Good evening, Kibitzers! I hope everyone is in good health! I have yet to hear of someone I know becoming ill, and I urgently hope a) that keeps up, and b) it’s the same for you.
Things are heating up, though. The list of famous people infected has become clickbait. The latest (that I’ve heard about as I write): awesome Rep. Nydia Velasquez (NY-07), and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo (links are to their announcements). Now, we start to worry who else among House Democrats has been exposed.
But we’re here to put aside worry for a while, maybe! I hope my rummaging on the internet has turned up something you’ll like.
Recently, Sir Patrick Stewart was moved to read Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnet 116, the one that begins “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” to Twitter (and now, to you). Speaking as a person who would buy a ticket to hear him read the phone book, a state of mind I’ve been in for more than 30 years, I was not a bit surprised that his reading was extremely well received. (Sonnet 116 text)
The response caused him to decide to take on a project he’s tagged #ASonnetADay (Sonnet 1 text).
He’s continued to post one sonnet a day to his Twitter feed. He’s skipped a couple (he said Sonnet 5 was “too hard”), but he hasn’t skipped a day. (Sonnet 2 text)
I’ll just link the rest so far, rather than make a mile-long diary:
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Depending on how many Sir Patrick feels like skipping, that puts us roughly into the first half of October with this entertainment. I wish very hard that he’ll stay well and complete them — he’ll be 80 in July, gods love him. Here’s the table of content at MIT Shakespeare for the rest of the sonnet texts, if you like to follow along. h/t to Dok Zoom at Wonkette for putting me onto this.
In the spirit of serious art as befits plague times, tonight’s musical selection is Contemplative Al Yankovic playing Classical Gas (and, I presume, illustrating what kind of view snark can buy you if you do it at a master level.)
Last week, we had the first installment of Crashing Vor’s in-progress documentary about New Orleans and its Coronavirus responses. Last week’s segment, concerning food, is here (its diary is here). The diary for this week, about “the helpers”, is at this link. And here’s the video — feel free to go give him some clicks.
⛈️ 🌊 HURRICANE MARIA 🌊 ⛈️
💥 AND 2020 EARTHQUAKES 💥
923 days since Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico
on September 20, 2017.
Puerto Rico and USVI are still struggling to recover.
Now,a swarm of earthquakes has added to their misery.
PLEASE FOLLOW Denise Oliver Velez and the SOS Puerto Rico group for the latest news about developments in Puerto Rico and the USVI. Denise continues to collect resonant tweets on the subject, and post them in comments daily in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup (APR) and twice weekly in the Black Kos diaries, to make them easy to retweet. If you tweet or FB, please share something about Puerto Rico and USVI regularly.
Find links to help HERE (including earthquake relief).
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🐨 🔥 AUSTRALIAN FIRES 2019-20 🔥 🐨
Enormous bushfires burned 25.5 million acres in Australia during that continent’s summer. The fires forced widespread evacuations, destroying over 3,000 homes, and were large enough to generate their own weather, including fire tornadoes and dry lightning that set more fires. Over 1 billion (with a B) wild animals are now estimated to have died.
Find links to help HERE.
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🚒 🔥 CALIFORNIA FIRES 2019 🔥 🚒
This piece from Wonkette is a pretty concise explainer about how climate change, overdevelopment, and greed are fueling California fires. (Spoiler: failure to rake the forest doesn’t figure into it.) Even your dumbest FB friend can probably get something out of it. Meanwhile, people are still struggling from the previous year’s fires, joined by victims of the 2019 fires.
Find links to help HERE.
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⛈️ 🌊 HURRICANE DORIAN 🌊 ⛈️
Denise Oliver Velez posts what news there is on the Bahamas in the APR thread. This Black Kos thread has coverage of the scale of the damage.
Find links to help HERE.
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🌟 GOTV 🌟
🌟 VOTING BY MAIL: Some states (New Jersey is an example) don’t have vote-by-mail as their standard procedure, but issue absentee ballots with no questions asked. Now would be a good time to check into that for your state and those of your Democratic friends and relations — Google can help. In the case of NJ, one has to download, fill out, and mail in an application. I plan to switch over to automatically getting a mail-in ballot for every election from now on, which is one of the options here. No one who does not have to touch buttons in a voting booth should be doing so!
🌟 POSTCARDING: If you are looking for a way to help and can’t do things like canvassing or phoning, consider hand-writing postcards asking people to vote. These are reminders to likely Democratic voters. It’s easy because you’re given specific talking points from the campaign you’re working with, so you don’t have to think up what to say, and no one will be coming back at you with questions. And if you like to color, you can get creative decorating the cards. Note that you are responsible for buying postcards (and stamps if you don’t use pre-stamped ones.) Postcard stamps are 35 cents each; pre-stamped postcards from USPS are 39 cents each; two different pretty designs. If you can spend a little more, the two postcarding sites below sell their designs; or, searching the phrase “postcards to voters” on Amazon will show you many designs.
To get started:
🌟 PERSONALIZED LETTERS: Similarly, you can do more good than you might expect by writing personalized letters (from a template) to Democrats who are unlikely voters, adding a brief personal statement about why you VOTE EVERY TIME. Studies have shown this can boost turnout by enough to make a difference. As with postcards, you get names/addresses for these voters in targeted districts from the website, fill in the letters, address/stamp/fill the envelopes, but then, you hold them and mail them on Oct. 27, a week before election day! Note that, as with the postcards, you are responsible for buying envelopes, paper (no special paper required), and stamps. First class letter stamps are 55 cents each. (A new Gwen Ifill stamp just came out!)
For more info:
🌟 CONFIRM YOU ARE REGISTERED, REPEAT REGULARLY, AND GET YOUR FAMILY AND OTHERS TO DO THE SAME!!! FIGHTING VOTER SUPPRESSION STARTS AT HOME!
- Many folks here have been surprised to find that their or a family member’s registration has mysteriously disappeared, even though it had been active. Don’t wait until too late to catch and correct this bullshit.
- HEADCOUNT.ORG will direct you to your state’s Department of State/Division of Elections (or similar) webpage, which is the horse’s mouth, as it were.
- Or, google something like “am I registered to vote” plus your state, and go to your state government’s page directly.
🌟 If you can do more, do it! These are just things you can do at home at 3 am. Some of us have the wherewithal to do more, and we should! No one is coming to save us. Act accordingly.
Remember we need the House and Senate, or no president will be able to help us. If your presidential candidate isn’t nominated, please find some downticket races to get excited about. We all need each other.
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