Thanksgiving Photo by Anjali -- IV

11/26/2014

I was walking to the post office this week when the crossing guard showed me her cellphone.
It showed a "Hi, Gram" text message.
"Where does she live?" I asked.
Upstate, she said. She was beaming.
"It makes you feel good," she said, turning her attention to the drivers barely in control of their vehicles and their impulses.
We oldsters often talk about the new breed who start flicking their thumbs in social situations, when families used to sit around and talk.
But the phones have their moments, particularly at holidays.
One of our grand-daughters now lives a mile away; she texts us all the time, sometimes with her latest photograph.
Anjali often sees things nobody else sees -- utility wires, somehow blue, outside her house, on a day of slush.
Happy Thanksgiving.

On the cusp between wet and frozen. Photo by Anjali

Alan Rubin link

11/27/2014 07:25:12 am

George

Keep Anjali’s photos coming! She has a special gift to see the unusual.

My 15 year Brooklyn granddaughter just placed first and third in the BMCC camera club, which she joined three years ago as a family member. I did not even come close.

The theme was railroads/train stations. We took pictures at the elevated Smith and Ninth F & G station for a few hours.

Anjali’s images would also place high in the BMCC (Berkshire Museum Camera Club) contests.

Thor A. Larsen

11/28/2014 05:14:35 am

George,
As I had noted before, Anjali is gifted in recognizing beauty in nature. Perhaps some of her artistic DNA comes from her grandmother. Anyhow, I love viewing her imaginative photos!

George Vecsey

11/29/2014 01:33:24 am

Thanks to you both. She just sees it.
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
George

Comments are closed.

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

Thanksgiving Photo by Anjali -- IV

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