New Year's Warning: Careful What You Wish For

12/31/2016

Carries the noise very well

A colleague has spent part of the past decade wishing the subway construction would be over.
Enough with the drilling and the rumbling.

A few days ago, they flicked the switch for the Second Avenue subway.

Her euphoria ended abruptly.

“An all-night test has those of us facing Second Ave. most upset,” she reports. “The long escalators hum and the motion causes a vibration, which is felt even in my apt. (on an upper floor.) Worst of all we hear the trains rumbling past every six minutes.”

Guess those artistic entrances allow the sound to escape. (As Casey Stengel said about artificial turf in the new St. Louis partk, 1966: "It sure holds the heat well.")

“The stations look beautiful but we are quite sure the engineers on this project had never worked on a subway,” my colleague adds. “They should have studied the system in Paris. It is QUIET.”

C’est vrai. The tires in the Paris Métro are made of rubber. So are the tires in Montréal.

All right, so Second Ave. is not Paris or Montréal. We already knew that.

But the planners don’t even know north from south.

The sign for one exit:

Unidentified bystander notes geography mistake

"The exit is at the NE corner,” my colleague said. “I told the mucky-mucks at the preview. They stared at me blankly.”

There is a moral to the story as we try to escape 2016:
New Yorkers used to snicker at the lumbering scam artist with the orange hair in our town. The vast majority of street-smart New Yorkers wished the guy would get a hobby and go practice it elsewhere.
Ha!!! Meantime, Happy New Year.
* * *
But first, a little ditty from 1969:

Richard Taylor

1/1/2017 08:26:19 am

Mr Vecsey, I'll have you know the day after the November election I adopted CCR's Bad Moon On The Rise as my personal anthem. How nice to know I'm in good company. Couldn't choose a better song for 2017. Happy New Year!

George Vecsey

1/1/2017 09:39:13 am

Dear Mr. Taylor: You win the prize for reading to the bottom this early in the new year. Thank you.
It seemed like the perfect song as the 60s morphed into the 70s.
I recently also recalled the CSNY dirge "Four Dead in Ohio," as an example of bad stuff that happened -- now, a long time ago -- and we somehow got through. To this.. Happy new year, and here's the link for my CSNY reference:

http://www.georgevecsey.com/home/old-people-have-seen-bad-stuff-before-but

darrell berger

1/1/2017 01:54:59 pm

I ain't no fortunate sone.

George Vecsey

1/1/2017 03:24:33 pm

Darrell, thanks for Fortunate Son.
Somehow I never heard that song, that I know of.
It illustrates my point that people of a certain age have seen fire and we've seen rain. (And I have friends who served in combat; I see it from different less judgmental eyes at this late age.) A high-school pal is going down on the million-woman march...and she is sending around a petition for those who can't make it. This is serious business, too.

Fortunate Son
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Produced By John Fogerty
Album Willy And The Poorboys
FORTUNATE SON LYRICS
[Verse 1]
Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Ooh they're red, white and blue
And when the band plays Hail to the Chief
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

[Chorus ]
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, no

[Verse 2]
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, no
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yeah

[Chorus]
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no millionaire's son, no no
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, no

[Verse 3]
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, "How much should we give?"
Ooh, they only answer More, more, more!

[Chorus/Outro]
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no military son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, one
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, no no no
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate son, no no no

bruce

1/4/2017 07:35:08 pm

george,

great pick.

wasn't that trump's favourite song when he was serving in 'nam.....

bruce

George Vecsey

1/4/2017 07:49:45 pm

It was either Nam or military academy. Both taught him discipline and respect.

bruce

1/4/2017 07:55:35 pm

george,

he's smaht tho.....learned enough at the academy--loved his uniform--that he knows more than the generals to this day.

bruce

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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

New Year's Warning: Careful What You Wish For

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