The view from locked-down maine

100,000 unemployment claims filed. That’s the number of idled employees eligible for unemployment: 14% and climbing. The tens of thousands of self-employed, including fishermen, charter boat owners, loggers, owners of small businesses aren’t included in the toll.

As of today, 44 Deaths, total, are attributed to COVID.

In Maine, 150 people have been hospitalized at some point and there were 42 in the hospital as of Thursday, 18 in critical care and 11 on a ventilator.

Nursing homes have been hard hit both in the number of cases and in deaths, and the Scarborough veterans home is the latest example.

The state is still monitoring outbreaks at six long-term care facilities: the Augusta Center for Health and Rehabilitation, The Commons at Tall Pines in Belfast, the Maine Veterans’ Home in Scarborough, Falmouth By the Sea, The Cedars in Portland and Edgewood Rehabilitation and Living Center in Farmington, which was added Wednesday. Collectively, those facilities have seen more than 200 cases and 24 deaths.

Maine, population 1.3 million, is not new York City, yet it’s been as thoroughly closed as that metropolis.

Panic is an ugly thing, and leads to poor decision making.

Singing away the blues

Ignorance doesn't excuse idiocy

Governor of New York tells the unemployed to “go get jobs as an essential worker”.

Twenty-two million people are out of work, health care workers, including doctors and nurses, are idle; where does Cuomo think citizens of New York and the country find these jobs? A meatpacking plant, perhaps? Driving semis?

FWIW’s resident village idiot, the landscaper calling himself Master Hedge, joins Cuomo in his abysmal world of stupidity:

You want to go back to work, be my guest. May I suggest you take a job on one of the Covid-45 floors at Greenwich Hospital - yes floors! In fact, I am happy to drive you there myself.

It’s all well and good for a hedge trimmer to suggest applying for non-existent jobs — for some reason, mowing lawns and weeding flower beds is considered essential, so he can continue driving around town in his new Ford 250 (although where he’ll find the illegal immigrants to actually do that work is an open question; even legitimate farmers can’t secure them), but do he and media star Cuomo truly believe that the answer to a paralyzed, ruined economy is to set office workers, airline pilots, fishermen, physical therapists and musicians to work sweeping floors in hospitals? (Do the hospitals even need more janitors, and can they afford them if they do? Most hospitals, from what I read are suffering financially because all “elective” surgeries and exams — think hip replacements, mammograms, colonoscopies — have been cancelled, cutting off revenue while idling skilled health workers.)

Just last December Joe Biden, responding to charges that his global warming plans would throw hundreds of thousands of miners and oilfield workers on the unemployment rolls said they could “just learn how to code”. Besides being clueless, IT jobs are disappearing, along with all white-collar jobs, and salaries for those who are still employed are rapidly dropping.

None of which bothers those ignorant of microeconmics and how an economy works. We’ll see how they feel when fall comes and they discover that the farmers they depend on for food went bust this spring or held off planting and raising livestock, and grocery shelves are still empty. There’s no code for solving that one.

Editors seem to be a thing of the past

The Reader

Since I’ve been staying off the Internet I’ve turned instead to reading novels, as many as two a day, and I’ve noticed that many of them, especially those published in the past two decades, have numerous plot errors. I’m speaking not of awkward sentences, or inapt phrasing, but errors in detail: a character sets a meeting for “ten to one” on one page, and three pages later the meeting is conducted at ‘ten to five”. Or, coming to the door to answer his murderer’s knock he reflects on his two grown children, out west. The poor guy is murdered, and the investigator comments, “well, at least he had no children we’ll have to notify.”

Minor, but annoying, and it occurs to me that, just as publishers have savagely cut their editorial staff, they seem to extended those budget cuts to mere copywriters, too. I was the victim of the first type of cut; I had two editors at Viking who were championing one of my manuscripts and talking of a two-book contract until Viking’s German parent threw them and dozens of others out of work and no one left had any interest in a new novelist; in fact, I doubt anyone at Viking even picked up the manuscript ever again. But copywriters are so poorly paid that it’s hard to see what their demise contributes to the bottom line.

