What is the point where elected officials have killed their credibility?
10 minute read
November 18, 2021, 11:41 AM
Starting Saturday, November 20, Montgomery County, Maryland implements mask mandate number three. This is based on rules that the Montgomery County council, sitting as the Board of Health, determined in August and October, where seven consecutive days of “substantial” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (50-100 cases per 100,000 people), based on raw case counts, automatically triggers an indoor mask mandate, and seven consecutive days of “moderate” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people), again based on raw case counts, automatically rescinds an indoor mask mandate. This continues until 85% of the county’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The result of this auto-on, auto-off policy has been a yo-yo effect, where it’s masks one week and no masks the next.
For some history on this, the Montgomery County government first implemented a mask mandate in April 2020, not long before the governor issued a statewide mask mandate. That mandate was rescinded in May 2021 when everyone else did after the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks anymore. When the county had reached a 50% vaccination rate, they abandoned their own COVID rules and began following the state’s guidance instead, which included no more masks and a full reopening of everything. Then in August, after the CDC revised its guidance again, and the county council watched as case numbers went up, Montgomery County started implementing its own rules again separate from the state, and brought back the mask mandate. The idea was that the mask mandate would last until there were seven consecutive days of “moderate” transmission, after which time it would automatically be rescinded. This happened in late October, and the mask mandate was rescinded effective Thursday, October 28.
Right after this is where they started to shoot their credibility, and it demonstrates what is wrong with looking at raw case numbers as a metric for determining public policy. On October 30, two days after the mandate was rescinded, they were already talking about reinstating the mask mandate, as they soon returned to “substantial” transmission territory, and announced a return to masks less than a week after they were rescinded, to be effective on Wednesday, November 3 (i.e. six days from rescission to reimplementation).
Continue reading…Categories: COVID-19, DC area local news, Montgomery County, Reddit, State and local politics
Regretting the shot not taken…
20 minute read
October 14, 2021, 10:04 PM
Some of you may remember that a month or so ago, there was a large protest on Reddit about COVID misinformation, targeting a subreddit called /r/NoNewNormal. The idea of the protest was that a number of subreddits “went private”, i.e. stopped accepting submissions, and vowed to stay that way until Reddit management did something about this subreddit, after Reddit management had previously stated that they were not going to intervene. Ultimately, /r/NoNewNormal was banned, and as such, the subreddit and all of its contents were removed from the Internet, as if they had never existed. I have mixed feelings about the whole affair, and I feel like I have a unique perspective on it, because I used to moderate the subreddit, and probably did the most in building it, and then once it caught on, it slowly morphed into something that it should never have been.
First of all, my own stance on the whole pandemic is no secret. I wrote a very long Journal entry about it back in May. In short, I said that vaccination is the only way out of this, and that we should have never fooled around with much of the fabric of society like we did. We should have never mandated masks, lockdowns, closures, plastic shields, social distancing, or any other weird new rules and restrictions. And then when the vaccine became available, get it without delay. That has been my stance more or less from the outset. The entirety of “your part” in this is getting vaccinated. Aside from that, nothing else matters, so leave me alone. I took an exceptionally dim view of people who tried to justify all of these changes as a “new normal” like they expected this to remain a thing for the foreseeable future, as well as playing the “wE’rE iN a PaNdEmIc!1!1!” card as an excuse to be exceptionally rude and/or judgmental with other people who disagree with them.
At the same time, it initially felt like those of us who opposed all of these new rules, ostensibly to curb the spread of COVID-19, were fairly alone in our opinions. The sense that I got was that most people were all in agreement on these measures, and that I was the odd man out. Then I discovered the /r/LockdownSkepticism and /r/EndtheLockdowns subreddits. These were people who thought more like me on these matters, i.e. that the lockdowns and related measures were security theater. I later found /r/NoNewNormal, which was started a little bit after the other two, and I tended to participate in that subreddit most, as it had the post quality of /r/LockdownSkepticism, but unlike /r/LockdownSkepticism, it did not have a “gatekeeper” for posts. I tend not to post in communities that have gatekeepers, because I don’t want to waste my time posting somewhere when there’s a chance that no one will ever see my post based on the whims of some anonymous approver. If I go to the trouble of posting something, I want a guarantee that it gets seen. In any case, /r/NoNewNormal fit that bill, with decent, open discussion and no gatekeeper. It was described in its sidebar as, “The phrase ‘new normal’ is pretty creepy. Let’s talk about concerns with it, and what can be done to resist it.” It was sort of a way to criticize the measures being taken, and also a place to get emotional support for what we were all going through from a sympathetic group of people. In other words, it was built with good intentions.
