No Popcorn for You!

Posted on by Thor

France is experiencing a huge wave of Omicron infections. To combat the spread of the disease,    the country is going to prohibit Popcorn, candy and soda sales in movie theaters.

These restrictions will go into effect January 3, 2022. The ban of at least three weeks on eating and drinking also applies to theaters, sports venues and public transport. France’s cinemas are expecting a deluge of sales in the final days before the ban takes effect.

French President Emmanuel Macron, is facing reelection in April 2022 so he is hoping these types of restrictions will keep venues open while curbing the spread of the virus. There will also be limits on crowd numbers at public venues, with no more than 2,000 allowed indoors and 5,000 outdoors. The limits don’t apply to election campaign rallies which are always perfect superspreader events.

New infections are higher than they have ever been and hospitals are again overburdened with the sick. Some Cinema goers struggled to see any logic in not being able to indulge their sweet cravings in cinemas or theaters when restaurants are still allowed to serve food and drinks.

In America, a December 20, 2021 YouGov poll of 1,000 Americans found that 39 percent of respondents age 45 to 64 were less likely to attend theaters during the variant surge. 53 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 were not more or less likely to visit.  The major studios have seen resurgent box office for blockbusters like No Time to Die, Dune and especially Sony’s  Spider-Man: No Way Home, which reached theaters in mid-December 2021. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” could become the first and only film released in 2021 to surpass $1 billion at the global box office. Cha-ching!

 

 

Omicron New Year

Posted on by Thor

On a December 30, 2021 morning TV interview New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the ball drop in Times Square  will go on as planned. City Councilman Mark Levine, who chairs the health committee, to cancel it as other cities like Rome, Paris, and Tokyo have done. Levine and others fear that it could become a superspreader event.

December 31, 2021 is the mayor’s last day in office. So this superspreading event will be his swan song. Shortly after the ball drops, Eric Adams will be sworn in as the city’s 110th mayor in Times Square. It will be his job to clean up the aftermath. Adams had planned to have an inauguration ceremony at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn Saturday night but canceled it because of rising COVID cases.

The celebration in Times Square typically holds around 58,000 people in viewing areas, but this year it will be limited to 15,000 people. Everyone will be required to wear a mask and show photo identification. All visitors to the Times Square celebration are required to show proof of vaccination if they are older than 5. Any unvaccinated children younger than 5 must be accompanied by a vaccinated adult to attend.

In November 2021, de Blasio had announced the return of a “big, strong, full strength” in-person New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square this year following its Wack Waving virtual event last year due to pandemic concerns. So are the safety precautions enough to keep New Yorkers and visitors safe? Of course not.

Pediatric Cases Double

Posted on by Thor

Pediatric cases due to Omicron are on the rise. CNN reported that there has been a five-fold increase in pediatric admissions in New York City this month. Nationwide, on average, pediatric hospitalizations are up 48% in just the past week.

The Christmas holidays have resulted in children being infected more then ever before. Across the country, pediatricians are bracing for a busy January.

Dr. Stanley Spinner told CNN, “They’re needing oxygen. They’re needing some other assistance. Even if they’re just really dehydrated, needing IV fluids, most of these kids that we’re admitting for COVID are kids that have respiratory issues — that they need oxygen and they need other support. So they’re going to be pretty sick. You know, you don’t see kids that are not very sick in the hospital.”

Children are an easy target for the virus, Dr. Juan Salazar, physician in chief at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, told CNN.

The Miami Herald reported that, emerging evidence shows children are getting infected with the coronavirus and being hospitalized at alarming rates relative to pre-omicron days, particularly those who are unvaccinated. As a result, kids younger than 5 years old, who are not yet eligible for vaccination, are making up large portions of pediatric COVID-19 surges across the globe. Nationwide, more than 900 children with COVID-19 have been admitted to a hospital as of the week of Dec. 20, up from 800 the week prior, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

 

 

The Gadget

Posted on by Thor

The “Gadget” was the plutonium device detonated at the Trinity Test site in July 1945. Manhattan Project scientists had to overcome difficult scientific and engineering challenges to design and build the Gadget. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.

