I’ve been a fan of Mike Doughty since his Soul Coughing days and his new Ghost of Vroom project brings back the his earlier found art/jazz collage vibe to effectively comment on the craziness of navigating a pandemic from an small room in NYC.

For years now, comparisons of the US to individual European states has troubled me. Primarily because in terms of GDP, population, and geographic size, the individual US states make for a more apples-to-apples comparison than the entirety of the union.

So, why in the midst of this global pandemic are we still comparing US as a whole against smaller countries?

The ‘a-ha’ I had this week that helps me better understand the lopsided comparison:

In Europe, the growing conditions for beer ingredients - barley, oats, wheat, hops - are comparatively pretty narrow relative to grapes and other cereal grains. While beer traditions, and very intriguing ones, do exist outside of England, Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. I’m focusing on these 4 countries for right now as they’ve been the most influential on our current beer styles.

After MPR read the headline, the 9 year old immediately asks:

“Hey Google, what’s third degree murder?”

#MyHeartKeepsBreakingAgainAndAgain

For their mental health, we’ve been strongly and persistently encouraging the teenagers to make in-person plans with their friends. Provided they stay outside and don’t climb on each other - we’re cool.

Ensuring in-person social interaction is far tougher for the elementary school kids, as coordination still happens through parents.

Turns out, asking about comfort levels of previously banal activities with a parent of your kid’s friend inside a global pandemic is more awkward than asking, “Do you have guns in the house?”

According to Kevin Stroud over at The History of English Podcast, the reason we speak English is in part due to the Black Death. The plague was an indiscriminate killer, peasants, scholars, royalty alike.

With work shifting to video conferencing, rather than in-person meetings, we’ve lost the signaling of accessories - fountain pens, fancy bags, stickered laptops. So, inspired by the back of my iPad (that no one sees any more) and NASCAR paint-jobs, I created my own fake background for Zoom.

Unfortunately, without a physical green screen, the MacBook doesn’t have enough reality distortion to keep me from disappearing into the matrix .

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