Rural hospitals and COVID-19

I was startled to see a doctor from a local hospital on MSNBC’s The Week with Joshua Johnson. Jeremy Topin, MD, is respectful of local reality at every turn, but you can sense his exasperation about life here in COVID times.

The most recent ICU numbers at this hospital, from The New York Times: 93% occupied, with 29 COVID patients and one available bed.

A Douglas Ewart exhibition

Good news from Chicago:

Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) is pleased to present a retrospective of the virtuosic artist and educator Douglas R. Ewart, alongside Ewart’s recent large-scale audio-visual work Songs and Stories for a New Path and Paradigm, created in collaboration with NOW Society of Vancouver and 36 artists from across the globe.

The exhibition runs through December 11, with concerts scheduled for mid-October. Here’s more information.

Related reading
All OCA Douglas Ewart posts

Performative again

Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to a short commentary on the word performative. The commentary is crotchety and overwrought, with talk of corruption and senseless violence and infestations of body lice. I’m not linking.

It so happens that I wrote what seems to me a far clearer, more helpful, and less wrought commentary on performative back in March. That commentary I’ll link to: here it is. I’d say I got there first.

What, no candy?

I was so struck by the story of an eighty-eight-year-old professor’s encounter with a student who would not wear a mask that I missed this choice bit in The New York Times about “tangible inducements” to get college students to wear masks in class:

The University of Texas at Austin told professors that they could offer nonacademic rewards, like cookies, to cajole students to wear masks. (A university spokeswoman, Eliska Padilla, said this was informal, not an incentive program.)

Good thing UT Austin has administrators to clarify these points for the public.

A related post
On games and candy in the college classroom

Recently updated

Hi and Lois watch Now with no Odie.

Recently updated

Teaching the unmasked More on an eighty-eight-year-old professor’s last day in a classroom.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is yet another week’s worth of evidence, the sixth, that the Stumper is back. It’s a good puzzle, filled with smart clues and novel answers. The clue that somehow, I don’t know how, opened up the puzzle for me: 62-A, ten letters, “International Emmy category.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

13-A, ten letters, “Fancy low-level furnishing.” I was wondering if it had something to do with a conversation pit. But of course not.

21-D, four letters, “Audio equipment.” GEAR?

22-A, three letters, “British Columbia’s 1000-year-old Big Lonely Doug.” The answer is guessable, but the clue adds value.

23-A, seven letters, “Secured a bill, perhaps.” Clever.

33-D, four letters, “Like some stand-out characters.” The clue works in a couple of ways.

42-A, nine letters, “Sent sideways.” I was thinking boxing, or something to do with pool. No.

53-D, four letters, “Enhance unnecessarily.” Like, how often do we see this word?

55-D, four letters, “Suited to following.” Pretty Stumpery.

59-A, ten letters, “Very early arthropods.” I don’t know what arthropods are, but I know my Clark Coolidge.

And my favorite: 10-D, eleven letters, “Group hitting the bottom of the barrel.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Heron

[Photograph by me. Click for a larger heron.]

The nearest faraway place for our household right now is a trail around a lake.

Please consider this photograph a brief respite from the day.

A passion for ancient edifices

. . . and another for Henry Tilney.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

Related reading
All OCA Jane Austen posts (Pinboard)

“Cold ellipses”

[“Totally Elliptical.” Zippy, September 10, 2021.]

“ . . . I feel oddly hesitant for some reason . . .,” says Zippy.

Here’s my favorite way to make an ellipsis in HTML. And here’s my favorite use of the ellipsis in literature. I have nothing to say about Dippin’ Dots save that I have never understood their appeal.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)