Pandemic Update

Pandemic Update (March 23)

 

I’ve remained at home except for a brief visit to Jewel, where purchases on scarce items such a milk and tissues were limited to one to a customer (and forget about picking up toilet paper). IUN has remained open to faculty but the Governor has ordered all nonessential facilities closed within 24 hours. I’m trying to master a borrowed laptop with a miniature keyboard compared to what I’m used to, and it is going slowly. Thankfully the HELP desk has been very helpful.  I just hope it will continue to be staffed a day from now.

 

When I get slightly depressed, I consider our situation much less disruptive compared to most folks.  Toni and I feel particularly sad that Becca and other young people are missing out on senior year activities and that so many people face economic uncertainty much worse than our own situation.

 

 I watched the six-hour documentary “McMillion$,” about the head of security who stole several dozen winning tickets and in the end got off with a light sentence thanks to a plea bargain while so-called winners paid a heavy price.  I found “Yesterday” on HBO,a humorous fantasy about a singer who discovers nobody has heard of the Beatles and becomes a pop star singing their songs. “Saturday Night Live’s” Kate McKinnon is a hoot as an overbearing manager. My favorite line is when a friend named Gavin says he doesn’t mind being second fiddle and references as an example Pulp’s “Common People.” Singer Ed Sheeran has a prominent role and is quite fetching.

 

I sailed through Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.” “The Guardian” described the author as combining an extraordinary talent with an archaic sensibility. Janine, for example, believes in astrology and that one’s fate is determined by the alignment of the planets at birth. A rich man is described as having a saturnine look.  After Janine has had an entomologist stay her for a few days, it reminded her how awkward it was to live with someone: 

  How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there. Each morning when he went off to the forest, I blessed my glorious solitude. How do people manage to spend decades living together in a small space? I wondered.  Can they possibly sleep in the same bed together, breathing on and jostling each other accidentally in their sleep?

 

I noticed that the Woody Allen movie “Match Point” co-starred Scarlett Johansen so I decided to watch it.  The opening scene, showing a tennis ball being hit back and forth, finally hitting the net is meant to symbolize how luck often determines one’s fate, in this case depending on which side it falls on. Later a murderer tosses evidence into the river only it hits the railing.  Which side it lands on will determine whether or not the villain gets away with the crime.

 

Ron Cohen called to see if I were still going to IUN (negative) and whether my blog entries would continue (doubtful, but we’ll see).  He recently got a call from Danny Mack, a student of ours when we first started teaching 50 years ago. He had been a grader for Ron.   I only used a grader once, when I had a class of over a hundred students. Dave Malham gave almost everyone an A, so I had to go back over them and grade them myself.

I’ve been looking at a map Phil Arnold sent me of General George Washington’s  Montgomery County (PA) itinerary between October 1777 and June 1778  .He stayed in two dozen places while hi troops were encamped nearby including an estate near Oreland owned by George Emlem that in now Sandy Run County Club, where my 55^th reunion took place.  The map identifies township (i.e., Upper Dublin, Whitemarsh), boros (Ambler, Norristown, Jenkintown ), and small towns (Flourtown, Oreland) but not, of course, Fort Washington, which came into existence at a later date.

 

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