Elemental Starlight

Let me tell you the epic story about a cat named Salem. Salem is an all black cat who was left behind by previous tenants in our building, and has been adopted as the building mascot. Salem’s daily care and needs are taken care of by one of the tenants but he roams at will wherever his little cat heart desires, including outside.

Now to the story…

I am prompted to look out my front window this morning to an unusually vigorous cacophony of angry magpie calls to which I see an epic catventure in action.

Salem the Cat  is booking it across the road towards home, dead magpie in his mouth being chased by a very large hoard of angry magpies. 

He gets past the corner of the house where I can’t see any more and I hear a giant THUNK of him vaulting through the milk door he uses as a cat door and a decided increase of screeching from the angry magpies something I did not believe possible. I was wrong.

Soooooooo

My downstairs neighbour is most likely going to come home to a dead bird in his apartment tonight

I learned that this is not the first casualty in Salem’s one cat war against the magpies. He has apparently done this a minimum of 2 other times.

In the book industry, Amazon is Goliath, the giant who overshadows everyone else. But there’s a new David on the scene, Bookshop.org.

It doesn’t expect to topple the giant, but it has launched a weapon that could make Amazon’s shadow a little smaller, and help local bookstores fight back.

Bookshop.org, a website that went live at the end of January and is still in beta mode, is designed to be an alternative to Amazon, and to generate income for independent bookstores. And, perhaps more importantly, it seeks to give book reviewers, bloggers and publications who rely on affiliate income from “Buy now” links to Amazon a different option.

Profit from books sold through Bookshop will be split three ways, with 10% of the sale price going into a pool that will be divided among participating bookstores, 10% going to the publication that triggered the sale by linking to Bookshop.org, and 10% going to Bookshop.org to support its operations.

with every purchase, they tell you how much you’re putting toward independent booksellers, which is fun and cute:

it’s also amazing for authors! i’ve been asked a couple times about the best way to support my books. this site is now the answer. it reports sales figures to the NYT and Bookscan, a type of tracking that helps authors hit bestseller lists. and even better, authors can set up affiliate pages, and if you buy through those pages, we get an additional 10 percent of each sale on top of royalties. this is a massive deal!!!

for reference, many royalty rates are in the 6-8 percent range. so if you buy through Bookshop author affiliate pages, authors get more than twice as much from sales of their books, with no additional cost to you.

the site is still in beta, but it also has a fun interface where you can make book lists for favorites or recommendations, sort of like goodreads (except better, because goodreads is owned by amazon).

In addition, Influenza sufferers would stop being contagious about five to seven days after first showing symptoms, but with COVID-19, you may not stop being contagious for weeks after fully fighting off the infection—that is, if you even start having symptoms at all.

Even if you don’t develop symptoms of COVID-19 while carrying it, you are still highly contagious, and it’s believed that you may be even more contagious than those who do show symptoms.

Originally, tests were showing around 60% of carriers did not show any symptoms, but it is now apparent that even up to 90% of carriers may never even know they’re infected without being tested.

They don’t have anywhere near the amount of resources to test everyone for it, even just the people who are showing symptoms and actively seeking to be tested, let alone asymptomatic carriers who wouldn’t have a reason to believe they’d need to be tested!

This is a disease that by its very nature is impossible to properly track and contain.

Once you had Influenza and survived, you would become immune to it—HOWEVER, with COVID-19, not only is there no evidence that people who have survived become immune to reinfection by it, but there is actually significant evidence to the contrary! Beating COVID-19 may not keep you from getting it again!

And even if you do beat it, COVID-19 leaves you with permanent lung damage and in some cases vascular damage, kidney damage, liver damage, and neurological damage, which may last for decades if not the rest of your life! Which, of course, means that should you get infected with it again, or infected by something similar, your body will have a much lower chance of successfully fighting it!

COVID-19 is not Influenza. It is several times worse than Influenza, and it is people’s failure to understand this that will cause the further impending waves of it to be much more deadly than the second waves of Influenza.

Officials are now saying that they expect COVID-19 to last into 2022, with a theoretical vaccine only being developed and mass produced by 2021, and that’s if things go well. There’s no guarantee that we’ll actually find a vaccine that soon, or be able to produce and distribute it widely enough to completely curb successive waves of it.

And, if course, that’s not accounting for the fact that there are different strains of COVID-19, and a vaccine that works on one may not work on another, just like yearly flu vaccines.