I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up:
- Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate.
- Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad."
- Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula "a cold region."
- Who's interviewing for Vice President?
- In my neighborhood, the Chamber of Commerce and friends want to rethink what our business district will look like in a year. And the Trib asks restaurants what they might look like.
- Elsewhere in Chicago, sex workers have had to change their business models as well.
- AVWeb reports that Air France will retire its A380 fleet this year, instead of in 2022.
- Climate change will make last week's Chicago-area floods more common.
- James Bennett II, writing in McSweeney's, asks: what does your favorite requiem mass say about you? ("Cats, man.")
Finally, author and Ohio resident John Scalzi sums up why he won't rush back to restaurants when they reopen in his state next week:
My plan is to stay home for most of June and let other people run around and see how that works out for them. The best-case scenario is that I’m being overly paranoid for an extra month, in which case we can all laugh about it afterward. The worst case scenario, of course, is death and pain and a lot of people with confused about why ventilator tubes are stuck down their throats, or the throats of their loved ones, when they were assured this was all a liberal hoax, and then all of us back in our houses until September. Once again, I would be delighted to be proved overly paranoid.
I have sympathy for the people who are all, the hell with this, I’ll risk getting sick, just let me out of my fucking apartment. I get where you’re coming from. You probably don’t actually know what you’re asking for. I hope that you never have to learn.
Note to Mr Scalzi: I hope to start The Last Emperox this week. I really do.