I very much enjoyed Keep on Keepin' On, the absolutely lovely story of Clark Terry and Justin Kauflin.
You don't really need to know much about the history of American Jazz or about piano or trumpet, though you might enjoy the movie more if you do.
At its heart, Keep on Keepin' on is about people connecting with people, and about two wonderful talents who somehow find each other and share a most remarkable collaboration.
Shared without a lot of commentary: One out of Five Investors Sold All of Their Stocks
The stock market falls because people want to sell and people want to sell because the stock market falls.
Fidelity has the receipts. They showed that nearly one in five investors sold all of their stocks some time between February and May.
In California, COVID activity and protocols currently vary county-by-county.
Some counties are doing extremely well, some counties are struggling. And that simple summary contains within it a richness of complexity, variation, and nuance.
If you want to understand this at a deeper level, I recently found that the California Department of Public Health has quite a bit more information that you can see:
Each county is different, and the description of the particular challenges and obstacles each county is facing is something that I find simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking. I won't try to summarize it; if you're interested, please go read.
Knowledge is power, as they say.
Alameda County remains the hardest-hit of the Bay Area counties, with far-and-away the highest case rates. Alameda County is the second-largest county in the Bay Area by population, with just under 1.7 million residents. For the epidemic to-date, it has had 3,950 cases confirmed, and 101 total deaths confirmed.
Getting a more detailed picture, though, is a challenge.
Since around May 1, the county has been performing at least 1,000 COVID-19 tests daily, and over the last 2 weeks that number has risen to an average of 1,500 tests daily.
The percent-positive rate for the tests, which had been at about 5%, has fallen slightly as the number of tests has risen, and is currently at about 4.5%, which overall works out to about 60-70 new cases reported each day.
Case rates vary dramatically by neighborhood, with some neighborhoods reporting 15x the per-capita cases as other neighborhoods.
The testing data is not broken down by neighborhood, just the confirmed cases data.
I assume that the 1,500 daily tests are not randomly selected, but rather are being performed "for cause": a person has symptoms and the doctor orders a test; a person works in a high-risk field and gets tested routinely; etc. This, too, is not described anywhere that I can find.
I thought maybe I'd try to find a "comparable" county elsewhere in California, but have had trouble doing so. Santa Clara County and San Mateo County seem like they are probably comparable, and maybe Orange County might count as comparable?
Anyway, I don't really know how to tell how Alameda County is doing.
At least one of these must be wrong, I would think?
The study reported both results-by-country and results-worldwide, which accounts for some of the confusion, I guess?
But still.
Almost as soon as I turned the last page of Paulette Jiles's marvelous News of the World, I was making plans to pick another of her books to read next.
Somehow I had not heard of Jiles before, although she's been writing for more than a decade with many awards and accolades. She lives in San Antonio and (I think) sets most of her books in Texas.
The timeframes and settings vary, I believe; News of the World is set in 1870, which was a time of great change in America as a whole, but certainly in Texas. Our hero is Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 71 year old veteran (of the war of 1812!) whose profession is to bring Texas the news of the world.
That is, Kidd "reads the news". In a time in which a combination of turmoil, poverty, low literacy rates and other factors meant that most people had neither the access to nor the capability of getting updates on current affairs, except what they might pick up incidentally via a trip to the grocer or the tavern or the blacksmith, Kidd provides a critical service.
So when Kidd rides into town, puts up his placards advertising the evening reading, and rents the local meeting hall or tavern for the night, townsfolk stream in and drop a dime into the can to hear Kidd read late into the night selections from the Boston Morning Journal, the New-York Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the London Times. These readings might be weeks or months old by that point, but they are still fresh news from the world at large in frontier towns such as Fort Worth, Meridian, or Bowie.
The main thrust of the book, though, is an unlikely, yet certainly plausible and well-supported by evidence, adventure story involving Kidd and a 10-year-old girl named Johanna Leonberger, who was taken captive by a Kiowa tribe five years earlier following a battle near San Antonio, and has grown up since then in Kiowa territory (the broader Great Plains region). Johanna, it turns out, has been seized back from the Kiowa by some out-of-work Civil War veterans who were hoping to collect the reward, but for complex reasons too good to spoil, it falls to the Captain to take her 400 miles from the Red River town of Spanish Fort back to San Antonio, all the while being chased by a never-ending collection of neer-do-wells intent on foiling his simple plan.
There's action galore and lovely evocative tellings of frontier life in Texas in the 1870's, but some of the most fascinating parts of the book come in those quiet times in between:
He sat on his carpetbag and leaned against a wheel. His mind kept going back to the fight and to put it aside he watched Pasha graze and drank black coffee and smoked his pipe. Johanna played in the stream like a six-year-old. She turned over rocks and sang and splashed. To comfort himself and slow down his mind he thought of his time as a courier, a runner, and Maria Luisa and his daughters. Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.
There are certainly plenty of mysteries in life, but of this I am sure: you could spend many a lovely hour with Paulette Jiles's News of the World. I can't wait to read more of her work.
... who agree that the New York Times has no responsibility nor duty to publish Tom Cotton.
The senator has plenty of ways to make his views known. The Times does no service to anyone by publishing him.
Opinion Editor Bennet's claim that the paper "owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments" is valid in the abstract, but not valid in the specific case here, where, as Bennet himself documents, the counter-argument in question is in fact "made by people in a position to set policy."
The media serve no purpose when they are the empty mouthpiece of the state. The state already have the ability to show their arguments. A respectable Opinion Editor of a respectable paper should certainly know that.
