Tuesday night.

I’m trying to use lockdown to catch up on all the lazy leisure things I never had time for: re-reading old favourites, finally playing some video games I never quite finished, etc. After turning everything upside down and failing to find the right cables for my old Xbox 360, I went ahead and bought Red Dead Redemption (aka 2010 game of the year) for PS3 instead. I distinctly remember playing but never finishing it in 2012, and it’s still every bit as good as I remembered.

The game takes place in the Wild West in 1911. I spent most of the evening familiarizing myself with controls, shooting bandits, exterminating jackalopes (bunnies with antlers), and playing Texas hold ’em in an old-timey Western saloon. Yeehaw! As extreme escapism goes, that game is pretty high up there. It cost me $30, but it’ll keep me distracted from, you know, the plague for a good couple of weeks.

Just one month left until Christmas. At this point, I can literally count the remaining business days till my staycation on my toes and fingers. So close!

In covid news, remember that giant Hasidic wedding in Brooklyn that I mentioned 37 days ago, all the way back on day 219? Especially the part where I said “That may mean they’ll abide by the 50-person limit, or they’ll use the family loophole to sneak in a few thousand of their closest friends.” Well, I hate being right… They went ahead and did it: a Brooklyn synagogue (7,000 capacity) was completely packed, and some of the videos of the event look like a covid nightmare. After publicly promising to cancel the event back in October, they spread the news in person, without any official announcements online or in print. Allegedly, the local authorities will slap the synagogue with a $15,000 fine, but that’s small potatoes – and, if anything, an encouragement to have more mega-weddings. This will not help New York’s insular Hasidic community, and the secrecy (the story just broke a few days ago) means there’s no way to do contact-tracing. That’s one hell of a way to get a super-cluster going.

Stay safe and out of secret celebrations, eh.