Something about sitcom endings…
9 minute read
September 29, 2021, 9:44 PM
Recently, I was thinking about the way various sitcoms that I watched ended their runs, and it made me realize that I actually prefer a certain kind of sitcom ending over others. I admit: I didn’t ever think that a preference for certain kinds of sitcom endings would even be a thing, let alone that I would have a preference for types of sitcom endings, but here we are.
First, though, to clarify: I am referring to shows that had a proper final ending, i.e. shows where everyone knew when they were taping the final episode that it was to be the final episode. To clarify what I mean, Perfect Strangers and Full House, for example, had proper final episodes. Everyone knew that the final episode was to be the final episode when it was being made, and it was aired knowing that it was the last episode. By comparison, Family Matters and Step By Step, while both long-running series by sitcom standards, did not have proper series finales. Both shows were cancelled after their ninth and seventh seasons, respectively, and a proper finale was never filmed for either one. In this entry, I am talking about the former case, where the end point is known, and not the latter case, where the final episode was not intended as such from the outset.
And interestingly enough, my preference is for series endings where the characters are set up to just go on and on, where things don’t drastically change in the finale, where we’re left feeling like the characters that we had come to love would be just fine going forward, even though we wouldn’t be watching them anymore. In other words, I prefer the ones where the people involved don’t pull out all of the stops to make a huge grand finale. They may still provide some sense of closure – a capstone of sorts – but it leaves the premise of the show intact.
Categories: Television
Woomy has his own website…
2 minute read
July 2, 2021, 3:59 PM
So Elyse and I recently went hunting online, discovered that woomy.info was available, and snagged it. This is the result:
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta, Woomy
I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…
23 minute read
May 25, 2021, 9:37 PM
On Friday, May 14, 2021, a number of state governments rescinded emergency orders requiring the wearing of face masks in public for people who have had all of their shots for COVID-19, i.e. “fully vaccinated”, on the heels of earlier announcements providing dates for when nearly all COVID restrictions would be removed. And with that, I think that it is safe to say that we’re finally on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that life will return to normal. Ever since the middle of March 2020, when the response to a novel coronavirus started becoming out of proportion to the actual threat, and fear began driving the narrative, I’ve been looking forward to this time, when the world finally started returning to normal.
Truth be told, I took a dim view of the official response to this thing from the beginning. From the outset, my stance has been that almost all of these various “precautions” were unnecessary, and that the best advice for the public was (A) wash your hands at frequent intervals, and (B) be careful about how much you touch your face. This is the same advice that we give about nearly every communicable disease, and it’s served us quite well. I didn’t see any reason why this one should have been any different. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks, limits on gathering sizes, closed restaurants, closed drinking fountains, plexiglass shields, one-way aisles, contactless everything, the constant cleaning and “sanitizing”, temperature checks, and all of the rest of it is all just security theater, i.e. “the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.” In other words, these measures were there primarily to placate a certain vocal subset of people who were afraid, and their fear was then projected onto the rest of us. In the end, though, as long as there was no vaccine for it, there was nothing that most of us could reasonably do to prevent its transmission. It was a problem that was beyond most of our capabilities to solve. With that in mind, I wasn’t worried about it, and trusted that the scientists whose job it was to solve it would come through. For the rest of us, there was only one single action that was “doing our part”. That action was getting vaccinated against COVID-19 when it became available. Nothing else made a bit of difference. But until that time came when a vaccine was available, we just had to wait.
Unfortunately, though, we all know how much people hate to be told that they have to wait for something to be solved, and can’t do anything about it in the meantime – especially when they’re scared. And for a mass hysteria event, we apparently just can’t have that. Unfortunately, telling people to wait doesn’t look good for politicians, whose constituents will demand that something be done about it after the media has whipped them up into a frenzy – especially during an election year when many of them were trying to keep their jobs. You know that people would practically crucify any elected official who got up and said, “I’m sorry, but there is really nothing in my power that I can do to solve this at this time. Until a vaccine becomes available, we just have to wait.” So, instead, they pander to the masses, going out and doing things that make it look like they’re doing something, i.e. security theater. When they make it look like they’re doing something, the masses eat it right up. They stepped in and shut down businesses (and destroyed many people’s livelihoods in the process – see my Gordmans entry), enforced social distancing rules on everyone, and required masks. Everyone was impacted in some way, and it sure looked like something was being done while we waited. Especially with the use of mask mandates, they put the pandemic in your face – and on your face – all the bloody time. As far as the politicians were concerned, mission accomplished.
