Covid-19 #3: It's More Personal Than Ever

[Fury Resurrected]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Sure, but aren't they a lot harder to work with while also not yielding as much? 

Work with? What are you doing with these birds? All you do is feed them and they are very pleased to be fed. They’re also not like wild geese and are no more or less likely to be unpleasant or skiddish than chickens are. As for yield, it kind of depends. If you are just yourself or a couple, a few geese will be more than enough eggs for you and they will live longer than high yield laying hens. Also, every single person I know who has chickens (and quail also) has wayyyyyy too many eggs all the time. You just don’t need a ton of birds to have enough eggs and they are safer from predators and happier in groups or with size. And also, geese walking around the farm yard look fucking cool

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

17 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Work with? What are you doing with these birds? All you do is feed them and they are very pleased to be fed. They’re also not like wild geese and are no more or less likely to be unpleasant or skiddish than chickens are. 

Just typical farming stuff, and I'd be interested to see that in person. Not wild chickens, but ducks, can be rather pleasant creatures to come across on a walk. Wild geese are almost always dicks unless you're watching them from afar.

They also shit a lot, and I doubt domestication changes that.

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As for yield, it kind of depends. If you are just yourself or a couple, a few geese will be more than enough eggs for you and they will live longer than high yield laying hens. Also, every single person I know who has chickens (and quail also) has wayyyyyy too many eggs all the time. You just don’t need a ton of birds to have enough eggs and they are safer from predators and happier in groups or with size. And also, geese walking around the farm yard look fucking cool

Well you are definitely right to say that a lot of people doing things on a smaller scale have too many eggs quite often. I guess my limited experience is just being on farms that needed to produce for a lot of people (not any factory farms), and geese were never raised there.

We're getting so off topic here, but you might get a kick out of this. I was watching JP last night, and it always makes me think of the time I was with my dad when I was a young kid and we were getting chased by a mean goose while in a golf cart, and he kept slowing down so that it could get really close to me even though I was yelling for him to speed up.

Must go faster!

[Larry of the Lawn]

I was attacked by a domestic goose at an animal rescue my mom worked at when I was 4 or 5 years old.  It was more funny than anything else, it bit me a bunch but didn't break the skin or anything.  I've only seen wild Canada Geese be aggressive if you're near their nests and on the water.  

Last year I surprised a mother brant with 3 goslings in an alpine stream and she wasn't aggressive at all, just led them away from me slowly, mostly unconcerned.

Chickens on the other hand will peck the shit out of you when the mood strikes them, and their beaks are pointy and stabby and do puncture skin easily.  I always wear heavy pants and high boots when taking care of my neighbors when they're out of town even in August.  

My buddy's have kids wanted to raise chickens for a few years now but he ended up getting them ducks.  

With covid everyone wanted to try to raise poultry this year and all the breeders were sold out back in March and April.  Then about June I started seeing all these ads on Facebook for free chickens.  

[Zorral]

Geeze are the Original Gangstas. Even Ancient Rome gave Geeze RESPECT! Big Respect.

Then ... there's foi gras, which if one is French, is fundamental and geeze are the best for that.  Plus goose fat for cooking and preservation (though maybe French think duck fat is best?), and goose down for clothing the winter bed and the body outdoors in winter.  Not to mention that w/o goose quills we'd never have invented literacy.

 

[BigFatCoward]

28 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Geeze are the Original Gangstas. Even Ancient Rome gave Geeze RESPECT! Big Respect.

Then ... there's foi gras, which if one is French, is fundamental and geeze are the best for that.  Plus goose fat for cooking and preservation (though maybe French think duck fat is best?), and goose down for clothing the winter bed and the body outdoors in winter.  Not to mention that w/o goose quills we'd never have invented literacy.

 

Fois gras is torture, that's not celebrating the goose. 

[Zorral]

19 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Fois gras is torture, that's not celebrating the goose. 

When done industrially it is. But when done naturally as geese enlarge their livers to store energy against winter, it's, well, natural.  

[HexMachina]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

When done industrially it is. But when done naturally as geese enlarge their livers to store energy against winter, it's, well, natural.  

If you know people who produce it that way, great. But the way it is generally produced is through force feeding the duck/goose and then slaughtering it. 

[kairparavel]

Do the geese have Covid-19?

