Tourists, 1918

At Multnomah Falls, Oregon.  Image credit to Shorpy, where the photo can be impressively magnified, via mudwerks.

Folk art scarecrow (1930s)

"built out of branches, fenceboards and furniture pulls."  Via Anonymous Works.

Jeff Bezos' office in 1997

In 1997... [Bezos] gave a little talk to some Harvard graduate business students about his online store known as Amazon.

As Brad Stone's book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon relates, the large-brained students began to chat among themselves as if Bezos weren't there.

Then, one of the fine Harvardians told Bezos: 

You seem like a really nice guy, so don't take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes & Noble and get out now.

Photo via Reddit.   I also use a door for a desk, though mine is propped up on file cabinets rather than legs.

Coronavirus curves in various countries

Lots more at The New York Times.

GOP senator shared coronavirus info with wealthy donors

North Carolina’s Republican Sen. Richard Burr had key information about the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) three weeks ago. This information was not shared with the general public or his broader constituents, however, and was only supplied to wealthy donors at a posh “luncheon” in Washington, D.C.

In a secret audio recording obtained by National Public Radio’s Washington Investigative Correspondent Tim Mak, Burr can be heard relaying information about the severity of the Coronavirus well before even the White House was coming clean about the potential pandemic and resulting panic.

Warning only North Carolina’s business elite, Burr said:

There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history. It’s probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.

The upper crust luncheon was organized by the Tar Heel Circle, a self-professed non-partisan organization of organized capital interests comprised of the corporate and business class—North Carolina’s owners, employers and political leadership.

More at Law and Crime.   Despicable.

Addendum from an article at The Daily Kos:

Now ProPublica is reporting that Burr engaged in a 29-transaction stock selling spree on Feb. 13, two weeks before even that private admission. The stocks Burr got rid of were worth between $0.5-1.5 million dollars, a significant percentage or possibly even a majority of his total net worth.

Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, is one of the "Gang of 8"—the eight lawmakers in the House and Senate briefed on the most sensitive government secrets. As such, Burr was likely privy to information about COVID-19 spread and preparedness efforts that even most lawmakers may not have been briefed on.

Addendum #2 from the NewYork Post:

A wealthy Georgia Senator is reportedly the second member of Congress to have dumped massive shares of stocks following a private, chamber-wide meeting on the new coronavirus.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), whose husband is the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, began selling off more than a million dollars in stocks on the same day as the closed-door Senate meeting on Friday, Jan. 24...

Even after allegedly dumping her holdings, Loeffler bashed Democrats for playing up the threats of the virus.

“Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness,” she tweeted in late February. “Here’s the truth: @realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.”

Scum.

Addendum #3:  AOC has called for the senator to resign.

"... culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that..."

While defending President Trump’s use of “the Chinese virus” to describe the novel coronavirus, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) blamed China on Wednesday for the disease and several other viral epidemics from the past two decades.

“China is to blame because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that,” Cornyn told reporters. “These viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people, and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS, the swine flu, and now the coronavirus.” 

Above (cropped for size): "Jackie Bibby a.k.a. “The Texas Snakeman,” holds in his mouth 10 western diamondback rattlesnakes for 12.5 seconds in 2006 to set a new Guinness World Record for Most Live Rattlesnakes Held In Mouth." via the Longville (Tx) Courier-Journal.

Below:  Screencap from video at Fox News showing a dead rattlesnake uncoiling on a Texas grill.

And I'm not going to get into the Appalachian snake-handling churches.

Addendum:  Found an instructional video on how to grill a rattlesnake.   This guy might be from Wisconsin. 

Coronavirus information from 2009

Part of a page in a college microbiology textbook from 2009.  Cropped at brightened from the original at the facepalm subreddit.

Excerpts from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"

The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".

It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence...

But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust...

When the eyes of the Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.

"Who dares,"—he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him—"who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!"..

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.  

Fulltext at Project Gutenberg.  Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, via Wikipedia.

Rainbow barf scarf

Credit, via.

Koala fingerprints resemble human fingerprints

“If you passed a chimpanzee print to a fingerprint office and said it came from the scene of a crime,” Haylock said, “they would not know it was not human.”..

As with the chimpanzees, koalas have fingerprints super similar to our own. The loops, the whorls, the fact that the patterns are completely unique to each individual koala ...

Maciej Henneberg, forensic scientist and biological anthropologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, has stated that these iconic creatures’ prints could also easily be mistaken for our own: “It appears that no one has bothered to study them in detail… although it is extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime, police should at least be aware of the possibility.”

