I have some brussels sprouts in the fridge that I got at a farmer’s market for experimental purposes. My first attempt to cook some was awful, like bitter cabbage. I think I need to cook them longer in the pressure cooker to soften, then I’ll try your suggestion to saute them in garlic. Lots of garlic, to mask the taste. Unless that turns out great, I don’t think I’ll repeat the sprouts experiment.

Anyway, for some reason, cruciferous veggies get a bad rep, probably because they are gas-producers. That said, for nutritional value if nothing else, frozen is great, but I tend to leave the carrots and corn to the livestock and chow down on the lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, spinach and brussels sprouts.

Believe it or not, with marinara and a sprinkling of parmesan, brussels sprouts sautéed in garlic and oregano make for some interesting meatless balls in spaghetti. Cut ’em in half for a soup additive or dice them into your coleslaw.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Right?

Speaking of bread, I think I’m sitting pretty, having recently figured out how to make real yeast-based bread. The flour and other ingredients can keep a long time in the fridge. Not as hard to make as I thought–I think that because people are willing to spend money on bread-making machines, I just assumed it must be horrific, but not at all. Mainly time-consuming, as you have to allow for a total hour and a half or so to let it rise. Making my own, I get to control the flour (whole-grain wheat), and sodium content, making it “heart-healthy”. Add some sunflower seeds and you’ve got yourself a clone of Healthnut.

I’m staying away from canned goods due to the high sodium content. But I learned in a heart-healthy cooking class that frozen vegetables have all the nutrition of fresh, so I’m packing my freezer with bags of corn, carrots, broccoli, etc.

Got a couple weeks of coffee, too. Conventional wisdom is not to refrigerate or freeze coffee, but turns out you can freeze whole beans and it not only preserves them, but seems to improve the taste a bit. I can get wired on caffeine and eat my vegetables like a good boy.

All the precautions got a bit more urgent after learning this morning I’m scheduled for a treadmill test Monday. Gave me pause, but I decided that, on balance, the risk of going into a medical facility during a pandemic is outweighed by the need to get my heart fixed. But I’m not going to like it.

I was out of soup, bread and bagels.

No bagels left on the shelves and the bread aisle was fairly ransacked. I like Healthnut, but that’s all gone. Picked up a replacement loaf of something else.

They do know bread has little staying power … right? Probably dedicated half a deep freeze in the basement to bread.

Gremlins II:
“Canned goods and shotgun shells”

Soup cans were extremely low, but still plenty of those complicated microwavable soups.

Buffalo Springfield’s “Paranoia” song came to mind. Doesn’t really fit, but it was there.

Well, still doing fine. Got plenty of coffee and tea.

Don’t have any Ayn Rand to use as toilet paper, but I do have a huge stack of Bloomberg mailers. The stiff paper stock needs to be soaked a few hours, and with some of ‘em you can peel off the printed top layer; after that they work tolerably well. Mike can do it!

There have been a dozen cases reported in the county here, and one death in a nursing home. A local school district announced it was closing, and was promptly buried in ridicule from rightwingers; a day later they announced that a student had tested positive. Still crowds at Safeway, and little chance to social-distance in those narrow aisles. Still, I have to give Safeway credit for not only not price-gouging essential items, but putting some items on sale, like antibacterial hand soap for 1/3 the list price.

I have food stocks on hand to eat comfortably for a week, unhappily but not suffering for another week. After that I plan to use grocery delivery services to get food delivered.

I talked to Attila the Republican Friday, aka my old man, who’s 92 now. He’s spouting Trump’s lies, but the thing that reassures me is that his mobility is limited, and he simply can’t go out and get infected just to own the libs. But unfortunately my stepmother still goes out to shop and get together with her book club, and that’s a worrisome vector. But at this point I don’t think there’s anything I can do to protect them.

Opinion surveys recently suggest that Frank and Rob probably will flaunt the warnings and put themselves at risk–Republicans are about half as concerned as everyone else, and twice as likely to believe it’s a hoax or hype. But I don’t wish they’d get sick–that’s a step too far for me. But I have to admit it’s easier to feel a twinge of schadenfreude toward the Right, in the abstract, when it’s not people I know. But a name or a face puts it in a different light.

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles.

The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

The German government was reportedly offering its own financial incentives for the vaccine to stay in the country.

The German health minister Jens Spahn said that a takeover of the CureVac company by the Trump administration was “off the table”. CureVac would only develop vaccine “for the whole world”, Spahn said, “not for individual countries”.

We went on our semi monthly shopping trip to Costco week before last and people were already panic buying then… stocking up on bottled water (if water services go out then we have something more akin to the zombie plague than Coronavirus)

They were buying entire cartfulls of water and toilet paper, sanitizers etc… but oddly they were still stopping for the free samples…

Now the toilet paper shortage has hit Maryland, thankfully we have plenty, and in the event of emergency we stocked up on Ayn Rand books to use. N95 Masks have been of course IMPOSSIBLE to find but we had a few (3) from previous house-work purchased long before the Coronavirus.

I flew last week to see family, only to find out after I got there that the CDC had wanted to advise against the elderly flying, but was silenced by Trump. Since I was visiting my mother I really hope I didn’t make a huge miscalculation of the risk. I flew back here Wednesday and of course its hard not to be concerned over every ache and cough, wondering if I picked something up. However, my temperature has consistently been 1-2 degrees below 98.6, so no fever of any sort yet.

We have prepared to spend as long as a month at home. I stopped getting my morning fix of iced coffee at Dunkin donuts… so I get to have the lethargy and headaches even if i don’t have the virus.

If we ever start actually testing, the number of confirmed cases will jump orders of magnitude, and that will really crash the markets further.

Perhaps this incompetent performance will shake Trump’s supporters… maybe… but one lesson from history that has been repeated over and over is that scared people are more likely to support authoritarians… and society-wide emergencies are wonderful excuses for drastic, unprecedented, draconian actions.

But what makes it seem not crazy is that Trump’s calcified base is far short of a majority, even in the quantized maze of the Electoral College. That’s maybe 35% of the electorate. The normal people who disapprove of Trump make up over 50%, though the Achilles Heel is not everybody votes. So there’s this sliver of independents or people not blindly tied to a party and a tiny bit persuadable who are increasingly likely to vote hell no! to Trump.

It won’t take much persuading when the consequences of Trump’s incompetence and idiocy become glaringly obvious.

But I don’t think we should be rooting for incompetency with this. In my age cohort, the mortality rate is 3.6%, based on Chinese data. Then there’s the health riders, adding about 16%. I can’t realistically hope for Trump to suddenly stop fucking up, but maybe something will constrain him to let professional advice get through.

After all, this is the guy who gazed into an eclipse and today continues to shake hands with anybody who can’t get away; he’s known to be two degrees from a carrier. 14 days of quarantine might at least slow him down and let competent people get a word in edgewise.