Celebrating (?) a Year of Pandemic Blogging

 

I started this blog one year ago today. Well OK, there were a couple posts in December 2020, but that was a false start. Regular daily posts started on January 6, 2021. That's perhaps an inauspicious birthday because it's the same day T**** directed a treasonous mob to stage an insurrection at the Capitol.

Anyway, as it says in the "about the blog," I started it because I was kind of obsessing about the  pandemic and reading all I could about it. The blog functioned as an outlet for all the information I was consuming as I was hunkering down at home, and I thought it might be of some modest help to others.

One year ago, I never dreamed that I would still be blogging a year later! Like a lot of other people I was kind of naïve, thinking that with the vaccines coming the Apocalypse would be over in a few of months. Just goes to show how wrong a person can be.

I've enjoyed writing all of the posts (284 including this one) I've done. This is a kind of writing academics don't normally get to do, so it's a nice change of pace.

I'm also grateful to my Senior Foreign Correspondents—SalishSailor, PBR, Maria Iovine, Kaigai, and Cuitláhuac. It's always interesting to hear perspectives from other parts of the world.

Here are a few of my most-read posts:

• Mask Fitters Reviewed: Fix the Mask and Badger Seal is about devices that seal cheap medical masks to your face, making them perform like more expensive N95 masks.
• ADHS Director Cara Christ Stepping Down is about the person who served as chief enabler of our COVIDiot governor's pandemic policies.
• Debunking a Mask Debunker is a detailed rebuttal of some smarty-pants who cherry-picked facts and distorted scientific research to make the bogus claim that masks don't work, thinking nobody would bother to check his sources.
• There’s a Pandemic Marshmallow Test, and States are Failing is about governors in Arizona, Florida, Texas, and elsewhere who rushed to remove mitigation measures as soon as case rates went down, when they knew full well it was a temporary dip.
• Florida is Mad Because the Biden Admin Won’t Let It Hog Regeneron Doses is about Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis grousing about losing unfettered access to antibody treatments needed to save the asses of his anti-vaxxer supporters.

And finally, here are a few of my personal favorite posts, which I like mostly because they are funny and/or ridiculous:

• Masks Work, See for Yourself is neither funny nor ridiculous but contains a video I find very compelling and kinda gross.
• COVID-19 is Ruining Orgies Now is about swingers who had to cancel their annual "convention" plus an anti-gay European Parliament member from Hungary who was caught at a same-sex orgy because it violated lockdown rules. 
• Testing for COVID-19 Via Anal Swabs is about a solution in search of a problem.
• Tricorder for COVID-19 is about a company that claimed to have invented a magic ray gun that would detect an infected person, at a distance, even through glass.
• Nerd Immunity is about people who wear glasses having a slightly lower risk of infection.
• Anti-Vaxxers Think Their Semen Will Be the Next Bitcoin is about one of the crazier things anti-vaxxers think, which is saying something.

Thank you for your patronage. It would be hard to keep doing this if no one was reading. My most fervent hope is that very soon there won't be a reason to write these posts anymore!