Via Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Cybersecurity risks resulting from the coronavirus

I don't have a link for this, because it's from an interview I heard on Bloomberg with a former head of the Department of Homeland Security.  He noted that the risks for a conventional terrorist attack are now markedly decreased, because people are no longer gathering in stadiums, auditoriums, and conventions.

But the risk for a cyberattack have multiplied greatly.  More and more business is now being conducted online rather than face-to-face, and notably many businesses are asking their employees to work from home.  To the extent this working from home involves accessing business computers from home computers, it opens up many more potential ports of entry for hackers to access vital databases.  Obviously many home computers don't have firewalls in place that a business would have.

A quick search of the 'net this afternoon yielded one recent article in ZDNet: Roundup: Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic delivers array of cybersecurity challenges.  Lots of sublinks there.

There are zombies associated with the coronavirus pandemic

From an op-ed in the New York Times:

Though the Federal Reserve moved over the weekend to slash rates and buy treasuries, markets around the world fell on Monday anyway. The coronavirus threatens to set off financial contagion in a world economy with very different vulnerabilities than on the eve of the global financial crisis, 12 years ago.

In key ways the world is now as or more deeply in debt as it was when the last big crisis hit. But the largest and most risky pools of debt have shifted — from households and banks in the United States, which were restrained by regulators after the crisis, to corporations all over the world.

As businesses deal with the prospect of a sudden stop in their cash flows, the most exposed are a relatively new generation of companies that already struggle to pay their loans. This class includes the “zombies”— companies that earn too little even to make interest payments on their debt, and survive only by issuing new debt...

The easy money policies pursued by the Federal Reserve, and matched by central banks around the world, were designed to keep economies growing and to stimulate recovery from the crisis. Instead, much of that money went into the financial economy, including stocks, bonds and cheap credit to unprofitable companies.

As the economic expansion continued, year after year, lenders grew increasingly lax, extending cheap loans to companies with questionable finances. Today the global debt burden is again at an all-time high...

The level of debt in America’s corporate sector amounts to 75 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, breaking the previous record set in 2008. Among large American companies, debt burdens are precariously high in the auto, hospitality and transportation sectors — industries taking a direct hit from the coronavirus.

Hidden within the $16 trillion corporate debt market are many potential troublemakers, including the zombies. They are the natural spawn of a long period of record low interest rates, which has sent investors on a restless hunt for debt products that offer higher reward, with higher risk. Zombies now account for 16 percent of all the publicly traded companies in the United States, and more than 10 percent in Europe, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the bank for central banks. A look at the data reveals that zombies are especially prevalent in commodity industries like mining, coal and oil, which may spell upheavals to come for the shale oil industry, now a critical driver of the American economy.

More at the link, as always.

Interesting use of bronze

"[Romain] Langlois turned to bronze, a metal he now incorporates into works that are inspired by nature rather than man. His pieces visually pull apart the natural objects that surround us—building works that appear as bisected rocks, boulders, and tree trunks. These sculptures showcase glistening bronze protruding from their insides, unleashing the perceived inner energy of each object."

I'm not convinced that there is any "perceived inner energy," but his creations are quite visually striking. 

Summer camps for ventilator-assisted individuals

Ventilator-Asssisted Living is an online resource created and maintained by Post-Polio Health International.  The latest issue has a very useful reference list of camps for ventilator-assisted children for this coming summer of 2020.

Each summer, several camps across the country offer ventilator-assisted children a unique opportunity for fun and growth. These camps offer a wide variety of activities including swimming, sports, talent shows, arts and crafts and special events to entertain and educate campers. More importantly, these camps build confidence, foster independence and offer exciting, new experiences in a safe environment for children requiring ventilatory support. ​

The camps are often staffed by a volunteer force of professionals that include physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, physical and occupational therapists, and educators. They also provide extensive medical and pulmonary care. Some camps also draw their volunteers from among university students majoring in various health care fields. Camps often require physician clearance before a child can attend. ​

Many of the camps are free for attendees, while others offer assistance for those unable to afford them. Often the camps rely on grants and donations for funding. Nearly all of the camps’ websites offer a way to donate online if you wish to support them.

Besides giving kids the opportunity to experience new and exciting activities, these camps also help foster a sense of independence. For many first-time campers, it is their first experience away from home without their parents alongside. 

More at the link.

Also available from PPHI is a directory of funding resources for medical and adaptive equipment.

"This resource guide has been assembled to assist Americans with disabilities, particularly polio survivors with significant motor and breathing impairments, to find financial assistance for the costs of obtaining desired medical equipment and/or environmental adaptive modifications that are otherwise not affordable to them."

The directory lists national resources and (scroll down) state-by-state local resources.

Humor scrapbook, part V

This is the fifth of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially the case with humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (which may include material from the 1970s that would be "politically incorrect" nowadays).

The text on "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.