Teaching the unmasked

From a New York Times article about life in college, “‘An Emotional Hellscape’: Frayed Nerves for the Teachers of Unmasked Students”:

Irwin Bernstein, an 88-year-old psychology professor, said the University of Georgia had lured him out of retirement this fall. But when he posted a “No mask, No class” sign in his classroom, his department head told him to take it down “since I was in violation of the governor’s order.”

At his next class, a student resisted wearing a mask, saying it was uncomfortable, he recalled. He announced that he was retiring — again — and walked out of class.

Imagine having that moment be your last as a teacher.

The kind of selfishness that student showed is what we see around us in downstate Illinois every day, from all sorts of people. It’s what’s prompted a local bookstore owner to close and move his bookstore back to Chicago — he’s tired of arguing with people who refuse to wear masks in his store, even after he tells them that his children are too young to be vaccinated.

*

September 11: An article from The Red & Black (University of Georgia) has much more on Irwin Bernstein’s encounter with an unmasked student in his class. An excerpt:

The 88-year-old psychology professor explained to the student that he could die from COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and age-related problems, Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black.

Only about 15 minutes into the Tuesday lecture, which consisted of Bernstein taking the student attendance, he asked the student to pull her mask up again, but this time, the student did not respond.

Bernstein, who was already informed that two of his absent students tested positive for COVID-19, then announced his resignation on the spot and left the class immediately.

“At that point I said that whereas I had risked my life to defend my country while in the Air Force, I was not willing to risk my life to teach a class with an unmasked student during this Pandemic,” Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black. “I then resigned my retiree-rehire position.”

[Yes, there’s a mask mandate in Illinois. But the local response is to ignore it. I’ve rewritten a sentence to make clear that the selfishness here comes from all quarters.]

A Blogger warning

If you upload an image to Blogger, tinker with the code, delete </div>, but forget to delete <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">, your sidebar will end up where the body of your blog used to be and you’ll wonder what’s gone wrong.

The fix: proofread, and delete <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">. You may have to look through several posts to find your mistake.

Google makes so many unannounced changes to the Blogger platform that it’s easy to assume that any odd new problem is the company’s fault. But not always.

Why tinker with the code to begin with? To reduce the size of the big blank space Blogger adds above an image.

A related post
How to get clear images in Blogger

Michael K. Williams (1966–2021)

One of his roles: the trickster-god Omar Little on The Wire. The New York Times has an obituary.

An Omar-related post
The meaning of “rip and run”

Nancy Labor Day

In today’s Nancy, Olivia Jaimes follows Ernie Bushmiller’s practice of taking holidays off, or “off” (f’rinstance). Here’s April 5 for full context.

And other Jaimes Labor Days: 2020, 2019, and 2018 (“Sluggo is lit”).

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[Thomas Wimberly, Global Forefront — Thank You (2020). Via Amplifier. Click for a larger view.]

Starring Robert Mitchum

We were visiting Robert Mitchum in Los Angeles, courtesy of a friend in the industry. We met Mitchum in his apartment. It was an older Robert Mitchum that we met. He was sitting in a light-brown recliner. He was taciturn but not unfriendly.

He had no plans, nothing he had to do, so we took him out to lunch, perhaps to the now-defunct Clifton’s Cafeteria. We were seated with some other people at a long table. I was on the other side of the table from Mitchum, and at the greatest possible distance. It was impossible to ask him what Jane Greer was like when she was off camera.

Then he agreed to come back to our house, because he still had no plans, nothing he had to do. Did he want something to eat, to tide him over between lunch and dinner? Takeout Thai food?

I was about to ask him about Jane Greer when I woke up.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by “Anna Stiga” (“Stan Again,” Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor), is the fifth Stumper in a row, which makes me hope that the Stumper is back for keeps. “Anna Stiga” is a pseudonym that goes on easier Stumpers of the Newman’s creation, but I found this puzzle challenging — twenty-two minutes’ worth of challenging — with the top half relatively easy, the bottom half much tougher. The puzzle’s distinctive feature: top and bottom stacks of thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-letter answers.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, thirteen letters, “Mutable sci-fi skill.” The answer is a gerund. The answer makes 38-D, eight letters, “Prone to pallor, 1 Across, etc,” a bit tricky, for a reason I can reveal only in the comments.

1-D, six letters, “Really bad.” I’m a kid in Brooklyn again. This answer opened up much of the puzzle for me.

10-D, five letters, “Rapper named for his Florida capital home and his early hardships.” I wonder if he’s appeared in a puzzle before. (Yes, he has.)

16-A, fifteen letters, “Lingual clue for Sly’s surname.” My first thought was “Sly”? As in “Stone”? Surprising to see this answer in a puzzle.

40-A, eight letters, “Faux glow.” Faux indeed.

59-A, fifteen letters, “Family-friendly, furry friend.” I sometimes aspire to share their outlook on things.

64-A, thirteen letters, “Titular adventure of a ’68 film.” Notice: titular. This one threw me a bit.

My favorite clue in this puzzle, and what must be one of the great clues of all time: 23-D, seven letters, “Pink elephants, perhaps.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[Twenty-two minutes: As in “You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world,” the WINS-AM all-news mantra.]

Mess with Texas

From The Guardian:

Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes, and porn.

Last night the form for anonymous tips was down. This morning it’s back up.

There’s even an iOS shortcut (noted in the Guardian article) to mess with Texas by sending false tips en masse.

Local lunacy

A localite persists in adding COVID disinformation to the posts from our county health department. The department eventually removes her comments. But there they are, until they’re removed.

Her latest: coughing up mucus and taking cough medicine are defenses against COVID. You can cough in your backyard or in the shower, she explains. And she closes with what she must think is a witty turn: “Some of us refuse to live in fear. Pass me the Robitussin DM, please.”

If it doesn’t go without saying: she won’t get vaccinated.

A king on the bus

I was on a long-distance bus trip from ____ to ____. The bus was packed. I stood up to stretch in the aisle and saw the Imperial Margarine king several rows back. He too was standing up to stretch. The king was wearing a red-velvet crown and a dark T-shirt and slacks. He had two tiny scabs on the side of his nose, near his left eye. He looked like Norman Fell.

“You look just like the Imperial Margarine king,” I said. “Are you him?”

“Yes, I am.”

I asked him if I could take a picture. He nodded yes. But when I tried to use the camera on my phone, all I could see were maps of Bristol, England, and streaming video of soccer hooligans. No camera.

The bus stopped for a short break. The king walked across the street and through an open garage door into an enormous produce store. I waited beside the bus and tried restarting my phone. No improvement. I noticed my daughter standing nearby and asked if she had any idea what was wrong. No, she didn’t. I waited for the king’s return.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: thinking yesterday about Nabokov’s Pale Fire and its king or pseudo-king, and later making a U-turn in front of a huge garage door for a heating and air-conditioning company. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Norman Fell appeared in an Imperial commercial. But here’s one with Charles Kimbrough.]