Some Blog Site

One upside to being sheltered in place is that there are now some new accents on the Accenterator.com site. You can now train yourself how to sound like Elmer Fudd, Scooby Doo, or Mark Wahlberg. Oh, and there’s Beaker.

And it seems the German accent code went missing. I’ll have to re-write that one, as the only other place a backup might be is on a laptop that’s in a building that is closed due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Officially it’s closed because it has been deemed a non-essential business, but I’m thinking liability is a factor too.

Anyway, Elmer Fudd was the easiest to write. It took longer to find a decent picture of him than to code his accent. And the Boston accent (“smaht pahk”) took much longer to write than I expected. It was supposed to be just replace the Rs with Hs but it turns out to be more complicated than that.

I suppose I could have gone on with America in July and America in August, but the image was getting a little too long, plus I don’t want to predict exactly when we’ll be out of trouble. I thought that sequence from The Empire Strikes Back was a good fit for how things will go, but if you remember that part of the movie, Han Solo just moved into another bit of trouble and it wasn’t good for him just yet.

I thought about trying to caption who Jabba and cronies are in the world of 2020 – something like “countries who didn’t cripple their own economies” but it’s a little early for that. But I’m guessing there will be some countries in decent shape by the time America gets up and starts stumbling around – maybe they handled things better or maybe they were hit earlier so they recovered earlier.

For brevity’s sake, I should have stopped after the second image. Use that as the TL;DR version.

In case you can’t tell, those are glass cruise ships.

Because there’s no better incubator of diseases than cruise ships.

Another day, another announcement from the governor about what else is being shut down. The problem is that we disagree on what is “good behavior”. Not a big disagreement yet, but a number of small divergences add up eventually. New rule! New rule!

Some thoughts on the novel coronavirus AKA COVID-19.

• What happened to versions 1 through 18 of COVID? Is this like WD-40 where the first 39 versions didn’t work?
• Why is everyone stockpiling toilet paper for a respiratory disease? I’ll try to stay ahead of the game for the next disease outbreak, and if it has gastrointestinal symptoms then I’m going to stockpile Kleenex and Puffs Plus.
• I saw a news story on how restaurants are being affected because people with whatever symptoms were not being allowed to work. That should have been the case already. It seems that COVID-19 is making people behave (regarding personal health at least) the way they should have been anyway. I don’t want someone with a fever handling my food whether it’s coronavirus or the plain old flu.
• Restricting travel to control the spread of coronavirus is like inching your way into a cold pool. You know you’re eventually going to get wet, and all you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable. Ok, bad analogy – stop going into the pool instead.
• All the explanations about how much travel affects one’s carbon footprint were not really being heeded. A couple months of coronavirus has impacted people’s travel plans a lot more than years’ worth of global-warming policies and recommendations.
• I got a COVID-19 email from my bank. I thought the privacy notices were a waste, but if every company I do business with is going to send me not only privacy policies but also personal hygiene tips to avoid viruses, that will be an even bigger waste.
• Dear Politician, if you are going to enact a ban on public gatherings, you must also provide an exit strategy for the ban. Otherwise, I must conclude you are just making a power grab and taking advantage of fear and uncertainty. By “exit strategy” I mean how will we know when things are good again? You can’t ban public gathering and sporting events forever. So what is the indication? When you say so? I want an objective measurement instead.

My opinion, in case you’re wondering, is that our current reaction to the coronavirus is not sustainable. Business and travel must get back to normal eventually (although this has furthered my resolve never to go on a large cruise ship). The virus will spread and won’t be contained, and it will end up either being something everyone has to live with (like the existing cold and flu season) or enough people will get immunity and it will taper off.

My worry is that if this is how the country reacts to an easily-preventable and relatively mild disease, how bad is going to be if there’s something really bad? I can’t imagine the social and political disorder that something with worse symptoms or a higher mortality rate would bring.

And yes, I know the 19 from COVID-19 refers to the year 2019.

Also, I was going to make a image that showed 19 different crows and jays and ravens with the caption of Corvid-19, but several people have already done that so I skipped it.

The First Law of Bagels:
No matter where you start eating your bagel, the last bite will be the only part that was touching the garlic-onion bagel.

If someone brings in bagels to work, it’s usually in a bag and it’s the variety pack of bagels. I’ll pick something like a blueberry bagel, and it tastes nice and blueberry-y until the last bite. Obviously, my blueberry bagel has been resting against other bagels in its trip from the bagel store to out office. Most parts of my bagel had apparently been touching plain bagels, except there’s always that very fragrant (and whatever the word is for taste equivalent of fragrant) bagel in the bunch. And it’s taste is incompatible with that of the blueberry bagel.

Regardless of which part of the bagel I choose to eat first, the last bite is the one that has the most of the off-putting taste. I’d like to end my bagel-eating with just the flavor I chose, but it rarely works that way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one really likes to go to the SOS (or the DMV for those of you who are not Michiganders – it’s the Secretary of State). And for many years that was true.

Then in our previous administration we got someone in charge of the SOS who actually made an improvement. She brought the SOS up to modern times by allowing people to get in line via their phones, and to get updates via phones.

No more waiting at the government building! Check in online, and you only needed to head over to the SOS when they sent you a text. I could spend those 3 hours in line at work doing something rather than sitting in a hard plastic chair doing nothing. It was the best thing the SOS office had done in my lifetime.

But what about the internet? Surely being able to renew things online was a much larger accomplishment? Nope, and here’s why: they let you do things online that you could already do by mail. So it’s just a faster way of doing things remotely, but those things were already available to do remotely. The internet didn’t really change the things for which you had to go to the branch office. The online check-in changes the branch office experience.

They’re trying to help by adding more self-serve kiosks in more places like local stores. But those kiosks also don’t do things that you can’t already do online or by mail. Having SOS kiosks in every store across Michigan won’t put a dent in the wait times at the SOS office.

What they need to do, in addition to being able to use one’s cell number to wait in line of course, is to expand the things that can be done online. Every so many years, your license plate becomes invalid and you need to go in to get a new plate, instead of renewing online. Why? No one knows. And there must be other things that can be added to the online services.

What happened to the MI-Timeline? Why can’t I check in online anymore for the SOS? Why does it take so long to get an appointment? Good questions, and I can’t answer them. But you can help change the answer by going to the change.org petition to bring back the check in line online option.