Corona virus, what's different for you.

I don't know how I timed this right, but we got my 401k rolled over into savings after my last pre-retirement paycheck went into it in January. So it's been unaffected by the market. My wife's Vanguard account, however, lost 30 percent! It's crawling back up to where it was slowly, though.

Wound up binging Voyager over the last 2-3 weeks or so. It was something to keep me proccupied.

It's always good to know that things could be worse.

Downright un-Australian this is:

Yanno, I didn't have a TV during the last two seasons of Voyager (sacrilege, I know) but I found I didn't even miss it.

I'm old school (note, Stoopids: "old school" =/= does not equal "old," unless your balls haven't dropped yet. ). So, for me, Star Trek = TOS, Movies 2-4 and (maybe) STVI, and DS:9.

Everything else - even before AbramsTrek - does not compute.

Damn, things are depressing enough without putting yourself thru that!

the psychological scarring should go away after a few years.

Indeed. The ordeal appears to have already fucked up his spelling.

I've been a Star Trek fan since the first season of the first run of the original series. I'm not terribly fussy; I'm not one of those who claims that such and such isn't "real Star Trek" or that some new twist "ruined everything for me" or anything like that.

So I tried Voyager. I really did. I think I made it through three or four episodes, but I could feel my brain shutting down. The premise was good, but the realization was so bad that I just couldn't take it.

The premise was good. Too bad they dropped most of it before the pilot was over and did a reset button at the end of every episode. I could rant on for a while about all the reasons Voyager is by far the worst Trek series, but the TL;DR version is bad writing.

Conversely, I still think it had the best intro sequence and theme music of any of the series.

It says 12 per transaction, though. Couldn't you just buy 12n bottles and ask for n transactions?

It was my favorite intro music for any Trek series until Discovery came along. I like that theme just a tiny bit more, especially the callback to the TOS theme at the end.

"So, what do I have to live for? 3 weeks of Voyager episodes?"

On the other hand, the pandemic has a few bright spots: In-N-Out Burger is still open...

Also discovered that Amazon has a lot of campy, terrible, low budget movies from the 50's, 60's and 70's. A pretty good amount of them are the cheesy horror movies from then too. So I've been watching some of them as well. One has the best description ever on IMDB.

Night of a Thousands of Cats: Millionaire playboy Hugo (whose lack of facial expressions give him the appearance of a Thundercat marionette) flies around Acapulco in his private helicopter to pick up sexy young women. He whisks them away to his secluded old castle, where he wines and dines them (among other things, *wink*). With the aid of his bald mute little helper Gorgo, he kills his dates, keeping their heads in a crystal cage and feeding their chopped up body parts to his 1,000-strong army of blood thirty, flesh hungry cats.

Change the gender of Hugo and you have a Hallmark romcom.

If you like the old Hammer horror films, you should check out The Asphyx which is one of the best Hammer films not made by Hammer.

A long time ago, a doctor told me about something called "New Jersey Nose," which blamed the generally stuffy nose a lot of people were always complaining about on the air pollution in the NYC, Newark and Elizabeth area. I hadn't thought about that in decades, but I've noticed lately that I'm actually breathing thru my nose easier than ever in my life. I'm gonna enjoy that while I can, before things get back to their rush-hour, pollution-gushing normal again.

no no, that's the joisy nose. and you get it from sticking it where you shouldn't.

Hell, the writing in the pilot itself was cringeworthy.

On a serious note, one of my customer service desk associate's mother just got tested for symptoms and is awaiting results. We sent her home and will be covering out her shifts, and I'm mentally bracing myself for the worst as she is now a potential vector.

A good friend's wife is feeling poorly, and will get tested tomorrow. Meanwhile the Dr told her to isolate from her hubby, who is going insane with worry.

A asked someone at the office of the caf was still open, and how my friends at the deli counter were doing. One of them lost his elderly mother to the virus. The caf is set up with plastic screens separating the tables. Food is pre-made (no custom sammiches), and credit-card only.

Sure puts the people who have spent decades railing against organisations like the EPA in a different light.

I don't know anybody like that.

They closed down much of the town today for a tribute to our Fire Chief, who passed from the virus. Here's the head of the procession going past his house.

Steve will like this one. My monthly newsletter from the Association of NJ Rifle & Pistol Clubs came. Seems our governor took advantage of the situation to live out his petty dictator dreams and basically cancelled the 2nd amendment in NJ. He declared, by executive order, gun stores to be closed. He ordered shooting ranges to close. He suspended pistol purchase permitting. He shut down the NICS for NJ.

ANJRPC filed a federal suit. Around the same time the Trump administration issued guidelines that guns stores should be allowed to stay open. Nine days after his decree, Murphy backed off everything except the keeping the ranges closed. The association will keep bugging him about that. Ranges have booths with walls between the people.

I think the entire run of Voyager is comparable to season 3 TOS. Some of the individual episodes are as good as anything in the Trek Universe. The problem is that unless you're a really hard-core fan it's not worth it to sift through all the garbage.

Tested negative!

I have a friend who has MS real bad, and is generally an emotional wreck besides. His wife got sick and got tested. He dotes on her and relies on her, so he was more miserable than usual. They had to stay away from each other during the 4 day wait for the results. She came back negative, which is great, but she's still got SOME kind of bug. But not a fatal one, happily.

My wife heard from the woman who took her place when she retired. When my wife left, it was with the understanding that the boss would bump her friend from hourly to salaried and give her a good raise. He put her on salary all right. But now that my wife, who he was a little afraid of, is gone, he knows he can bully her friend. He makes her work extended hours (for which she doesn't make OT) and cut her pay twice. The man is downright evil.