Categories: COVID-19, National politics, News, Social media, State and local politics
I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for Kevin in the second film…
10 minute read
December 8, 2020, 10:07 PM
Since I’ve been a Disney+ subscriber, I’ve been able to watch the classic Home Alone movies, i.e. Home Alone and Home Alone 2, all over again. And I figure that this seems as good of a time as ever to explore my thoughts about the movies based on this rewatch as a 39-year-old who is now closer in age to the parents than to Kevin. In other words, I’m waaaaaaaaay more mature than I was when I first watched them when they were new.
For those not familiar with the Home Alone movies, in the first movie, the McCallister family, a well-off family in the Chicago area, is planning to go on a Christmas trip to Paris to visit relatives. The night before they are to leave on this trip, two things happen. First, at dinner, youngest son Kevin gets involved in a fight with his older brother Buzz, who is being unkind to him over pizza. That leads to his being banished to the attic bedroom (“the third floor” as it’s called in the movie), for the night. Second, while the family is asleep, high winds cause a tree branch to fall on some nearby power lines, creating a power outage, which takes out the alarm clocks, among other things, causing everyone to oversleep. When the parents wake up, there is a mad dash to make it to the airport in time. In the course of taking a headcount prior to leaving, a neighbor child, who stopped by to see what was going on and chat, was accidentally counted. So, with a good headcount, they were off to the airport. Unbeknownst to them at the time, they had forgotten Kevin. Kevin, meanwhile, wakes up to discover that the family has left for the airport, and he is all by himself. He eventually learns that two burglars are working the neighborhood, and that they are looking to target his house, among others. So he comes up with a plan to defend his house against said burglars, and leads the burglars through a series of traps that should have killed them many times over (but didn’t because this is the movies). Kevin also befriends a neighbor along the way, who ultimately finishes off the burglars with two well-placed blows with a snow shovel, which leads to the burglars’ arrest. While this is going on, Kevin’s mother, after realizing that they had forgotten their youngest, is trying her best to get back home to Kevin, and flies to a number of different cities to that end, and ultimately hitches a ride in a van with a polka group to get home, arriving on Christmas morning. The rest of the family arrives home shortly thereafter, and there is a happy reunion, with no one except Kevin’s knowing what had happened the night before.
Categories: Movies
Going down a nostalgia rathole…
6 minute read
October 11, 2020, 10:29 PM
Sometimes you sit down at the computer, and the next thing you know, you’re going down a major rathole on some obscure topic. For me, this was recently the case when I happened upon some videos about the old Care Bears movies by Nostalgia Critic. They did four such videos: one on the original Care Bears movie, the second movie, the Wonderland movie, and the Nutcracker special. Gotta love the Internet.
I watched all of these movies as a child, and enjoyed them quite a bit back then, considering them to have decent replay value. I watched some of these again more recently, and I kind of regretted it. The problem was that what my child self found to be quality entertainment, my adult self disagreed with that assessment. As an adult, I saw these movies for what they really were: feature-length commercials for toys, with relatively low quality standards. The stories didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, the animation had mistakes in it, and it gave me an overall sense that the people in charge of this film knew that the public would eat it up regardless of how crappy it was. Therefore, quality was something of an afterthought. As such, I kind of wished that I had left these movies as memories instead of rewatching them, only because the new viewing has changed my stance on the films, and I didn’t like my new take on them after rewatching. I was hoping to have an enjoyable experience with an old favorite, only to be disappointed in what I was presented with. I resented the change in my views, and it made me nostalgic for the old memories of the films before I added to them, so to speak. Innocence destroyed. Some children’s movies are still great films on their own merits, even as an adult (Follow That Bird immediately comes to mind), but these, unfortunately, are not.
In any case, watching Nostalgia Critic try to reconcile the events that occurred in the first movie and the second movie got me thinking a bit. For those not familiar, both movies contain origin stories, and the two origin stories conflict with each other in a very fundamental way.
I bought myself a toy…
6 minute read
September 19, 2020, 2:12 PM
Soooooooooo… I recently got myself a toy. I went on Etsy and bought myself a full-size retro arcade machine. Check it out:
Categories: House, Video games
Twenty years ago, Schumin Web started to get noticed…
10 minute read
September 7, 2020, 9:37 PM
It has now been twenty years since Schumin Web really started to get noticed by people. My first four years doing this site, I was having fun, but I always assumed, in those very early days of the Internet, that very few people were actually looking (though I had no way of measuring it at that time). But that was okay, because ultimately, it gave me an outlet to express myself, and I was having fun doing it.
