“Please Watch Out for Each Other”
“‘Love everyone and forgive everyone, including yourself.’
Jim Henson touched us all. Whether it was Sesame Street, The Muppets, or some of his later work, Jim Henson had a place in almost everyone’s childhood. Yet he influenced an entire generation of creators too. That’s why, in 1990, after Henson met his end, Disney honored Jim Henson with this cartoon. It was sent directly to his former company.'”
“Known for always wanting to have fun, Jim Henson had strict requirements for his funeral. Among them, no one was to wear black. The service also featured a song medley performed by Big Bird.
The untimely death of Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, from pneumonia in May 1990 at the age of 53 may have shocked many Americans who believed that bacterial infections no longer could kill with such swiftness.”
Good things do not last forever.
Mask up, maintain distance, stay out of crowds, and be safe. Covid can still kill or cause serious damage. Be safe . . .
hi, run
thanks for the reminder.
but what do i do about this?:
my county has a mask mandate. my grocery store has big signs “masks required.”
peole in the store are not wearing masks. and some of those who are don’t cover their noses…something they may have learned from watching our Senators.
now i find myself in the grocery store in a slow moving checkout line with people crowded right up against me not wearing masks.
my desire is to be a Karen and say something rude.
but i figure punching them in the nose might be more dangerous than just making sure my mask is tight and waiting quietly for my turn…to get Covid?
meanwhile the mother truckers in canada are demanding their freedom to not wear masks at work or in other large gatherings.
i can understand fear of vaccination. but freedom to cough on other people during a pandemic tells me more than i want to know about mah fellow ammuricans.
Coberly
There never was a freedom to cough on other people even if it was just a cold. People were urged to stay home and get better. Even if they could not, simple things such as covering mouth when coughing with a hand or better yet with the inside of an elbow.
What people appear to forget is their rights to do as they please shall not impinge upon the rights of others. This not only goes with the direct interfacing with people; it also applies to property rights, driving a vehicle, smoking, etc. Ones rights have limitations.
Sometimes, you may have to set the example.
I am an older white-haired male who gets little respect other than for a limited degree of intellect. You have a space around you to which people should not intrude. I get uncomfortable when people get too close, it is intimidation. I will look at them and politely ask for some space. Most oblige. I have not had resistance to a request.
So long as cloth and “procedure” masks are allowed, I think you should baseline the idea that your county does not really have a mask mandate. The maskless, in a sense, are less of a problem as they attract attention to the risk they may represent. Those masked with the above mentioned products carry very similar risk, yet it is natural not to think about it as such.
Eric
“baseline” as a verb is new to me. what do you mean? my county does have a mask mandate. i was thinking that “caring for each other” has ceased to be an honored virtue in this country. people demand their “freedom,” to hell with what anyone else thinks.
and it works from left to right as well as from right to left. there is no sense of proportion: everyone shouts “your fist my nose” at each other without regard to the relative size of the “freedoms” demanded.
Baseline just means that you might usefully think about your county as not having a mask mandate if ineffective masks satisfy the requirements. In my view you end up with a population of people without effective masking that is divided up pointlessly into compliant and non-compliant groups. So, I do think there is a good freedom argument that an authority that is okay with a mask that is functionally the same risk as being maskless but places some penalty (possibly never enforced) on an individual in the same risk category simply for not wearing an ineffective mask is an abusive authority. Millions of wearers of cloth masks have no idea how ineffective these are against a truly aerosol dispersed pathogen. There is little reason to think they will or even ought to dive into the evidence supporting this. But public health officials know it. I think they reasonably foresee that the conflict over mandating only effective masks would be far higher than the conflict over accepting any mask as being compliant. But it is cowardly since the mandate becomes an act of theater much more than a public health measure. Comments like “caring for each other” and “your fist, my nose” are part of the theater in that the current mandates allow for gross shortcomings and yet are satisfied. Cloth masks are not part of caring for each other and are just as much a fist to the nose as being maskless. The trend dropping them across the nation is a realization by officials that masking – as practiced – did not give good enough results to continue and mandating something much more likely to be effective would be too conflictive.
Eric
thanks for explaining that.
still, wearing masks that you think are effective is different from refusing to wear masks at all. despite the law. it shows extreme indifference, if not contempt, for what other people think. or value.
even if those other people were wrong about masks (they are not) their concern for their own safety deserves respect.
but no, “freedom”only means freedom for me. free to be meee! fredom to do any damn thing I want and to hell with you.
that’s where the nose punching starts.
when people sneezed or coughed on me at work long before there was covid, i didn’t say anything. too well brought up myself. i attributed it to their ignorance and not being well brought up.
anti masking today is a whole ‘nother problem.
Eric:
All masks are effective to some degree. Your argument is cloth masks are not effective and this is not true. Cloth masks are not as effective as a level one mask or the ultimate level three mask which are now readily available for a reasonable cost.
If you are promoting not wearing a mask at all because you can not get a level three mask. That is wrong headed.
“They found that the effectiveness of the masks varied widely: a three-layer knitted cotton mask blocked an average of 26.5 percent of particles in the chamber, while a washed, two-layer woven nylon mask with a filter insert and metal nose bridge blocked 79 percent of particles on average. Other masks scored somewhere in between.”
EPA Researchers Test Effectiveness of Face Masks, Disinfection Methods Against COVID-19
Run
I did not get into that because I don’t know enough, and it wasn’t my point anyway.
Also i did not read Eric close enough to unerstand that might be what he was saying: but it’s there, maybe: “it’s an abusive authority”…if it lets ineffective masks count while punishing no-mask. “therefore,” is he saying, “it’s okay to ignore the authority”?
my answer would be no, for the same reasons I gave above.
i think the good masks may be less effective than the data above suggests: they are hard to fit properly and uncomfortable enough that i suspect most people don’t bother to fit them carefully. in any case i think (no expert here) that ppm may only be suggestive of how effective they might be. stopping the fat drops might be more important than stopping the fine, and “some” level of protection may be enough to stay below whatever threshhold of number of virus particles (per day?) it takes to get past first level of body’s immune response.
like i say, i don’t know, but i think that respecting other people’s fears is more important than demanding your own “freedom”….that is, more important in disease prevention, if not more important for your soul… and you have a soul whatever you believe about religion. it’s an invisible and weightless organ that has something to do with your personal sanity and the kind of society you would want to live in if you knew anything.
[“you” here is not Run, but “you, me, and everyone,” y’all,]
Always be grateful to Henson for changing my daughters musical tastes. This got them to like Motown, and I parlayed that to get them to like the blues which is still ongoing.
EM
oh, absolutely.
Frank Oz lives – at 77 YO.