Thursday night. I wonder how many of my coworkers have no idea what I mean by “Happy Thor’s Day!” but are too afraid to ask.

I’m going to have to seriously modify my rules for Thirsty Thursdays because wow, just two glasses of that boxed wine actually made me fall asleep. My sleep deprivation is catching up to me, the way it always does, the way I always think it won’t. It always starts out simple: cutting an hour of sleep here and there, staying up late to watch just another episode of my TV show or read through yet another part of the Internet… And then you realize you have to wake up in five hours. And then you do it again. And again. There’s a fascinating new term for it now: RBP – Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. Heh.

At work, strange news and stranger tidings…

In culinary adventures, you can make a pretty neat carb-protein two-punch combo by making a large plate of pasta with some boneless chicken breast. This might sound completely obvious, but nonetheless – it’s still a great nutritional shortcut, and one that doesn’t require me to bake beets in the oven. (That right there might have been one of my strangest kitchen experiments.)

In covid news, the official worldwide death toll stands at 980,000. Unofficially, the world most likely crossed one million deaths a while ago. If you include excess deaths, we passed that number even earlier. Even so… We’ll likely cross that lowest of all official death totals within a week. Will it change anyone’s mind?

Good news from Helsinki: they’ve trained sniffer dogs to detect covid at airports. The only thing passengers need to do is dab their skin with a wipe, and the pupper in a separate signal if it smells the virus on the wipe. Apparently, the results are almost 100% accurate, and dogs can detect the virus even before there are symptoms. I blogged earlier (feels like much earlier) about Germans using sniffer dogs as well, but either they didn’t scale that up to airports, or they did, and the Finns are doing the same exact thing, but the world is just that starved for good news.

If other countries can do the same, it’d really make things easier: fewer clusters, and hopefully less community spread if there’s anti-covid paw patrol out in public as well. I do find it ironic, though, that for all our technology, supercomputers, high-tech microscopes, and other fancy toys, we’re reverting to the most ancient technology we have: letting dogs do their thing. A nice serving on humility to go with our hubris, eh? Good dogs.