187 I'll follow the sun


Above is Jupiter. To it's left is Saturn, but it's hard to see in this snapshot. 


The dot in the middle of this one is Mars. It was a pretty spectacular planetary display last night, and I was thankful to be able to see it without smoke in the air. (For now.)

It was a new moon on Thursday, so the sky was dark.


There's been a lot of talk about replacing RBG with a religiously conservative woman. 

Religion is a trip. Years ago, people sat around at night coming up with stories for why the planets move around against the stars. They combined those stories with some oral history (the bible even remembers the end of the last ice age, it's called the story of Noah's arc). 

Then some enterprising preachers got a scam going called "our one god is better than your planet gods." But it was still all based on the movement of the solar system. (No, it is not a coincidence that JC's "birth" coincides with the Winter Solstice. This is sun worship. Sun worship makes sense. We are completely dependent on it, and the rest of the universe.)

Amazingly, when we visited Rome last year, I learned there are all of these obelisks carved by Egyptians to worship the sun, stolen by Romans because they couldn't cut big fancy rocks like that, and then repurposed by Popes into Catholic symbols of...pointing at Ra, the sun god.

Meanwhile, here on Earth...

Thespian friend The Lion posted this, and it made me crack up. We have both seen this view. Together.

Are landlords going to be ok with getting 25% of the rent?

You know our local economy is fucked when the Chronicle starts asking that question.

But not all of the local news is bad.

That's it, better go for a bike ride now!

Well, we might have a little time.

On the backhand, there's definitely a core group of San Franciscans who are happy about headlines like this:

With all of the reopening, combined with pandemic unemployment benefits ending, what sort of autumn do you think we're about to see?

My guess is utter shit show, likely worse than the spring.

Although maybe our semi-response might track along with Sweden's. 

Maybe we're going to start letting seniors die in nursing homes without any time in the ICU?

It's hard to compare Sweden to the US, because we're having a few different pandemics here. 

There was the West Coast "lockdown fast" pandemic, the East Coast "oh shit" pandemic, and the southern "sorry grandpa" pandemic.

But let's look up some numbers.

Sweden has 10 million residents, and something like 5k deaths. That's, um,  1 in 2000 dead.

California has 40 million residents, and 15k deaths.  That's 1 in 2666. A little better than Sweden.

The US has 325 million residents, and 200k deaths. That's 1 in 1625. Worse than Sweden.

That's not great.

Speaking of cannabis...

It's almost pothead Christmas.

Time to put the tree in the window!

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