The Gadget was much larger than the COVID-19 virus but its deadly impact has been very much the same. Over 5 million people have died fro COVID-19 world wide and America leads the world in the number of deaths with over 800,000.

Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki about 199,000 died. A 2016 study concluded that, in the United States’ nuclear weapons plants since 1945, some 107,394 American workers contracted cancer and other serious diseases, and 33,480 of these workers have died as a result. People continue to die from something that they can not see and therefor do not believe.

Omicron is spreading as fast as a nuclear explosion. Omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than the delta variant. This means the infected person can breath out the virus much easier than if it settled deep inn the lungs. That allows that person to infect many others while perhaps being asymptomatic. “Strikingly, Omicron was 4-fold more infectious than wild type [the original version of the virus] and 2-fold more infectious than Delta,” Garcia-Beltran and colleagues wrote in their study.

In one case two fully vaccinated people were isolating in a hotel across the hall from each other. Each tested negative prior to isolation. Neither person left their room and yet they both became infected with Omicron. It is believed that the brief moment hotel staff opened one door and then the other to deliver food was when the virus spread from one person to the other across the hall. It may take less of the airborne partials to start an infection. It is more important than ever to wear a well fit KN-95 mask and to stay further than six feet from others indoors and out. January will result in an amazing nuclear wave of infection.

Crealde Thumbnails

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These are examples of the quick little thumbnail notes I jot down for students taking my Crealde Urban Sketching class. We work outdoors documenting the Crealde Campus. The notes usually apply directly to the sketch that the student is working on and I offer a quick simplification of the process.

My next series of Urban Sketching classes start January 30, 2022. They are every Sunday from 9:30Am to 12;30PM.

Learn to sketch from subject to the environment. Classroom sessions will focus on sketching clothed models and progress towards sketching the model and classroom environment. Learn how to incorporate storytelling into your sketches in our location sessions. These trips to local venues will challenge you to use your sketchbook the way a photojournalist uses a camera. The six-week goal is to produce finished sketches using pencil, pen, and watercolor within two hours. Skill level: Intermediate

Required Supplies

#2 pencil with an eraser, 05 and 08 micron pens, Stillman and Birn 9 x 12 inch spiral bound sketchbook (Alpha or Epsion series), Travel sized watercolor pallet (mine is a Windsor Newton with 14 color pans), Pentel water brush (water goes in the handle), Black Prismacolor pencil, Compact artist stool

I am always pleased by the wide variety of artists who take the class. My goal isn’t to get each artist to draw exactly like me but to encourage them to express themselves in their own unique style. If Artists start carrying sketchbook where ever they go, the world will have so much more to see than iPhone photos.

Crealde Urban Sketch Class

Posted on by Thor

Each Sunday I teach an Urban Sketching class at Crealde School of Art. We sketch outdoors on the campus and lately the weather has been gorgeous. I appreciate the class because it gets me out of my socially isolated studio where I focus on the horrors of the pandemic every other day of the week.

This sketchbook is over 35 years old and  I am intent on filling it up. The pages are tissue thin so the pages curl up when I apply watercolor. Partly because I know this will look like a throw away sketch, I can be looser and more spontaneous. I also work faster so i can walk around and give notes to each student.

I always wear my mask, even outdoors while teaching since I never know when a student might approach with a question. One of my student is a serious about staying masked as I am, which I appreciate.

We just finished the series of classes and the next series will begin, January 30, 2022.

Crealde Urban Sketching Class

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My Crealde Urban Sketching students have this week’s class off because of Thanksgiving.  I have 3 talents student an we work outside doing sketches of the campus.

I always do several sketches as well to show them my approach. I work quickly so that I can spend plenty of time walking to each student and offer sketch suggestions. I offer insights on perspective composition and how to work quickly.

The student in this sketch returned for a second round of classes. As she explained, the first time she suspected some of the information washed over her. Explaining the principles is far different that applying the principles in each sketch. That is why we spend most of each class sketching.

From the first class each student does finished watercolor sketches. They quickly realize that covering a sketch page with watercolor washes takes more time that expected.  It is rewarding to teach adults since they are more in tuned with the idea of slowing down and taking their time to finish each sketch. My main challenge is always to give people the time to truly see. Society moves at a breakneck pace and an artist needs to slow down to put things down on the sketch page. When my students are working outside I allow them to unmask but ask that they put it back on when within 6 feet of anyone else. I have notice them forgetting to mask back up and when they do I stay at least 22 feet away. That is about 4 dead bodies lying bed to toe.

