not go to work, and not make any money because I was in a job where I couldn't work from home, and the local grocery store, while hiring extra people, only managed to snap up eight of the available 150 applicants...and the federal government got back to me with preliminary news that support would be arriving sometime in May, in the form of a $1,200 check, and rent was due April 1st, and delivery food was due about now, and I were living paycheck to paycheck...and the cops weren't responding to any calls without gunfire in the background.

Well, wouldn't I be likely planning some crimes right about now, just from a statistical likelihood?

Not a political post, I don't want to talk about the corporate bailout, or who's obstructing who in the House or Senate. I just want to know when the hungry people are going to start radiating outward from their points of origin. You can't tell a hundred million people to stay home and order pizza for lunch, and then act surprised when they run out of pizza money..."

I know that for most of my twenties, when I was living paycheck to paycheck and didn't even have a debit card or a bank account to attach it to, nor any really valuable personal possessions to sell for cash, I would have been pretty well boned inside a week of this.

People are edgy now. Imagine when NYC hospitals, which are still on a rising curve of this, are having to use the temporary morgues in the parking lot.

The Cincinnati PD notice posted here seems typical of what most departments are doing right now. Basically, they're not even going to send out an officer to take a report of an assault or a B&E.

Pay attention when you're out and about, and for heaven's sake, if you don't keep your doors locked, get in the habit.
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