For the second time in three months, I missed writing something here yesterday. Just bone laziness.
It's certainly not that the plague years have ended. There was a story in Saturday's Globe about a study that showed one shot of the Pfizer vaccine definitely doesn't protect you against some of the new variants.
You begin to wonder, will it ever end?
We're still supposed to have our second jab by end of July and the prospects seem good that it will happen no later than that - and possibly earlier. A story in today's papers says Ontario has now given at least one dose to - I think it said - 41% of eligible people before the deadline the government had set for reaching that milestone.
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Meanwhile, Karen and I are watching a plague story on Netflix - The Rain, a Danish production. One thing the protagonists are discovering is that the much-worse virus they're having to deal with - which initially infects people when they're touched by contaminated rain water - is a constantly-mutating moving target.
It's a good series. The characters and actors are all fairly young. It's a bit like The 100, another sci-fi post-apocalypse story, in that respect. I'd recommend it - The Rain -except to people who just can't take anything more about mutating killer viruses. Which might, understandably, be almost everyone at this point.
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Ran this morning. I'm not used to running in warm weather (18C or 19C when I went out.) It really took it out of me.
It's the late 1870s. Fred Douglass makes a provocative speech larded with satirical observations of the Washington political class. One of his comments - that white southern politicians have many of the same speech patterns and mannerisms as blacks - is met with a firestorm of indignant criticism and abuse.
He argues for the truth of the observation by pointing out that most of these middle- and upper-middleclass southerners had black mammies when they were growing up. But Douglass must have been deliberately trying to get the goat of his racist enemies.
He is also embroiled in the controversy over the so-called Kansas exodus - of black southerners who want to emigrate to the still wide-open state of Kansas where they can buy land and form their own communities - and not be brutalized by white supremacists.
Most Democrats, some republicans and even some influential black leaders are supportive of the exodus. Douglass is a hold-out, telling blacks they should hang tight and weather the storm of racism in the south, that the leaving will be a victory for the white southerners.
In the early 1880s, apparently in a better financial state than he has been in the past - despite having to support most of his extended family - he buys a large property in the nearby countryside and moves there with his family and hangers-on. It's here he begins to write his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: A Will To Be Free.
The relationship with Ottilie Assing, his German friend, is winding down. Douglass is losing patience with her demands and interfering - although he still invites her to stay for extended periods at the new homestead. She is soon to depart again for Germany, though, never to return.
Blight quotes from a memoir written in the 1940s by one of Douglass's grandchildren in which she describes Douglass as a playmate-grandpa to her and her siblings and cousins at the new place. He would work half the day in his study, then come out and play and rough-house with his grandchildren in the afternoon. He also liked them to braid his long hair and put ribbons in it. It doesn't quite gibe with his dignified statesman-like public image.
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| Frederick Douglass (circa 1879) |
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I went back to my winter 2013 pictures today and discovered that many of the RAW files - the files that come straight from the camera's sensor, with nothing done to them - from early February have been corrupted, probably when transferred from one hard drive to another. There's nothing that can be done to restore them apparently.
It's maddening, but not a tragedy. I still have the best of my shots from that year, already edited, in a separate folder. They seem fine.
In the meantime, I did find a few of the RAW files to fiddle about with, including two more in my series on Tucson residential architecture and this one of Karen walking in one of the desert parks just outside the city.
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