COVID Christmas

Posted on by Thor

More than 2000 flights were canceled prior to Christmas Eve. Operational snags at airlines are coming as millions are attempting to fly in spite of rising coronavirus cases. The TSA says it screened 2.19 million people at airports across the country on December 23, 2021, the highest figure since the uptick in holiday travel started a week ago.

Just last week executives from airlines were testifying in front of a congressional committee and said that being inside an airplane is one of the safest places to be. One of those executives was diagnosed with COVID-19 the next day. You have to admit this virus has a sense of humor.

Later Thursday night, Delta Air Lines also canceled flights. The airline has canceled 130 Christmas Eve flights, according to FlightAware. Delta said the cancellations are due to multiple issues including the Omicron variant. It has to be a bit of a sigma to be an airline that shares the name of one of the deadliest of the COVID variants.

In the blink of an eye Omicron now accounts for 75% of most COVID cases in America. We will all be exposes in short order. Each American has to chose for themselves what risk s are worth taking to celebrate the holiday season. Do I plan to attend a company Christmas party? No. Any plans for flying to visit family were abandoned weeks ago since not everyone in the family is vaccinated. If you judge by the long lines of people waiting for tests in New York City it is clear that what most people want for Christmas is a COVID test. President Joe Biden is planning to offer at home tests for free, but those will not be available until after this tsunami has blown through.

Merry Christmas folks. Stay safe.

Fighting the COVID Ghost

Posted on by Thor

Falcons owner Arthur Blank said, “At some point you feel like you are fighting a ghost, you don’t know where to swing.”

Giants co-owner John Mara seemed equally resigned to the situation. “It seems like it’s never going away,” he said.

That’s why the National Football League (NFL) needs to devise protocols that acknowledge the fact that the pandemic has become endemic. It’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s not a one- or two-year thing. The league needs to figure out how to better manage things. The protocols need to reflect more common sense, more of the knowledge that has been developed over the past two years.

The NFL also needs to give a crap about the protocols it adopts. If a quarterback isn’t vaccinated, he can’t be allowed to ignore the rules, as Aaron Rodgers was.

Much of the 2021 protocols seemed to be about P.R. and politics. The goal needs to be finding a way to minimize the spread and to get players who catch COVID back in the game safely. Players who ignore the protocols need to be let go. It is looking like those that get infected with Omicron are showing less serious symptoms this could be a good since idiots like Aaron Rogers will likely get infected and this milder variant will give immunity. It will not however make him or the league any smarter.

Common COVID

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Everyone will likely be exposed to the Omicron variant in the coming weeks. If Omicron is far less deadly than Delta then that could be good news in this ongoing pandemic.The good news is that it will boost the immunity of anyone infected. The bad news is that we don’t know if long COVID symptoms will effect those vaccinated.

It can infect people who are vaccinated and even some who have been boosted. We are not sure yet how it affects the unvaccinated. Many hospitals in America are already full due to Delta.

A Cambridge, Massachusetts based data analytics firm nference conducted a study, yet to be peer-reviewed, that said the variant likely acquired at least one of its mutations by picking up a bit of genetic information from another virus, possibly one that causes the common cold. This does not mean the Omicron variant has “mutated into the common cold,” as some are claiming online. The Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant is significantly distinct from seasonal coronaviruses (HCoV) that cause the common cold.

Vaccinated people infected so far seem to have milder symptoms, based on reports from South Africa. Even of it is lets say 60% milder, and it is 300 % more infectious, it could still create more severe cases. Fully vaccinated people infected with the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus could end up with super immunity to the coronavirus, according to new research from Oregon Health & Science University. The research — published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association — found that breakthrough infections create “a robust immune response against the delta variant.” Researchers said the findings indicate that “the immune response is likely to be highly effective against other variants as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate.”

It does seem that COVID is here to stay and the world will have to continue to face ongoing waves as lone as people refuse to get vaccinated.