COVID-19 Journal, Part Five

My COVID-19 Journal continues with Part Five: First Week of April Edition. You can see Part Four here. I'm thinking of changing the name to Pandemic Journal. I don't know. Anyway, here it goes.

Wed. 1 April 2020

Can a joke be more sad than funny? Let’s see.

Everything is fine. … April Fools’… 

The Dogged Persistence of Fate: Cujo by Stephen King

Cujo is not my favorite Stephen King novel, but not my least favorite, either. This is vintage 70's/80's King. The characters are a bit less vivid for me than his characters usually are, but there's a heavy meditation on fate and chance, cause and effect. And that ending... it's a gut punch, and Uncle Stevie does not pull his punches here.

Weird Retail: Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka

Yeah, things are weird and scary right now, but I'm still reading books. And I'm still reviewing them. Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka was just what I needed right now.

I purchased the book from the author at Worldcon in 2016, and I wish I had read it sooner. Maybe in another dimension some other version of me did. Or maybe it's good that I waited until I needed a funny, weirdly-compelling book to read in this dimension.

COVID-19 Journal, Part Four

A photo from my social distancing walk on Sun. 29 March 2020

Since today is the last day of the month, I figured this was a good cut-off for a series I had no idea I would be starting at the beginning of this looooong month of historic proportions. See my previous entry here.

Also since it's the last day of March 2020, here's a repeat of my entry from March 22.

March 2020: The month the human race came together and collectively sighed, “Well, fuck.”

A Techno-skeptical Approach to Suddenly Online Courses

I see a lot of professors struggling with video lectures for our sudden conversion to online classes, so here's a bit of heresy on my part: video lectures aren't really required in online classes. You don't have to do them. They're maybe not the best use of everyone's time right now (especially ours). 

COVID-19 Journal, Part Three

My COVID-19 Journal continues, this time even more rambling than before! See previous entries here and here.

COVID-19 Journal, Part Two: 80's Metallica as COVID-19 Soundtrack

Here's the second in my series of COVID-19 journal entries. You can read the first one here.

20 March 2020

Somehow the four albums Metallica released in the 1980’s have been in especially heavy rotation in my listening the last few days. They’ve almost become a COVID-19 soundtrack for me.

I was wondering why, so I thought maybe there’s something appropriate about some of their songs. I should preface this by saying that I’m really bad with lyrics, even of songs that I have regularly listened to for 30 years. (Strangely, this does not apply to Weird Al.) Feel free to fill in the gaps with your knowledge of Metallica lyrics.