SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

Idaho.

And she was smarter than this bunch of twats:

"God-given". FFS. If you need a gun to preserve a right, you never had it.

The trains are lovely (compared to NY) - clean, air-conditioned, and on time. But it's that "regional" ticketing system that throws me (it's similar to the D.C. Metro). In NY, you pay one fare, period. Swipe your Metrocard in Canarsie and you can ride all the way to the North Bronx. Try instituting "regions" in NY and there'd be riots.

Forget about Covid tests: The Idaho Freedom Foundation are much more in need of rabies tests.

Huh. Technically it’s not regional, but it is distance- and speed-based, with a minimum fare. Plus surcharges for the airports. I guess you could consider it regional if every stop was a region...

Caltrain is the one that’s explicitly regional.

Haven't been to S.F. in a while, but I found the ticket machines .

Seattle's ORCA pass machines aren't that easy either and Seattle isn't the kind of place where people are all that eager to help. Luckily someone had mercy and showed me what to do. Once you know the trick, no problem, but figuring it out...

SF doesn’t have it that bad in terms of fare machines, although Muni is better than BART. Cleveland though. Unbelievably difficult to use.

But @Ancalagon keeps promoting how it's All That.

NYC's fares are too damn high, and there's nothing like waiting on an unheated/a/c'ed subway platform when it's 20 or 90 degrees outside and the platform is as cold as the outside or 120+ plus. (I used to live at the end of the R line, where the trains waited with the internal a/c running and the hot air running out to the platform. One local news station clocked it at 140 degrees one summer. You learned to wait upstairs until you heard another train coming and then scurry down to the platform as the doors opened.)

In my experience, nothing beats the SM Big Blue Bus. Regular fare: $1.25. Less for students/seniors/disabled. And it extends beyond Santa Monica to UCLA, Culver City, West L.A. and even downtown L.A. Since the pandemic, there's no fare, in order to keep the operators a safe distance from the passengers. Oh, and did I mention year-round a/c and a schedule you can access at the bus stop or through the TAP app?

Yeah, that's the kind of transit Anc about, but maybe in the next century...

I fucking love BART. And Capitol Corridor.

One screen, two movies:

As someone who frequently tells us how much you loath your former hometown, try not to tug it too hard - it might fall off.

What are you, twelve? Nothing of substance to contribute, so you try to dip my hair in the inkwell to hide your crush on me? Like I told Mike a couple of days ago, I don't date crazies. : (

My memories are wonderful, and I'll always love NY. I wouldn't trade being born, raised, and living there - including just off the coast of manhattan for much of my first 2 decades of my productive years - for anything.

In fact, I love NY even more today than I did back when I was a taxpayer. Much much more.

So you've forgotten what you used to post. And you've never been back since you fled for Gun Country.

Ed!!!!!

Wooo! National lockdown incoming for England (Wales is already in a 2-week 'circuit breaker' as is Scotland).... they're keeping schools and universities open though so won't change my life much apart from panic-buyers using up everything again.

Teacher's unions are apparently demanding to be included, which I actually agree with.

Universities make essentially no difference in our bubble, Kim can do most of everything from home anyway, disections already being restricted for students.

Won't affect me much if the uni goes to online only - am recording all lectures anyway, the only live stuff I do is a weekly revision session (well, four repeats as class won't all fit in a room under 2m distancing, but have an assistant to run two of those) to ensure everything is going in.

Bit odd recording myself in lab on a head-cam to demonstrate PCR etc to students instead of them doing it, but it's much fucking faster. Crammed two 3hr prac sessions into one 2hr one. Admittedly, a lot of that time they'd be sat around waiting for agarose gels to run whereas I can just skip to "and here's the result!" like a cooking show.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33053430/

https://www.templehealth.org/about/...k-of-neurological-damage-in-covid-19-patients

The Spike protein causes inflammation of the blood-brain barrier without actually killing those cells, but it does seem to make the barrier leaky. This virus just gets better and better. I hope that this isn't an obstacle to the mRNA vaccine, which manufactures Spike in vivo in order to stimulate an immune response.

More nurses have died of COVID-19 than in all of WWI.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-nurse-death-world-war-one-ww1-b1448185.html

In the past 24 hours Australia has had zero detected cases from local transmission. The testing results from Victoria (where almost all infections have been recently) right now matches the modelling almost exactly that was laid out when their lockdown started a couple of months ago.

The science knows what it's doing, restrictions suck but they work and locally life feels very much like it's back to normal.

Really? I had you pegged as loving HOMER.

Weirdo.

You aren't helping here bud.....

Lol @steve2^4, I was joking.

Apparently inappropriate and poorly judged dark humour is a side effect of viral lobotomies.

Oh the possibilities, and the justifications!

I married a nurse. I'm conditioned to sympathize with health care horror stories.

Lol, there are two types of nurses.

1) The compassionate ones who lose their ideals quickly.

2) The sociopathic and/or sadistic ones, who keep their ideals no matter what.

I Married a Nurse was on TCM last week!