Need context? Here’s some:
I’ve managed to not put on the “Quarantine Fifteen” by doing a 10K bike ride at least five days a week since March. In fact, I’ve lost a little weight over the past couple of months. I’m fortunate to be in a fantastic neighborhood for cycling — lots of tree-lined streets with interesting houses to look at, the Hillsborough River cutting an inverted “U” through the area, and parks all over the place.
The 2020 Saharan dust cloud has also made the weather a little drier than usual. Normally, during this time of year, we get either hurricanes, or the typical tropical “rainy season” weather where the day starts sunny, followed by a torrential rainstorm in the early afternoon, followed by sun. More than our fair share of days has been mostly sunny. It’s made for some pretty good cycling.
These photos are from a place I’ve written about before: Lake Roberta. I took them from its east side, looking west.
I think it’s a bad idea to ride with headphones on, but I sometimes like listening to podcasts while I bike. So I do the next best thing: I pop my phone in my backpack’s “iPod pouch” and just play it through the phone’s speaker.
I’m currently listening to Over the Road, a podcast where host “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer, a trucker who’s also a musician and a great storyteller, tells the stories of his fellow long haul truckers, highlighting their experiences and explaining how they’re coping in a world that’s changing as a result of new technologies, new regulations, and changes in the way people live.
And in case you need to be reminded:
Last month, this painting appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel (here’s the international edition, in English), the most-read news magazine not just in Germany, but Europe as well. Its title is Der Feuerteufel (the firestarter), and its subtitle is Ein Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand (“a president sets fire to his country”).
To find out more about this magazine cover, see Ad Age’s article, Germany’s Leading Newsweekly Decries Trump’s Incendiary Approach.
For the next five weeks, I’m teaching an online Python class from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. That means that on those days, I eat dinner a little earlier, which in turn means that I’ve got to have it prepped earlier.
Luckily, I have all sorts of tricks for this sort of schedule, one of which is the mid-afternoon veggie roast: Cut up some vegetables, drizzle with oil and seasonings, roast in the oven or turbo broiler for 45 minutes. It doesn’t take long to put together, and it doesn’t need to be attended to while in the over, allowing me to continue working.
Last night’s vegetable was a whole head of cauliflower in curry powder (I used Badia’s “Jamaican style” curry), truffle salt, and ghee.
While tasty, it doesn’t look pretty close up. It’s layogenic (pronounced “LIE-o-jennic”), a Filipino/English hybrid term that was BBC’s “Word of the Day” back in January. It means “attractive from a distance, but not close up,” — the “layo” part comes from the Filipino word for “far” or “distance”.
May 20, 2020: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, toeing the Trump Administration’s line of pretending everything is fine, castigates the media for overhyping the coronavirus threat.
An excerpt from his rant:
You got a lot of people in your profession who waxed for weeks and weeks about how Florida was gonna be just like New York.
“Wait two weeks! Florida’s gonna be next! Just like Italy. Wait two weeks.” Well, hell, we’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened.
So we’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative, it challenges their assumption, so they gotta try to find a bogeyman. Maybe it’s that there are black helicopters circling the Department of Health. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Two months after the rant:
Nice going, Governor DeVirus.