[Zorral]

Geeze are probably more about avian flu? Though whether migratory geese play a role in the spread of that is still unclear.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-in-birds.htm

OTOH migratory geese -- so far? -- w/o covid-19.

https://www.arctictoday.com/migratory-geese-and-ducks-are-free-of-covid-19-researcher-says/

However in relatively recent news concerning geese and covid-19, a flock of surveillance geese were laid off duty due to the school shutting down:

https://collegian.com/2020/03/category-news-campus-surveillance-geese-laid-off-amid-covid-19-outbreak/

 

[lady narcissa]

There are so many Covid-19 stories, its impossible to read them all and so many tragic stories are missed.  So I was really saddened to only learn about the Felician nuns in Livonia, Michigan (near Detroit) today.  Apparently 13 of the nuns at the convent passed away this spring and others were/are ill.  My dad's cousin is one of those nuns and apparently she was so ill that at times she prayed she would just pass.  She has survived but of course there is no idea of what any long term issues there could be.  She is just the sweetest and kindest lady and I am so sorry she and the other nuns in the convent have suffered so.

[Fragile Bird]

7 minutes ago, lady narcissa said:

There are so many Covid-19 stories, its impossible to read them all and so many tragic stories are missed.  So I was really saddened to only learn about the Felician nuns in Livonia, Michigan (near Detroit) today.  Apparently 13 of the nuns at the convent passed away this spring and others were/are ill.  My dad's cousin is one of those nuns and apparently she was so ill that at times she prayed she would just pass.  She has survived but of course there is no idea of what any long term issues there could be.  She is just the sweetest and kindest lady and I am so sorry she and the other nuns in the convent have suffered so.

I followed that story. Our very beloved parish priest got elevated to the senior ranks of his order and in January moved from our church in Toronto to the home base in...upstate New York. Fr. Dan is known as the Iron Friar, because he does triathlons. You can look him up. He was telling me he was out biking and didn’t notice a chain put between two posts on a road he was biking on, hit the chain and went flying and landed on his head. His life was saved by his helmet. He was taken to hospital and kept overnight because he had a bleed on his brain. They tested him for COVID-19 and it turned out he was positive. Basically everyone at the monastery was positive. And at their retirement home for nuns and monks, they also had 13 die, 10 monks and 3 nuns, iirc. That was a couple of months ago.

Very sad.

[Fez]

Looks like we're back to new interstate compacts being announced in the US because of how badly the Trump administration has fucked up...

If only there was some collective entity that states could be part of to organize large scale projects. 

[kairparavel]

4 hours ago, Triskele said:

Realizing that this is nothing compared to the more tragic stories:

 

I needed a minor repair in my apartment which the landlord arranged, and the guy shows up with no mask whatsoever.   I find this really mind-blowing.  He actually, to give him some credit, saw that I had one on and asked if he needed one, and I had spares and gave him one, but still...

And I'm in a city with a terrible outbreak.  

Kinda crazy that he'd show up like that.

We had some maintenance issues that couldn't be ignored in April during our lockdown. Our hot water tank kept turning off and needed the temp controller replaced. Our kitchen faucet started leaking and morphed into a geyser so it too needed replacing. Our maintenance guy wore a mask and gloves while he was working and I just followed up with a quick wipe down of the few surfaces he was in contact with. We've also got a few minor things we're living with now until we can't. 

Finally our building made masks mandatory in all common areas last week and limited the elevator to two people or one household. Very late in the game for that compared to other buildings/property management in DC. 

[Fury Resurrected]

I’ve just been fixing things myself in the apartment and informing the landlord after. I replaced my own damn faucet with one I liked better anyway. No way am I letting randos into my apartment, especially when my precious cat boys could also get COVID

[Fury Resurrected]

1 hour ago, Triskele said:

Per the Fury below, I should have just handled it myself or just said fuck it.  It all happened kinda weird because I just casually mentioned it to the landlord, and they were (it appears) trying to take care of the broken thing, but in hindsight I so wish that they wouldn't have.

The guys who showed up, bless him, sort of got it that he wondered if it was bad that he didn't have a mask.  And of course nothing against this guy or his situation, but what really worried me is that he's hitting it really hard doing jobs all over town but indoors and without masks.  

Only a blistering ignoramous could not conclude that it's statistically likelier that a perpetual, indoors, non-mask guy in a hot spot city is about the most infected guy that's not proven as infected.  

It's a strange thing where I really empathize with the position of workers keeping it going in this shite environment, and I sure as fuck don't want to shut that down for anyone, but on that same not I just cannot believe it's not a standard that no one shows up mask-free.  
 

 

@Fury Resurrected - You do just mean like...regular male felines and not something else?  Sorry that I had to ask.  But I wasn't just asking for me.  thanks in advance.