Then, in the summer of 2000, things started to change. I was featured as “Geek of the Month” in the June 2000 issue of the now-defunct magazine Front, a men’s lifestyle magazine from the UK, i.e. a “lads’ mag”. Check it out:
Categories: Netculture, Popular culture, Reddit, Schumin Web meta
Flying over the Shenandoah Valley…
8 minute read
August 27, 2020, 11:25 PM
Recently, Elyse got a copy of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator game, which, among other things, features real landscapes based on map data. However, it’s not without its issues, since, if it doesn’t have good data for buildings and such, it attempts to fill in the gaps by rendering a building, taking a guess as to what kind of building it’s supposed to be. When there is good building data, the buildings look correct, as is the case in much of Howard County, Maryland. Down in Augusta County, that’s not the case, and most of the buildings are rendered by the game, doing its darndest to make a good guess. To accomplish this evening’s field trip, Elyse dropped us at Eagle’s Nest Airport, which is a privately-owned airport just outside Waynesboro. I didn’t have to fly the plane. Rather, we left the plane on the runway, and just flew around with the camera. I didn’t want to have to fly an airplane, after all. I just wanted to have a little eye in the sky. So from Eagle’s Nest, I quickly got my bearings, and made a beeline to Stuarts Draft.
First thing that I took a look at was my old middle school, Stuarts Draft Middle School:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Video games, Waynesboro
Is it time to replace the national anthem?
5 minute read
July 29, 2020, 10:18 AM
An article from the Daily Mail was brought to my attention a while back about a few people who want to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, ostensibly because author Francis Scott Key was a slave owner. Replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” is something that I have had an opinion about for quite some time, though my own opinions about the song as our national anthem have more to do with the song itself, and not for anything that specifically has to do with Key.
First of all, though, for those not familiar, “The Star-Spangled Banner” originated as a poem about the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The poem was later given to his brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, who put the poem to the tune of “The Anacreontic Song“, which is essentially a drinking song that originated in London. If you’ve never heard the tune with its original lyrics, I encourage you to give it a listen, because it’s a good song. Nonetheless, hearing the way bands play the tune with such flourish as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then remembering that it originated as an English drinking song makes me chuckle.
I take issue with “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a few big reasons. First of all, the song is not about the country, but rather, it is specifically about the flag. Another problem with the song is that it glorifies war. And third, we can’t all see a little bit of ourselves in the song. For the first point, Americans have a very strange fascination with the flag. The thing about the flag is that it’s all well and good as a symbol that is associated with our country, but it’s only a symbol, and not actually the country. Thus I find people who get all up in arms about the way people behave in the flag’s presence to be a bit amusing. Our country is far from perfect. We have lots of problems that we need to sort through as a country, and the flag is often used to represent the country, like when people kneel in front of the flag as a respectful way to express various concerns about the direction that our country is taking. But some people treat the flag like it’s a god in its own right, to be worshipped and adored and held on a pedestal, and that’s not at all what the flag is about. It brings some truth to the meme about the flag that says, “If you don’t stand for the special song, the magical sky cloth won’t freedom.” Because that’s about how it sounds to someone like me, who views the flag as a symbol, separate from the thing that it represents. And then as far as the second point goes, we are altogether too eager to declare war on things. George Carlin put it best when he said, “We like war! We’re a war-like people! We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars. We average a major war every 20 years in this country, so we’re good at it!” And for some reason, people love to glorify it. And in regards to the last point, I feel like the song is distant to a lot of Americans. I can’t see myself at all in that song, being about a battle in a war that happened over two centuries ago, and I see the flag in its standard form most often used as a political statement by factions supporting issues that I don’t typically agree with. It all feels somewhat distant to me. It’s not necessarily the way that I would want to see America represented.
Categories: Music, National politics
Remember, do your research before you post…
3 minute read
July 18, 2020, 8:55 PM
Sometimes, people will share anything on social media without giving a second thought to just what they’re sharing. Recently, with coronavirus all over the news, a few folks that I know shared this:
Categories: COVID-19, Social media
How should one behave when responding to an unwanted surprise party?
10 minute read
June 26, 2020, 1:50 AM
I recently ran across an older Reddit post on /r/AmItheAsshole where someone asked the userbase to judge their reaction to an unwanted surprise party. This is what the user wrote:
Hi. So I turned 22 yesterday, and I’ve made it clear to my entire family that I didn’t want a party. In fact, I’ve never had a party, not for my 16th, or 18th, or 21st. I hate attention being on me.
