It doesn’t matter what gang you belong to — just join one, and work on your finger-snapping, dancing, and singing.
Category: It Happened to Me
It looks like twilight out there, but I took this photo from our front porch at about noon today. Tampa Bay’s under a severe thunderstorm watch until 4:00 this afternoon. Today’s a good day to stay in and get started on your spring cleaning.
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Six years ago today…
Happy anniversary, Sweetie!
Well, it’s the best grocery store sign ever in my opinion, anyway.
My hunch that Trader Joe’s Tampa would be a ghost town last night during Super Bowl LV’s half-time paid off. It was the perfect time to make a quick but important grocery run, as you can see from the photo I took while at the cashier (see above).
This run was important because there are better-than-even odds that we’ll experience a COVID-19 spike, thanks to Super Bowl superspreader gatherings like the one in the picture below, taken in Ybor City on Saturday night…
This is officially the wildest I’ve ever seen Ybor. EVER. 1:40am. pic.twitter.com/7LTC9NvEfE
— Luis Santana (@LuisSantana) February 7, 2021
…and covered in the following articles:
- Washington Post — Thousands of maskless Tampa fans flooded the streets, celebrating the Super Bowl win while risking a superspreader event
- New York Times — In Tampa, Super Bowl Celebrations Bring Superspreader Concerns
- WFTS Tampa Bay — Tampa crowds, dance parties spark superspreader concerns over Super Bowl weekend
- Medscape — Superspreader Sunday: The Super Bowl With COVID Variants Afoot
My advice: Be particularly careful over the next couple of weeks, because a lot of people were careless over the past couple of days.
It was a great morning for a bike ride in Tampa, what with temperatures of 24°C/75°F and plenty of sunshine. Here’s what I saw as I biked past the our yard and got today’s workout.
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It’s Burns Night!
Tonight — the evening of January 25th — is Burns Night, a celebration of the life and works of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. While I have no traceable Scots heritage in my family (it’s Irish, thankyeverramuch), Anitra does, and I’m never going to turn down a celebration where scotch whisky is involved.
You probably know at least one of Burns’ works, whether you realize it or not. He’s behind such classics as:
- Auld Lang Syne, which was originally meant to be sung at Hogmanay, the last day of the year, and eventually became the unofficial song of New Year’s.
- (My Love is Like) A Red Red Rose, one of the standards of romantic poetry.
- Tam O’Shanter, the poem from which the cap gets it name.
- To a Mouse, an actual poem written after Burns was ploughing his field and unintentionally destroyed a mouse nest, which the mice would have needed to survive the winter. This poem contains the line “The best-laid schemes of mice and men /
Go oft awry,” which became the figure of speech we know today. - Address to a Haggis, because if a food ever deserved a poem, it’s that most ugly-delicious of Scots dishes:
Even though we’re still in the middle of a plague and can’t host a Burns Supper tonight, we’ll still celebrate: I’ve got a lamb loin roasting in the turbo broiler…
…and I have some scotch handy. As for poetry — well, I have to write some code tonight, and when done well, code is poetry: Rich, expressive, and saying so much with an economy of language.
Have a great Burns Night, everyone!