They are male felines but they are far from regular. I care more about Guava’s survival than the survival of the human race. If a repair man hired by my landlord made one of my cats sick I would blow up the fucking building. I moved out of a boyfriend’s place the same day I moved in because he shot Guava with a spray bottle of water. 
 

But, Young Boring Danzig (in many ways he is much like an indoor/outdoor cat) could also get COVID and that would bother me in that I’d have to eject him from the apartment to protect my feline overlords and my career.

[Luzifer's right hand]

We had a roof leckage about three months ago and you can either access the roof with a ladder from our roof terrace or with a crane as we live in a penthouse apartment. Obviously people entering our flat was the much cheaper option but mask discipline was no problem thankfully. We postponed the painting of the ceiling and wall though. I treated it with anti-fungal stuff just in case but that was it. It is an insurance/landlord thing and I'm not going to spend my own money on it. It looks shit but I can live with that for a few months.

[Larry of the Lawn]

My landlord has been having the exterior of our building totally redone the last few months and a couple weeks ago they wanted to get into our place to remove an electric line running along the front of the building that wasn't to code.  Told them nope, not coming inside.  I ended up cutting it when they persisted and told them they could pull it free.  They also wanted to do a yearly walkthrough and I told them they can wait.  

 

[The Anti-Targ]

The last couple of days our Health Ministry and politicians have been talking about when, not if we get community spread happening here for a second time. One wonders if they do not strongly suspect there is already some community spread gone undetected so far and it will emerge in the next week or so? Or are they just seeing low testing numbers and lack of use of tracing apps and wanting to talk up the return of the virus to wake people up from their complacency and back into using the app and getting tested? I must admit, I have been complacent in using the app. But damn Google keeps close tabs on me, asking me to rate every little place of business I linger at for a few minutes.

My friend got the snuffles so went and got tested, so she did the right thing.

[Zorral]

Historically so many endemic diseases have been allowed to run rampant for reasons that the elite and powerful thought benefited them -- it's always, "It happens to the poor and etc. and it's their own fault.  When it happens to one of us it's god's will, but we stay in power no matter what."

The history of New Orleans and Yellow Fever, is just a single example:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/08/immunoprivilege-yellow-fever-new-orleans-covid.html

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[ . . . .]In New Orleans, Olivarius finds, elites refused to do anything at all about yellow fever for a hundred years. Theirs was a mindset of fatalism and cruelty that reinforced the society’s many human hierarchies; they saw yellow fever as a dangerous rite of passage that the truly worthy would come through. But poorer people who survived yellow fever were rewarded with the worst, most dangerous jobs; white people used Black people’s supposed “natural” resistance to yellow fever to justify the continuation of slavery. And the wealthy often turned profoundly hypocritical when it was their own families in danger. (That era’s elite fled to their summer houses too.)

Olivarius’ book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, which will be coming out next year, is about the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and eastern Texas. Since the work I was able to read was about 19th-century New Orleans’ culture of yellow fever, that’s what we covered in our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.[MORE]

 

 

[Clueless Northman]

The plague of Marseille is another tragic example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Marseille

 

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 In 1720, Yersinia pestis arrived at the port of Marseille from the Levant upon the merchant ship Grand-Saint-Antoine. The vessel had departed from Sidon in Lebanon, having previously called at Smyrna, Tripoli, and plague-ridden Cyprus. A Turkish passenger was the first to be infected and soon died, followed by several crew members and the ship's surgeon. The ship was refused entry to the port of Livorno.

When it arrived at Marseille, it was promptly placed under quarantine in the lazaret by the port authorities.^[7] Due largely to Marseille's monopoly on French trade with the Levant, this important port had a large stock of imported goods in warehouses. It was also expanding its trade with other areas of the Middle East and emerging markets in the New World. Powerful city merchants wanted the silk and cotton cargo of the ship for the great medieval fair at Beaucaire and pressured authorities to lift the quarantine.

A few days later, the disease broke out in the city. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed, and residents panicked, driving the sick from their homes and out of the city. Mass graves were dug but were quickly filled. Eventually the number of dead overcame city public health efforts, until thousands of corpses lay scattered and in piles around the city.

During a two-year period, 50,000 of Marseille's total population of 90,000 died. An additional 50,000 people in other areas succumbed as the plague spread north, eventually reaching Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Apt and Toulon. Estimates indicate an overall death rate of between 25%-50% for the population in the larger area, with the city of Marseille at 40%, the area of Toulon at above 50%, and the area of Aix and Arles at 25%.