More details here, from the paper of a somewhat different record.
Category: Uncategorized
On Sunday, I wrote about my sister, Dr. Eileen deVilla, who is the Medical Officer for Health for the City of Toronto. Simply put, she’s the head of public health for Canada’s largest city and economic capital. This is a big responsibility, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, the work she does in coordinating the effort to combat the spread of COVID-19 is literally a matter of life and death.
I know this from my own experience as a developer evangelist: doing good work is important, but doing it in style gets the work noticed. Our Mom is a sharp dresser and so was Dad, and it’s a lesson that we both took to heart. For me, it’s nice shirts and the accordion, and for Eileen, it’s splendiferous scarves. At every news conference — and she’s been doing one daily for the past little while — she wears a different scarf.
Someone’s noticed the scarves and started a fan Twitter account — Dr. de Villa’s Scarf, or @de_scarf:
Let’s show my sister some love and appreciation for the work she does — let’s get that account past two thousand followers. Follow it now!
Also worth checking out
Want to see Eileen in action? There are plenty of videos featuring her on the City of Toronto’s channel of COVID-19 news releases, which I’ve included below.
Tuesday, March 12
Friday, March 13
Monday, March 16
Tuesday, March 17
Wednesday, March 18
Thursday, March 19
Hunkering down for a hurricane means staying indoors, hunkering down in your house’s designated safe room (the innermost room with the fewest windows, or better yet, without any windows), keeping all interior doors shut, losing power and eventually the food in your fridge and freezer from spoilage, and wind and flood damage.
Compared to all that, social distancing and sheltering in place, with working power, air conditioning, internet, running water, and being able to go outside (as long as we maintain distance) is a cakewalk.
Categories
Adapt, improvise, and overcome
“All I’m sayin’ is that if it does a good job scraping chocolate pudding out of the bowl…”
In these times of social distancing and a possible shelter-in-place order coming soon, it’s important to remember that your local small business needs you more than ever. Support them, and if you’re on social media, share your support with the hashtag #SmallBusinessStrong.
I’m subscribed to a number of Facebook pages for my neighborhood of Seminole Heights, and a number of people have talked about which stores are still stocked with which items. They’ve only talked about more “basic” places: Publix, Winn-Dixie, Walmart, and the like.
I have a suggestion: Check out the bodegas!
There are a number of them in or near Seminole Heights, a couple of which are House of Meats and Huracan, both of which are on Sligh between Florida and Nebraska, just west of 275.
House of Meats, as its name implies, has a lot of meat, some of which has been packaged up, and some you can order straight from the butcher’s counter. You can get your standard beef, chicken, and pork cuts, as well as stuff like goat, rabbit, chitterlings, hooves, and other stuff that might send your more basic friends screaming to run to the comfort of a Pumpkin Spice Latte or a White Claw.
House of Meats. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
Five bucks will get you pretty far here — that got me a pack of eight hefty bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and another fiver got me a pound and a half of pork rib meat.
In addition to all that meat, House of Meats has a great selection of vegetables, especially frozen ones, as well as a lot of canned goods and Latino bread.
House of Meats. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
Across Central Avenue from House of Meats is Huracan, which also has a butcher shop, and a lot of fruit and veg. I get my yellow plantains here.
I read that some of you were looking for eggs and that Publix has been running out with all the COVID-19 panic buying. There are huevos aplenty at Huracan, as well as cheese, some tasty flan, and tres leches cake, too!
Huracan. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
And when it comes to shelf-stable protein, you can’t beat beans, which take up an entire aisle at Huracan. White beans, pink beans, butterbeans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans (a.k.a. chickpeas), pigeon peas — they have these and more, in both canned and dry form:
Huracan. Tap the photo to see it at full size.
So if you’re still stocking up your fridge, freezer, and pantry, give your local small business some love. And if you’re near a bodega but never go, don’t be so basic — break out of your comfort zone and check them out!
And while I’m on the topic of being basic…
Do you know what will get us through the COVID-19 crisis? A combination of smarts, courage, strength, and compassion — all qualities exemplified by the First Family of Superhero Comics: The Fantastic Four!
If you know them only through the movies, you can be forgiven for thinking that they’re not all that interesting a team. The 2005 film (Fantastic Four) and its 2007 sequel (Rise of the Silver Surfer) were in the lower tier of what a film with Marvel characters could be in the pre-Iron Man era, and the 2015 remake was even more disappointing.
Both were still better than the 1994 Roger Corman film, which was made only to fulfill a contractual requirement to hold on to the film rights for the characters. Want to know how bad it was? Here’s the trailer:
Here’s a great (if long — an hour and fifty minutes!) video that a long-overdue look at the Fantastic Four, their history, and how their book changed the world of comics. When they debuted in 1961, superheroes were cardboard characters in spandex, and the Four were imperfect, slightly dysfunctional, error-prone, and squabbled with each other almost as much as they fought supervillains. They were deeper characters — and they were a family.
While you’re stuck at home, practicing social distancing, go and watch this documentary — which is also a sort of love letter — about the Fantastic Four. It’s probably the best analysis of these characters and their story I’ve ever seen (and I spent a lot of my youth at Toronto’s Silver Snail reading Marvel comics). Not only is it well-researched, but it’s well-produced, and there’s some great voice acting, too:
Here’s a compilation that shows how quickly Fox News’ talking heads pivoted from downplaying COVID-19 as something minor or as a ploy to discredit Trump to calling it a very serious health crisis and a matter of grave national importance, now he’s declared it a national emergency:
For more, see this Washington Post piece: On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus.