Events

Getting my first Pfizer-Biontech SARS-COV-2 vaccine today comes on the heels of Chicago setting a new one-day record for vaccine administration: The 7-day daily average of administered vaccine doses is 112,680, with 154,201 doses given on Wednesday. Officials also say a total of 6,707,183 vaccines have now been administered. Illinois next week will make 150,000 first-dose appointments for coronavirus vaccinations available at 11 state-run mass vaccination sites in the Chicago suburbs and at area...

I got my first Pfizer Biontech jab this morning, and will get the second one in three weeks. So far, no side-effects. And Cassie seemed to enjoy being with me for the portions of the morning involving the car, though she didn't seem all that pleased with the car itself. In related news, I've booked a flight for mid-May. I feel better already.

Today's Republican Party has gone so far from an actual policy-making political entity that one wonders if they see their own self-owns. Right now, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said so many nonsensical things about President Biden's key proposals that I have trouble taking him seriously. OK, I have more trouble lately. As Paul Krugman pointed out this week, Republicans oppose Biden's proposals because they don't want him to succeed. But this strategy has run into the reality of 75%...

As the US approaches 4 million Covid-19 jabs per day, I finally got my place in line. I get my first dose on Thursday morning, and the second dose three weeks after. If all goes according to plan, I should have maximum resistance to SARS-COV-2 by May 13th. For those of you keeping score at home, that will be 419 days after Illinois first locked down on 20 March 2020.

Humorist Alexandra Petri didn't write a humor column today: There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is...

Via Josh Marshall, Pfizer has halted vaccine shipments to Israel because political chaos there has made the company worry about getting paid: Pfizer has halted shipments of coronavirus vaccines to Israel in outrage over the country failing to transfer payment for the last 2.5 million doses it supplied to the country, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Senior officials at Pfizer have said they are concerned that the government-in-transition will not pay up and the company does not want to be taken advantage...

You read that right. The UK has so few dogs available for adoption that organized crime has stepped in: “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the field for 35 years,” said Wayne May, police liaison with Dog Lost, Britain’s largest lost-and-found dog service. May said thefts reported to his organization have increased 250 percent, year-on-year. “That’s over 400 cases, just in England, just reported to us,” he said. “This isn’t a dog that’s run off. This is a reported case of theft.”...

It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon. So, posting may be light this weekend.

A few articles caught my attention this week: Jennifer Rubin says the GOP's opposition to literally everything President Biden has proposed is killing their popularity. The New Republic, in collaboration with the Chicago Reader, tells the story of the last remaining men's hotel in Chicago. NPR host Steve Inskeep describes his difficulties getting his adoption records from the State of Indiana. Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Alcarón mourns the loss of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory last December....

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud: Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline. The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the...