Category: Uncategorized

Yes, Charo. I saved the best for last.

Johns Hopkins

If you want to get your hands clean enough to perform surgery, follow the steps in the Anatomical Surgical Hand Scrub video by Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Department of Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Control:

Gordon Ramsay

He should’ve given his hand-washing lesson as if he were delivering one of his famous dressings-down to an idiot sous-chef:

Alton Brown

Not only do I steal a lot of my public speaking and presentation tricks from Alton Brown, but I also follow his science-backed cooking and cleaning advice:

Maria Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza, a.k.a. “Charo”

If you’re at all familiar with 1970s television shows, you’ll recognize Charo, who’s still delightfully bonkers as ever. In this video, she’ll forever alter the way you pronounce “Mississippi” when counting out seconds passing, and teach you the “Cuchi cuchi” method of measuring time.

At this point, I feel that it’s necessary to remind people that beyond the broken English/deeply dippy persona, Charo is an accomplished guitarist who studied under Andres Segovia:

Thanks to Dare Obsanjo for the find!

If you think these are satire, you haven’t been watching the news lately…

Tap the poster to see it at full size.

Tap the poster to see it at full size.

Tap the poster to see it at full size.

Tap the poster to see it at full size.

Goldfinger’s eponymous debut album is one of my favorite albums of the 1990s. There isn’t a single “dog” track on this album — I enjoy the throw-away tracks, even the one with the drummer’s phone call audition one. And while it’s a corny crowd-pleaser that even Goldfinger themselves don’t like to play, Here in Your Bedroom is my go-to song on the album. In fact, it’s one of the first songs I played on the accordion on that fateful Saturday when I first took it out onto the street.

While the current stay-at-home order wasn’t how I imagined the spring of 2020 would be, it has had some unexpected upsides, including this one: Goldfinger putting together a quarantine version of Here in Your Bedroom from their separate stay-at-home studios!

For comparison’s sake, here’s the 1996 video for the song:

Tap the photo to see it at full size.

While reading a number of articles on the potential for CPAP machines to be used as makeshift ventilators for less-severe COVID-19 cases or as the basis for conversions into full-fledged ventilators, it occurred to me that a nose-and-mouth CPAP mask like mine could be used as a makeshift mask for going out on essential trips.

They’ve got a lot going for them: they form a tight seal, they’re easy to clean and can be reused, and you can connect a bacterial filter to the hose attachment (which opens downward thanks to gravity, further reducing the risk of droplet contact). I was in the process of ordering a replacement mask anyway, so in addition to a new mask, I ordered a fresh cushion for my old one so that Anitra could use it.

Here’s how the mask and filter fit together:

Between the mask/bacterial filter combo and the fact that the airway faces downward, I figure that the rig makes for some decent droplet protection.

The no-prescription workaround

The tricky thing about getting a CPAP mask is that like the CPAP machine you attach it to, it requires a prescription. However, there’s a workaround that just about every online CPAP vendor makes available to customers: while ordering a complete mask requires a prescription, ordering CPAP mask parts doesn’t, and the parts snap together quite easily. Best of all, the cost of ordering parts is about the same as ordering a complete mask.

My new mask is a RedMed AirFit F20, which sells for $120 in kit form at CPAP.com. A cushion for my old mask, a Quattro, sells for $54. This isn’t a cheap solution, but if you already have a CPAP and have some old masks, you might be able to repurpose them for the plague.

In case you were wondering:

• The red thing in the center column, bottom row is a tabo. To borrow a line from Hasan Minhaj, who used the same phrase to describe a similar item called a lota, it’s “the manual transmission of bidets.”
• The stuff in the lower right corner is White Flower oil, which I would describe as “China’s answer to Vicks Vaporub.”