So on Saturday, my dad told me he wanted to take me to my favorite bar and I thought that would be a decent compromise to wanting to be alone. However, when we walked into the door, there was my entire family and friends all standing there and they already had me a drink poured. Because I’d spent the last six months telling my familiy I did not want a party, I just turned around and walked right out the front door and straight back to my apartment (about a 15 minute walk), and I ordered Chinese takeout and went to sleep. I woke up to over 50 texts from various family members telling me how ungrateful I was and how I made my parents cry, and I even got a text from one of my family members who had visited from overseas who I wasn’t aware was at the party. I apologized to him for having a wasted journey, and told him we could hang out one day after work if he wanted, and I resolved that issue. However, the rest of my family now will not talk to me, and my mom is demanding an apology.
So, AITA?
A Facebook comment should not bother me this much…
5 minute read
February 11, 2020, 11:11 AM
Recently, I commented on a post on the Facebook page for WHSV, the local ABC affiliate for Harrisonburg, Virginia, and got some unusual feedback. The original post was for an article about Trump’s participation in the “March for Life“, an anti-choice demonstration held annually in DC on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
Before I continue, though, it seems worthwhile to explain my stance on the matter of abortion. My stance is that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. But ultimately, it’s not my call. What other people do with their bodies is their business, and it doesn’t affect me.
I also believe that abortion is more or less a settled matter, but that it has value for the GOP as a campaign issue. In other words, the Republican Party will talk a big game about it, but ultimately, no one is going to ban abortion. Ever. Why ban it and settle the matter decisively in your favor, when you can bring it up as a campaign issue every election cycle and raise money and get people to vote based on it? To actually ban abortion would be to kill the golden goose, and also hand a massive fundraising opportunity to the Democrats. Maybe I’m a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I imagine that if they were really going to act on that issue, they would have done it by now, during the various periods where the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. That they haven’t done that tells me that they are not interested in settling it.
Categories: Middle school, National politics, Social media, Stuarts Draft
Thinking about the credits music…
5 minute read
September 17, 2019, 9:14 AM
As you well know, I am a big fan of Today’s Special. I certainly know more about the show than most, and have traveled to Toronto to visit a number of different filming locations from the show. And before we get too far along, nerd alert: I’m going deep into the weeds with this one.
There’s one episode, though, where I take issue with the credits. In that instance, I think that the music that they chose to use doesn’t completely fit the mood of the ending. That episode is “Babies“, from 1984. In that episode, we learn that Wanda Willoby, from the Willoby Tale stories, has run away from her home in Possum Ridge and has come to the store, because she feels as though she is being replaced by a new baby that’s on the way. After everyone finds Wanda, they comfort her, and explain to her that her parents won’t love her any less now that there will be a third child in the family. Meanwhile, Wanda, while meaning well, causes a lot of trouble in the store, including accidentally dropping a large display of balls in the Children’s Department, and inadvertently backing into an alarm button in the Computer Room. This underlines the need to get Wanda back home to Possum Ridge as soon as possible. In the end, Wanda realizes that she is not being replaced by the new baby, and the episode ends with the storyteller, a young Lori Chodos (whom you might better remember as Beezus from the 1988 Ramona series), telling everyone how well Wanda handled the new baby after her experience in the store. The episode ends on a high note, though certainly differently than any other episode, since the storyteller had never been integrated into an episode like this before (storytellers typically appeared in standalone segments).
The end credits music used was the slow flute theme, which is the basic melody of the theme on flute with some other accompaniment. This is used on four episodes: “Babies” and “Butterflies” in 1984, and “Wishes” and “Phil’s Visit” in 1986. Of those four episodes, “Butterflies” and “Wishes” have sad endings. “Phil’s Visit” doesn’t have a sad ending per se, but it’s a very emotional episode about alcoholism, and the slow flute ending fits. Out of the four, only “Babies” has a happy ending. “Babies” is also the first episode to use that piece of music. For recurring pieces of music, the first usage is sometimes very different than the other usages. For instance, the music typically used during suspenseful scenes first appears in a relatively lighthearted scene in “Police“, where Sam is attempting to help Officer Hardy look for clues, but ultimately gets in his way. In almost every other instance, the tune is used to help build suspense, such as when a spaceship lands on the roof, or Muffy is rescued after becoming trapped in a utility chase.
Categories: Today's Special