Movie theater in Minneapolis

Via.

Sweet

Recognize this crystal?  (answer in the comments). 

Image cropped for size from the original at the mildlyinteresting subreddit.

Her name is Campanula

In the movie Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the character voiced by Helena Bonham-Carter is Campanula, which raised the question of how many other names are derived from flowers.

Apparently there are hundreds of them.  It's a broadly cross-cultural phenomenon.  Mostly for girls (Heather, Iris, Olive, Violet, Rose, Lily, Daisy ...), apparently few for boys.  I found a list for dogs (presumably female dogs), some unusual ones (Anemone - really??), and even baby names inspired by food (Kobe, Barack, Katniss, Colby, Brie, Ginger and various herbs and spices).

Image via.

The city of Manila, before and after quarantine

The comment thread at the mildlyinteresting subreddit indicates similar observations coming from California, India, Jakarta...

Reminds me of when I drove from Wisconsin to Ohio after 9/11 and saw no contrails in the sky.

If you have anosmia, isolate yourself immediately

A mother who was infected with the coronavirus couldn’t smell her baby’s full diaper. Cooks who can usually name every spice in a restaurant dish can’t smell curry or garlic, and food tastes bland. Others say they can’t pick up the sweet scent of shampoo or the foul odor of kitty litter.

Anosmia, the loss of sense of smell, and ageusia, an accompanying diminished sense of taste, have emerged as peculiar telltale signs of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and possible markers of infection.

On Friday, British ear, nose and throat doctors, citing reports from colleagues around the world, called on adults who lose their senses of smell to isolate themselves for seven days, even if they have no other symptoms, to slow the disease’s spread. The published data is limited, but doctors are concerned enough to raise warnings.

“We really want to raise awareness that this is a sign of infection and that anyone who develops loss of sense of smell should self-isolate,” Prof. Claire Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, wrote in an email. “It could contribute to slowing transmission and save lives.”

Full article at The New York Times.

The Idol stone

One of the amazing rock formations at Brimham Rocks.  Good thing it's not in the United States, because some Yahoo would have tipped it over by now.

Coronavirus in blue states and in red states

It has been interesting to me to note how the epicenters of the coronavirus epidemic have centered on what have traditionally been "blue states" (Washington, New York, California), for epidemiologic rather than political reasons.  Some have argued that the response (or non-response) of American politicians has been in part governed by that distribution.

Today an article at Bloomberg discusses Las Vegas and Orlando as targets for the economic devastation that the virus will bring - for obvious economic reasons.

The Great Coronavirus Shutdown of 2020 is hammering lots of industries, but leisure and hospitality is probably the hardest hit. This is a big deal because (until a week or so ago, at least), restaurants, bars, hotels, casinos, theaters, museums, gyms, sports teams and the rest employed 16.9 million people, or 11% of the U.S. nonfarm payroll workforce, up from 9% in 2000 and 7.4% in 1980. That’s more than manufacturing, construction and even health care (albeit just barely on that last one, and probably not for long).

They then present a national map showing the dependence of each state on leisure and travel industry:

Red states dominate the distribution.  Here's a county-by-county breakdown:

It will be interesting to see how the economic and political response to this pandemic plays out.

How American healthcare became tethered to employment

I found the answer at a Marketplace article:

“You’re coming out of the Depression and all of a sudden hiring ramps up,” said Sherry Glied, professor of public service at New York University. So many men are abroad that businesses are desperate for employees that “wages start to climb and prices start to climb. We start to see major inflation happening in the U.S. economy,” Glied said.

“We shall be compelled to stop workers from moving from one war job to another as a matter of personal preference; to stop employers from stealing labor from each other,” Roosevelt said.

That year, the National War Labor Board forbade employers from raising their workers’ salaries — a wage cap. If our employer-sponsored insurance system has an origin story, it is this.

Beyond the wage cap, the labor board also ruled health insurance was exempt from the cap, so employers began to dangle health insurance as a benefit to attract the best and brightest.

The cherry on top: The IRS decided employer contributions to health insurance premiums were tax free, which meant workers paid less out of their pocket.

By 1952, just a decade after Roosevelt’s fireside chat, the economy hummed along.

People wanted new Fords, the best medical care and shiny everything. Private employer-sponsored health insurance exploded.

“How many people have this important private health insurance? Only 8 million people in 1939. But in 1952, 92 million,” Oveta Culp Hobby said in a speech in the mid-1950s. Culp Hobby was President Dwight Eisenhower’s health secretary and just the second woman to hold a presidential cabinet post.

She pitched Eisenhower’s plan to provide national insurance to the 63 million uninsured Americans who lacked coverage either because they were too old, worked for employers who didn’t provide insurance or were out of work.

It was the third pass at getting some kind of national health plan in place since the end of the war and join most other Western nations in providing coverage for all.

Melissa Thomasson, a Miami University professor of economics, said each time there’s a push to expand coverage, doctors — through their lobbying group, the American Medical Association — launch scorched-earth campaigns. “Doctors have always worried that it would limit their ability to charge patients what they wanted,” she said. Physicians “say if health insurance is nationalized, it’s likely that government won’t stop there. They’ll start nationalizing other industries, too. So they use the fear factor to kill it,” Thomasson said.

That largely ended any serious attempt at national insurance. The employer-sponsored insurance became king.

With massive unemployment on the near-term horizon, revision of health care financing is going to rocket to the top of the public's concerns.

