Monday night. Saying “Happy Monday” should be a federal crime.

Another day, another XXX loonies. (This just prompted me to start doing mental math and adjusting for currencies. I have concluded that I am, in fact, making more than when I was a low-level warehouse grunt in the US.) I’m trying to differentiate the passage of days any which way I can. This week, I’m treating myself to an episode of “Black Summer” (a Netflix horror show) each day before bed. Most of Netflix’s selection is frankly unremarkable (especially if you get past the top-25 in each category), but hey – it is, for all intents and purposes, an infinite archive, and who knows how much longer the lockdown will last, eh?

One tiny success story – today was my 100th consecutive day of learning French on DuoLingo! To be perfectly fair, I haven’t been putting in as much effort as I should (considering my 2021 goals and all), but that’s still better than where I had been 100 days ago. It’s nice to know that I’m objectively better in at least some quantifiable way after spending so much time in the lockdown mode. And hey, seriously, give DuoLingo a try: it’s corny and a bit childish, but it works. And it’s free! Pick a language, any language, and go for it, eh.

In covid news: the CDC is being weirder than usual. First they updated their covid guidance and confirmed the long-suspected aerosol transmission: it can spread through the air, and not just on droplets. (That’s the best way to explain the infamous choir cluster a few months ago: either that, or that person had deliberately licked every doorknob.) And now that guidance has been taken down from their site again. They released a memo stating that the initial update was an accident.

The social media consensus is that politicians (and/or the apparatchiks at the HHS) have control of the CDC’s site, and they’re just blatantly manipulating the facts for their own bizarre purposes. It’s really hard to gauge why exactly someone would actively take down valuable guidance. My best bad guess (and remember, I’m just a random guy on the Internet) is that the chasm between the scientific evidence and the White House’s “everything is awesome šŸ™‚ ” view is growing so wide that the only way to keep up the charade is by destroying all evidence to the contrary with extreme prejudice.

Either way, the CDC’s reputation is damaged even more. With each back-and-forth update, with each blatant political intervention, they lose more and more trust that they’d earned since their inception in 1946.

…in more positive covid news – Nova Scotia hasn’t had any new cases for 13 days in a row. That is huge. That proves that it’s possible to beat the pandemic in North America – not just in Vietnam or New Zealand. Part of their success is demanding that anyone visiting from outside the Atlantic region self-quarantine for 14 days. (I doubt that can be successfully implemented in different states in the US.) One downside: I don’t live in Nova Scotia. One upside: if they could do it, that means eventually we’ll all be able to. (Though, needless to say, some sooner than others. Sorry, yanks…)