The Month that Just Won't End.

YESTERDAY I GOT MY SECOND SHOT!

That’s it though, I don’t want to celebrate too much because when I woke up this morning I saw that the Johnson & Johnson roll out of vaccines has been “paused” apparently over concerns about blood clots. To date something like 6.8 million J&J shots have been administered and there have only been six reports of possibly related blood clots.

I know this is how safe science is supposed to work, but damn, that is just a kick in the gut. Having no special knowledge about any of this, I know that when the EU briefly paused their AstaZeneca roll out over concerns about blood clots, they determined that the occurrences of vaccinated people with blood clots was actually lower than in the population over all, so I’m hoping that a similar type of determination could be made in this case. Fingers crossed.

Maybe things had been seeming to be getting slightly better lately and maybe that is why the J&J thing has hit me so hard this morning. I’m a big fan of thinking about second and third and fourth order effects and the ripple effects this could cause in the supply chain and in the culture could really be significant.

I’ve been concerned for awhile now that America isn’t actually going to reach a herd immunity threshold, basically because we are a nation of anti-science assholes, and this is not going to help matters any. People who were on the fence about vaccines because they only believe in handguns and healing crystals, will now have yet one more data point to misunderstand. The irony of course being that a pause like this over six possible blot clot occurrences should actually INCREASE their trust in the way science and medicine work specifically because when there was even a whiff of a problem, the distribution was stopped so more information could be collected. That is the sign of a system working, not the sign of a vaccine failing.

It is also a bummer that no matter what this means the overall vaccine distribution will be slowed to at least some degree and that means we may not hit those optimistic thresholds we’d all been hoping for; July 4th barbeques and life looking normal-ish by Fall. The pause means this whole thing could stretch on longer and we’ll be stuck in this situation where some people are vaccinated and others who want it aren’t and that is not a good recipe for anything.

Here we are in April of 2021 and yet it turns out we still are not as done with March 2020 as we’d thought.

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A Public Service Announcement about Words.

The editors here at standardkink wanted me to remind you that we are not just a website of writing and photos and poetry about whatever the hell it is that is wrong with me; we also provide the occasional public service. So here is some useful information for you to enjoy: Science Based Life

You know all those times when you have been driving to work and suddenly you have to stop your car right there in the middle of the freeway because there are a bunch of rhinoceroses just lounging around in the road? And so you roll down your window and shout at them, “Hey! Some of us have to get to work right now! We can’t all just lay around all day and let oxpeckers eat ticks off our skin!”

And then the rhinoceroses all turn their heads and look at you like you’re the jerk?

But then you eventually get to work, late, and you punch in, late, and your boss is there, eating a ham sandwich and looking at you all like Late again, huh? and you want to say, “Look, it isn’t my fault! There were rhinoceroses again!” but you don’t say any of that because you can’t because you do not know the proper term to describe a group of rhinoceroses? So you just slink off to your station on the assembly line, shoulders slumped and your face all tight with indignation about how small your vocabulary is.

Well the word you need in that situation, the word which will change your life on days such as that, is crash.

A group of rhinoceroses is called a crash.

You’re welcome.

Also possibly useful in your day-to-day life:

A group of monkeys is called a barrel (no joke).

A group of buzzards is called a wake (really, no joke).

A group of owls is called a parliament.

A group of cockroaches is called an intrusion.

A group of hyenas is called a cackle.

There are times when I find the English language to be needlessly frustrating and overly complex, and there are times when I bemoan its lack of the artfulness that produces in other languages things like simpatico or la petit mort or schadenfreude, but then there are times like this when I’m reminded that one of the great things about participating in such a complex living language is that we get ‘clank’ and ‘truthiness’ and we also get ‘bloat’ which is the way I feel after drinking too much dark beer and also what you call a group of hippopotamuses.

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