Tagging for half-rim glasses is annoyingly inconsistent on Pixiv, so I ended up doing a comprehensive search for all kinds of eyewear, then manually selecting both kinds of half-rims.

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Sweeping shutdown orders that fail to take into account population density, treating inner cities the same as suburbs and rural villages.

Whimsical decisions on what businesses are and aren’t essential, with no regard for practicality, sensibility, or Constitutionality.

Tons of food being thrown away because the producers and distributors that handle commercial sales have no customers.

Big-box stores allowed to remain open but restricted in what kinds of products they can sell, based on one man’s opinion of what people should be allowed to buy.

Houses of worship threatened with permanent closure unless they “voluntarily” shut down, but not applied to all religions equally.

Senior citizens standing in line at dawn for the chance to buy staples.

A black market in dog-borrowing for a chance to get out of the house.

Low-density parks and beaches shut down, because theoretically a group could show up.

And this is far from an exhaustive list; it’s just what I remembered from the past week off the top of my head.

America is getting an object lesson in centrally-planned economies and petty tyranny, and guess what? 90% of it is coming from Democrats.

Afternoon grocery update

Since I needed a few onions for my weekend recipes, I hit the second-closest Safeway. The only things completely out of stock were TP, flour, yeast, and sanitizing wipes. Everything else was present in reasonable quantity, although it looks like someone’s throwing a Tide Pod party tomorrow. Rice was abundant in packages of all sizes, so much so that there was an endcap display of jasmine rice.

The in-store bakery was keeping the shelves filled, but not getting a lot of business. In particular, the decision to create pre-packed doughnut boxes clearly wasn’t popular, because they made sure every assortment included all the unpopular crap that’s usually left over at the end of the day.

Glen Campbell in his prime:

Unrelated, based on my trips to Safeway and Costco over the past two weeks, I’ve suddenly realized that there’s going to be a metric fuckton of leftover Easter candy on clearance sale soon. Pity my freezer’s full of actual food, since I consider the easter-egg form of Reese’s Cups to be the perfect balance of shell and filling, not that my doctor would approve of a freezer full of candy…

Update

There’s also a nationwide glut of chicken wings, due to the lack of sporting events and sports bars. Many of the producers aren’t set up to handle retail packaging, so they can’t easily divert them to groceries, and it likely wouldn’t help because people are apparently mostly buying main-course chicken parts rather than wings.

So, expect some serious bargains on bulk frozen wings soon.

I find most sports-bar wings overcooked and undersauced, so I prefer to make my own when gathering with friends, but since I’m not gathering with anyone right now, I’m not in the market, either. On the bright side, a reduction in the wholesale price might help improve the profit margin enough for places like Wing Stop to stay in business long enough to wait out this mess.

Duuuhpdate…

Where’s all the yeast? On friggin’ eBay at 3x markup, of course! Damn glad I bought a pound of SAF Red and stored it in the freezer last year.

Because the hipsters all had Corona-chan before it was cool, and now that everyone’s into it, they are so over it.

For the past week or so, the local Safeway has had 6-foot-distance lines at the registers, made with painter’s tape. Today someone was pulling those up and laying down big red professionally-printed floor markers indicating where to stand, as well as little posters explaining the CDC distancing guidelines.

In addition, the glove-wearing cashier and bagger wouldn’t touch reusable bags brought in by customers, and would only bag your purchases if you paid for paper bags (naturally, the state didn’t suspend the law mandating a minimum ten-cent price per bag).

Most of the store had stabilized, with only specific brands being low or out of stock, with the usual exceptions of TP, pasta, rice, flour, yeast, and beans, which were mostly gone. Actually, yeast seems to be one of the most persistently absent items now; I have half a pound in the freezer, so I don’t need any, but either it’s being snatched up like toilet paper, or the turnover is normally so low that it’s taking a while to refill the distribution pipeline.

Or it’s being diverted primarily to commercial bakeries. Which is a distinct possibility, because they had a double-shitload of bread in stock, enough that it looked like a white-bread-themed holiday was coming up. (“Dough Is Risen!”)

I just grabbed a half-price rotisserie chicken and some celery. Most other people seemed to be in normal-shopping mode as well, although the young asian couple wearing bandanas as masks saying something about “the last time we’ll be able to buy groceries” was mildly concerning. I choose to believe they’re just too busy providing essential services to get out much during the reduced shopping hours…

In other news, my severance was direct-deposited as promised today, which even after 41% withholding is still eight (California!) mortgage payments. No sign of Cobra paperwork yet, which is the only monthly expense I can’t predict (for those outside the US, that’s “18 months continuation of your former employer’s health plan, but you pay their part as well as yours”). My regular coverage expired today, but fortunately I had just gotten a three-month refill on my prescriptions before the axe fell.