They aren’t necessarily essential, of course. I had one earnest young woman, probably a freshly minted English major, point out that my claim that the term “au pair” was “just an anagram for nanny, used by placement firms to hike their fee” was technically incorrect, and she proceeded to explain to me what an anagram was. So okay, she didn’t add much to the effort, but when continuity errors are disruptive, forcing the reader to stop and go back, or stop where they are and consider whether, as one author I just read had it, Memorial Day really falls on the 30th of June. A novel, like all fiction, depends on the suspension of disbelief, and errors like these break the spell.

So harrumph.

So what's happening? Nothing

36 Zaccheus Mead — rented at $50,000

There’s really been no significant real estate activity of note recently, and between that absence and my starting away from the Internet because I’m tired of reading about Kung Flu, there’s no material worth posting about.

Rentals are still going strong, especially as spec builders and other disappointed sellers turn to the Manhattan refugee market to stem the bleeding. 36 Zaccheus Mead, which has stubbornly refused to sell at various prices beginning at $10 million, went up as a rental at $50,000 per month, one-year term, and went in 7 days.

That’s typical, and sort of, kind of interesting, but the powerhouse of the Greenwich real estate market, sales, is moribund.

How long will that last? One reason I stopped perusing the Internet is that I kept encountering idiot commenters who seem to believe that the economy is like a light switch, which can be turned on-and-off at will. Of course, those same people have no idea why a light switch works (Michael Moore admitted yesterday that he had no idea where the electricity that powers the electric cars comes from), so it’s no wonder that they believe in magic in economic affairs.

My fear is that the world won’t recover from this disaster for a decade, if at all. In which case, housing sales will be the least of our problems.

So screw it. If I can think of something to comment on that doesn’t trigger a deep mental depression, I’ll do it. Check back tomorrow.

Strange justice

Michael Cohen released from Otisville to join the rest of us in home confinement. Attorney Cohen was convicted of several felonies; what’d the rest of us do?

Question for Chris Murphy

Richard Fernandez asks:

Get woke, go broke

Maybe they should replace the girl with a depiction of savages in action in Deerfield, MA

Land-o-Lakes dumps their Indian overboard

Well of course they do

Open wide!

Democrats demand that Trump stop building the Mexican wall “during this crisis”

“Open the border now!”, Christopher Murphy, told FWIW. Those voters down there need our help and our money, and how can they get that if they aren’t here?

Murphy, who has been busy this week demanding that we provide aid to Iran and defending China against the “ridiculous” charge that it is in any way to blame for Kung Flu, still found time to insist on the opening of our border to more people who will be unemployed and placed on welfare when they arrive here. What a humanitarian.

Help some good kids do good

FWIW reader Doug Zach has written to alert me to a project his two boys have been working on, and asked if I’d publicize it. Happy do to anything that will keep two rambunctious kids busy and safely inside during this fiasco, so ….

(Note that if you don’t need another coffee mug, but would still like to contribute, you can do that at the site, too.)

(Zach):

I wanted to share with you the message and link below re a project that my sons (12 and 16 yo) have worked on over the last week to help the workers at Greenwich Hospital.  As you know, GH has been somewhat of a ground zero site for dealing with the virus in our area and has reportedly seen hundreds of infections including dozens within its own staff.

While the project is pretty "small time" (they were limited in what they could develop in a short period of time during a lockdown), my sons are excited about the possibility of helping the workers at the hospital.   The support fund is targeted at the front line workers who are treating patients with the virus.

Hope this isn't overreaching, but as you obviously have a large following in the community I was wondering if you would be comfortable helping us spread the word.  I know that these are challenging times and that you have a lot to deal with these days so completely understand if this isn't something that you would be comfortable doing.

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>> www.bonfire.com/store/never-was-so-much-owed-covid-19

(Justin & Jayden Zych):

We created our design and this website to express our thanks and support for the doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers that are fighting on the front lines against the COVID-19 outbreak.  Like the heroes of the past, they are selflessly putting themselves in harm's way in order to protect us all.

All donations and proceeds raised will be contributed to the Yale New Haven Hospital COVID-19 Support Fund for Greenwich Hospital which has been established to provide critical help and support for our local hospital workers during this challenging time.  

Thank you for any support that you are able to provide.

Justin and Jayden Zychal health workers. that site, including items they designed themselves, can be found here.