Tuesday night. Today was Taco Tuesday: my taco-making skills are pretty bad, so the things I’ve wrapped together might, in fact, be burritos. They made for a tasty lunch anyhow.

I haven’t yet made peace with the fact that my second country, the US of A, is going to hell in a handbasket. (Multiple handbaskets, to be precise, traveling at different velocities.) It’s mildly less painful today than it was yesterday, though, so there’s that. After work, I dived into my preferred escapism – the “7 Days to Die” zombie video game. It’s a very ostrich-like maneuver, I know, but it keeps my mind away from all the pandemics, crumbling empires, and shouting landlords all around me. Helps pass the time, you know?

A few days ago, the game got a major update: better graphics, smarter enemies, more options. It became incompatible with the save files from the old version. I left my old character just where she was: riding through the deserted desert town on her homemade motorcycle, laden with assorted firepower, and surviving the zombie apocalypse like a pro. I’ll never access that save file again, so my character will continue her survival adventure all by herself. That may be as close to a retirement as a video game character can ever get. At least someone got a happy ending, eh?

In covid news: FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn has spent the last day or so eating crow. Everyone who knows anything about statistics, math, or science has been very busy ripping him a new one since his recent speech praising the plasma treatment. Last night, Hahn apologized on Twitter (“The criticism is entirely justified”) but apparently decided to stay on instead of quitting and letting someone else take over. His weird misguided praise (and the apparent misreading) of the plasma research wasn’t just a personal failure, it was also a huge hit to the FDA’s credibility. Every alphabet agency out there (the WHO, the CDC, the FDA) has made plenty of avoidable mistakes, and let politics get in the way of science. There are no good guys left.

And in Oxford, Mississippi, an entire fourth grade (over 200 kids) is in quarantine because one kid and more than half of their teachers tested positive for covid. I get that most people suck at strategic thinking, but really – what was the logic there? Reopen schools and pray to the deity of your choice that everyone will stay perfectly healthy for the duration of the school year? Now they (and pretty much all the other schools around the country) will have to improvise an online curriculum on the fly. Ho hum.

If and when a vaccine – an actual, tested vaccine, and not something rushed past the FDA – comes out, that should make things better. Hopefully, at least. Until then, the lockdown continues – and so does the flood of crazy news.