Wednesday evening. It really is amazing how fast time flies sometimes: the understaffing at work has gotten serious enough that they’re importing random backfills from the US. Can’t say I’ve seen that happen before. Some part of me wonders what exactly I’ll see when I return from my two-week vacation. (Only seven business days away now!)

Not much in personal news. It occurred to me that it’s been about two months since my last haircut, and 45 days since my last shave. The Apocalypse Beard still leaves much (so very, very much) to be desired, but I’m kind of curious to see what will happen. (No one aside from my landlords will see my unmasked face at any point soon, anyhow.) The hair is definitely getting longer: when I was 18, I thought I’d cheat the system by saving time and money on monthly haircuts. That was a bad idea. I ended up ruining my own freshman year of college: by the time I cut it off, 18 months later, I looked like a Russian Carrot Top. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to rock the hairdo much better now that I’m 15 years older and (allegedly) wiser. Heh.

Covid news. In a very surprising move, Houston’s mayor Sylvester Turner has cancelled the Republican National Convention that was scheduled for next week. The convention was supposed to flaunt all the mask rules, though Texan VIPs had already said they’d give their speeches remotely. Heh. As far as I can tell, this might be the first time in modern political history where a major party won’t get to hold an annual convention. It’s partly funny, but partly beneficial, since there’ll be less covid spread.

[Edit on 7/10: I misread the article: that was for the Texas Republican convention, not the national convention that will take place in Jacksonville, FL.]

Arizona’s ICU beds are about 85% full now. Dr.Anthony Fauci keeps sounding the alarm about uncontrolled exponential growth, but he keeps being ignored by everyone with the actual power to change things. Fauci isn’t a saint: early on, he was part of the chorus saying that masks are useless. (All part of the ridiculous strategy to sideline them for medical personnel.) Still, he’s as good as it gets in this toxic mess. I’m reasonably certain that if he’d tried going against the party line in, say, Russia, he would’ve been defenestrated ages ago, just like the few Russian doctors who dared to contradict Putin.

The real tragedy of the US approach (if you can call it that) is that it would’ve been so much faster and cheaper (though still expensive) to just lock down the whole country, give everyone a few thousand dollars a month, and just wait it out for three months while shutting down absolutely everything. Instead, here they are, with the economy that’s neither shut down nor running, with masks becoming a symbol of political division, with more cases that were entirely avoidable. Other countries are already opening back up. Canada is almost free of covid. And yet… the moment the US border is reopened, all our efforts here in the great white north will be nullified by irresponsible American tourists. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, eh?