More virtual firsts, where the London CTO group I’m part of met online in something that tries to replicate the sound experience of a party (or a pub). You can hear people more distinctly when you’re closer to them in the online space. Which is a neat idea, although the sound didn’t really taper off fast enough for me, or maybe I know some people with very loud voices. Either way, there was too much I could make out from other groups. But an interesting idea fairly well-executed for something that still seems basically in stealth mode, so I won’t link to them unless I find out that’s okay now.
And from tomorrow (I think? or is it Monday?) people living on their own can buddy up with another household in what I think is supposed to be called a “support cluster”, but I suspect everyone will think of as “sex pod”. Which would be all well and good, but you still have to go through the outside with all the idiots and the lack of masks.
Speaking of which, I have ordered some washable, definitely non-medical grade, masks. Some were from here, because they’re awesome and only partly because I know the maker. Anyway, this will mean I can retire the half-arsed thing I made out of a t-shirt, for when I need to wander around outside and protect other people from any infections I’ve picked up from the packaging of the masks.
But until most other people are wearing masks, no one will be protecting me. So that won’t be happening often. Maybe early in the morning or late at night.
It’s been a quarter of a year in lockdown. Or will have been in the next week, depending on exactly when you stopped going out. I came back from Cyprus on Friday 13th March, stayed in a hotel at Heathrow until the Saturday, and then came home. Two days later we shut our offices worldwide. So technically for me I suppose it’ll be a quarter of a year on Monday.
If you try to Google for things that last 13 weeks you’ll mostly get human first trimester advice. (Apparently at this point a human fetus is the size of a cactus.) That’s about the average gestation of an entire leopard. I could have grown a leopard in this time.
It’s been a bad week to be a statue of a bad guy. Actually, scratch that. They’re moving around; one of them even got to go for a swim. These are statues. They’re living their best lives right now. The people they’re statues of? Long dead racists.
Still some work to do on the living ones though.
And for that matter on the ones who just didn’t think it through. Lady Antebellum are just now realising that the war their name referred to is the one fought over slavery? Maybe we need to teach more Latin.
But at least they’re owning and fixing it and not say doubling down. (Also, good on NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag, although again you might wonder what they thought it stood for up until now.)
I own two flags: Kernow and Bretagne. There was a point, probably when I was in my twenties, when I had a vague plan to get the flags of the other Celtic nations, but they weren’t monochrome which was a thing I was going through at the time. Also you have to decide where you stand on places like the north-west autonomous communities of Spain, and Norte. After a while the flags ended up in a box, and I found them again recently. They are now in a different box.
Burning is an acceptable way of disposing of a Union Flag. If you otherwise acceptably dispose of flags you don’t own, that’s vandalism.
I couldn’t figure out if the Vandals had a flag, but I’m sure they had something approximate. The closest thing I could find to Vandal symbols though were starting to get a bit…Germanic Swastika. And although that isn’t per se racist, there’s definitely something off about knocking down statues of racists and burning flags of their racist countries — while wearing that as an emblem.
Stay safe.