If you’re feeling unwell, McMaster is advising you to NOT go to a hospital because they no longer require masks there, and they don’t want people in there spreading their diseased germs around. Wha…?? Some doctors and nurses are excited to ditch their masks, despite the potential harm that could come
Continue readingAuthor: Marie Snyder
A Puff of Absurdity: Transphobia is the New Homophobia
Natalie Wynn, one of my favourite YouTubers, came out with a 2-hour long video, basically a feature-length film, her first in 10 months. This one is on J.K. Rowling, whom she discussed two years ago (and I wrote about here if you need to catch up on the controversy). This time she goes
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Still Hopeful
I went to a book talk via Zoom tonight to see Maude Barlow talk about her recent book, Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism. I last saw her in person, seven years ago, when she worked to try to get Nestle out of Guelph. This time her book
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: At What Point is Inaction a Form of Eugenics??
This impressive and prescient thread worthy of saving is from Miles W. Griffis. He interweaves a speech from Vito Russo, AIDS activist, back and forth with current headlines on Covid-19 to show how easily we write-off a group of people when they become inconvenient: Vito Russo’s 1988 ACT UP speech
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: We’re Not Ready for This
I’m waiting to write my last exam of the term. It’s supposed to open at 8:00, and we have 90 minutes to write it, online, multiple choice, open book. I set aside 8-9:30 am today to write, and asked my kids to stay in their rooms until I finished. Except
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Age of Absurdity
We’re skipping gleefully into the most absurd period in history. The philosophical notion of the absurd came from Camus. It grew legs with existentialists after WWII when the youngest and fittest men were sent to be slaughtered in war. The streets of Paris were full of widows and grieving mothers
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Looking for the Enlightened
The season finale of The Last of Us sets up a great deontological v. teleological conundrum with the big question (tiny spoiler), which ends up being an episode-long trolley problem: Is it right to kill one person if doing so could save multitudes? (The brilliant Just an Observation explains how the entire
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Liquid Life and the Myth of Government Protection
Liquid life is a concept some Buddhist cultures had of the young and old, typically those under 6 and over 70, whose lives weren’t seen as quite solid due to the greater likelihood of death at either end compared to the middle. This book discusses, among other things, some of the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Where We’re At: It’s Still Here!
Several people have been screaming into the void about how Covid works, how bad it is, and what we need to do to stop it now that we’re dealing with another dominating variant: We’re on to Arcturus now, guardian of the bear. I’ve collected three threads here explaining the current situation and
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Step By Step: Engulfed by a Lack of Sensitivity
Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and Polish historian, made a ten minute speech in December 2021 that has become a more and more timely reminder to pay attention to how we think about harm to one another. He explains the slow and slippery way a government can get us to accept
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Being Athletic as a Pre-existing Condition of Long Covid
Novelist Alisa Lynn Valdés connected the dots between her personal observation that athletes are getting Long Covid (LC) more often than sedentary people and capillarization. The number of small blood vessels a person has in their muscles (capillaries) can triple in elite athletes. I think she’s on to something: Long
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: International Long Covid Awareness Day
Now we have a delegated day, today, to remind the world of the number of people who have lost their lives or livelihoods to this ever-mutating virus. Worldwide, about 1 in 1,000 have died so far, and almost 1 in 100 are living with long Covid. That’s not 1% of
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Where is My Mind? On Freud and Neuropsychology
Freud got some things right, and this isn’t a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It’s a lot like Aristotle’s science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It’s still pretty impressive how far they got as they
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: In the News…
A couple unnerving things happened recently that I’m just catching up with. First, the CDC quietly added an update for guidance around certifying death from Covid last February. The controversial bit is here: And then the NACI announced that bivalents are waning in effectiveness, and people really need two doses,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Understanding Long Covid
A couple days ago, Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish biostatistician, was at a White House roundtable discussing Covid when he said, “We knew about [infection-acquired immunity] since 430 BC, since the Athenian plague until 2020. Then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know again.” Many classicists
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Whale and Love
I used to write about films a lot, and then I just stopped. But for the first time in a long time, I’m compelled to say something about a film, mainly because so many reviews I read or watched seemed to get it all wrong. I have to wait for
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Marooned in Anomie
Jon Mooallem wrote a poignant piece in the New York Times yesterday about a project that’s been recording people’s experience with the pandemic since March 2020 over individual Zoom calls. His words, “raise the possibility that when we say the pandemic is over, we are actually seeking permission to act like
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: World Health Network’s Safe Schools Initiative
The World Health Network has a 30 minute video out about Safe Schools with a small panel of people looking at how to make schools DavosSafe! Michael Bailey, co-founder of Indoor Air Care Advocates, talked about ventilation and filtration. They published a parent advocacy guide to help parents advocate for
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Dating for Dogs
Lots of people discredit the Myers-Briggs as just a horoscope, but it’s significantly different and can be useful in recognizing that we’re all innately different kinds of people. This awareness can help us get along in this world and maybe even find love, or at least a better roommate. Dividing people
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Times They are A-Changin’
Doing another degree has been eye opening to see how much university has changed over the past 20 years since my last Masters. TL;DR: It’s a lot more like high school! I’m doing it at the same time as my youngest is in first year (at the same university even!),
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