Tidbits from "The Thin Man"

While sheltering in place yesterday I watched a classic movie - The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.   I was startled when Nick Charles spoke the above line, pronouncing the final word "susPECTS" (enPR: səs.pĕktʹ, IPA(key): /səsˈpɛkt/).  Then in the next frame, Myrna Loy responds the same way:

She also pronounced it "susPECTS," which to the modern ear sounds like a verb.  I'm obviously not the first person to have noticed this.  After some Googling I found a book passage that said "In 1934, however, suspect had yet to fully make the transition from being only a verb... to having a noun form...", suggesting that Nick and Nora's pronunciation was standard at the time.  Perhaps some reader at home will have time to dive into the OED or some old pronunciation guides.

The other curious item was an apparently nonsensical phrase in the final scene of the movie.  As the offering of a box of chocolates was being politely declined, Nick Charles exclaims "Not a hip in a carload!" and the others laugh.  I found the explanation in a Turner Classic Movies discussion thread:

One that I did catch was the "Not a hip in a carload" comment made by William Powell (to some women worried that they would gain weight if they ate from a box of chocolates) in one of the Thin Man movies. He was referring to a popular cigarette advertisement of the time in which a railroad car packed with cartons of cigarettes was captioned "Not a cough in a carload" (to indicate how smooth and healthful the cigarettes were).

Here's one version of that ad:

A 2013 article in the Scottish Daily Mail commented on a similar phrase in Laurel and Hardy movies - "not a laugh in a carload" and "not a chirp in a carload."

You learn something every day.

Addendum:  Found this observation re Myrna Loy's striking outfits in the movie -

Myrna’s wardrobe is fabulous in my opinion and I am surprised that it has been so overlooked over time, just as the work of the designer responsible for it, Dolly Tree: England’s leading stage designer during the ’20s, the first woman to design for the Folies Bergere and one of Hollywood’s major screen designers. And she was one of the first designers to promote the strapless evening gown.

One interesting difference between COVID-19 and the Black Death

Informed opinion from a history professor at Boston University:

More importantly, while it was a tragic loss of life, the economic effects of the Black Death had overall positive effects for the surviving wage-laborers of medieval Europe. With a smaller population, there was more land, and more food, to go around. More importantly, landowners still needed the grain on which their wealth was based harvested. With less of a labor supply, wage-laborers were able to demand higher prices than ever before. Before the Black Death, a skilled laborer in England could earn three pence per day. Afterwards, he could earn four—adding up to about three pounds a year more total income, accounting for holidays and idle times. The result was a sort of  “golden age” for wage laborers, more prosperity, and more class mobility. Additionally, some historians argue it caused the rise of modern capitalism as the nobility, caught in a pincers between falling grain prices and rising labor costs and seeking a stable income, rented out their properties, allowing the social rise of prosperous non-nobles who invested in agricultural land and proto-industrial infrastructure such as mills.

The coronavirus will have the opposite effect in our late-capitalist economy. With stock prices plummeting, corporations will be under pressure to maintain shareholder value. The easiest way to do this is to reduce payroll. Moreover, with investors withdrawing their credit from the marketplace, companies will stop expanding their operations, further reducing the demand for labor. The “nonessential” workers told to stay home in case of “quarantine in place” also tend to be the most vulnerable; moreover, they are the least likely to have the resources to stockpile necessities. With an uncertain economic future, consumer spending, the driving engine of our economy, will fall, continuing the spiral into recession. For instance, home values will plummet, reducing investment in that major economic sector and affecting whole industries. The net result of the “market correction” will be a fall in wages, economic uncertainty, and the widening of the divide between the rich and the rest of us.

Aggressive dog breeds

Chuckleworthy.  Credit to Hayley Cakes and Cookies.

Delilah didn't cut Samson's hair

I misremembered my Bible history - and so have many artists and film directors.  The actual cutter of the hair was an unnamed Philistine man (‘And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.’) (Judges 16:19). 

Image of Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature via.

What if coronavirus cripples the government ?

It could happen.  It has already infected its first senator (Rand Paul).  Newsweek explains what contingency arrangements are possible:

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of "continuity of government" plans that include evacuating Washington and "devolving" leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations.

But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated -- including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages -- are forcing planners to look at what are called "extraordinary circumstances".

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans – codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac – are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, "devolution" could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America...

When might the military's "emergency authority" be needed? Traditionally, it's thought of after a nuclear device goes off in an American city. But now, planners are looking at military response to urban violence as people seek protection and fight over food. And, according to one senior officer, in the contingency of the complete evacuation of Washington.

Under Defense department regulations, military commanders are authorized to take action on their own – in extraordinary circumstances – where "duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation." The conditions include "large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances" involving "significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property." The Joint Chiefs of Staff codified these rules in October 2018, reminding commanders that they could decide, on their own authority, to "engage temporarily" in military control in circumstances "where prior authorization by the President is impossible" or where local authorities "are unable to control the situation." A new Trump-era Pentagon directive calls it "extreme situations." In all cases, even where a military commander declares martial law, the directives say that civil rule has to be restored as soon as possible.

"In scenarios where one city or one region is devastated, that's a pretty straightforward process," the military planner told me. "But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we're in territory we've never been in before."

More at the link.

Reconsidering "unskilled workers"

Via her Twitter thread.

The history of country music, as told by Ken Burns and Peter Coyote

YouTube link.

I've been binge-watching this seven-part series recently.  The programs ran on PBS last year, but are available as a download or as DVDs from libraries.  I think it's well worth the time to watch, even if you don't think you like country music, just for learning the history of the genre.