If hand-washing helps keep Corona-chan at bay, then surely prolonged bathing will provide even more benefit…

[soundtrack]

Related, I was wrong when I thought last week’s episode was the end of Interspecies Reviewers. Episode 12 not only lets Our Horndogs boldly go where they’ve been before, but includes not only the long-overdue demon shop review, but a bonus bathing scene featuring Death Abyss herself. 9/10, would contract again.

And hey, if you’re working from home due to Zombie Apocalypse, then everything’s Safe For Work, right?

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It’s been bothering me for a while now, and I haven’t found an honest number, or a journalist looking for it. WierdDave over at Ace’s place asked the same question last night, and nobody had an answer for him.

We know that San Francisco has a large number of people with poor nutrition and hygiene, no healthcare, a variety of conditions that can compromise their immune systems, unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a habit of disposing of their waste in the middle of the sidewalk.

And the ones who aren’t hipster techbros are long-term homeless who are older and physically debilitated by illness and addiction. Corona-chan has been out there for months now, with one of the major worldwide vectors being travel for the Chinese New Year, and SF has a rather substantial Chinatown.

So why aren’t the homeless dropping like flies?

Unrelated, It’s a Trap!, with bonus hilarious typo.

Today looks like a good day to take a long walk outdoors while maintaining Minimum Safe Distance from the neighbors.

Maybe spend an hour or two sitting out front with the Porch Cat.

Despite increasingly frantic media spin and censorship, polls suggest that people are starting to notice that Trump is the grown-up in the room, and that Biden isn’t having a few senior moments, he’s having a few non-senior moments. The one thing we can be sure of is that if the Democrats take the White House, he won’t be the one in charge.

Talked to my landscaper yesterday, pointing out that after the repair he recently did on the sprinkler system leak (aka “front-door fountain”), he didn’t plug the controller back in, so it hasn’t been watering anything for two weeks. Not a huge issue given the current rain, but this is California, and soon the rain will stop for six months.

This also reminded me that I really, really need to cut out all the dead culms in the backyard bamboo. I don’t let his team do it, because of the time The New Guy topped it like a hedge.

China announced that they’re beating Corona-chan like a rented mule, reporting zero new infections, and as a show of confidence, reopened 600 movie theaters.

Then immediately ordered them closed again. And the test kits they sold to other countries turned out to be worthless crap. And then we found out that when they were still claiming it wasn’t a serious problem the first time, they were ordering everyone in Australia working for Chinese companies to buy all the masks and other supplies they could get their hands on and ship them over, fast.

Streaming video providers are reducing quality to save bandwidth, and cloud providers are running short of capacity. Good thing no one relies on this stuff to make a living…

Inhuman interest news, Scoldilocks first announced that she’d caught a bad case of Irrelevancy, then announced that she’d beaten Corona-chan in a three-round cage match. With luck, this means that she can be bled for antibodies, making her useful to society for the first time in her life.

The same people who banned single-use bags, utensils, and straws are now graciously and temporarily allowing them to be used again, due to the clear benefit they provide in reducing transmission of disease. However, manufacturers and distributors of said products are not necessarily considered essential businesses, and may not be allowed to operate during shutdown-all-the-things.

Democrat mayors and governors across the country have given up pretending to pay lip service to the Second Amendment and revoked it by declaration. In response to this, outraged gun owners have behaved like sensible adults and filed lawsuits.

As reliable (non-Chinese) data becomes more solid, it’s beginning to look like killing the patient to save it was perhaps not the optimal strategy.

Important reminder: prices are signals, and raising the price of something in response to increased demand is not necessarily the result of naked greed and despicable opportunism. If stores had simply adopted a reverse discount for buying bulk, there would never have been a run on toilet paper (“raise your hand if ewwwww”). While they were a bit late to the game, I do admire Costco’s prominent no-refunds signs for anyone trying to build TP forts and water-jug bunkers.

I eagerly await the end of shelter-in-place, not because I have a great desire to get out there and socialize, but because it’s kinda hard to interview for new jobs when nobody knows whether they need caravan guards or IT staff.

On that note, I take great comfort in the thought that while I will have no difficulty finding a new job, the company that kicked me to the curb in the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse will never find another first-rate problem-solver with over 30 years of experience who’ll fix their servers during vacation from a hotel halfway around the world.