I rarely quote Trump here. Maybe I never have. But this is worth quoting. "Our death totals, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We're very proud of the job we've done."#

We'll know it's time to lighten the lockdown when Steve Kornacki can do a weather report on CV outbreaks around the US, with confidence. Science is really good at that these days. Weather reports are amazingly accurate these days. We have to get just as good with tracking virus outbreaks.#

I did a little checking after posting this, and it seems request is not being deprecated. Rather, they are freezing it. Totally legit. But it's safe to keep using it, which is exactly what I plan to do. If they ever take it out, I'm just going to fork it and add it back. I have enough complications to manage in the messes functionality I've created. #

BTW, if you're writing a Node app that needs to read a feed, I recommend davefeedread. I wrote it, and I use it. It's stable and pretty well debugged. 💥#

Earlier today I went grocery shopping and was surprised at how well-stocked the store was. They actually had hand sanitizer and Lysol cleaning stuff. And I was sure all the meat would have gone, given the problems with meat processing plants, but not so. The checkout line was ridiculously long, but moved quickly. All in all a gratifying experience. PS: I was really scared to do this. #

On Twitter it was suggested that I change the titles of the items in the Cuomo Briefing podcast feed so each item has a unique title, that it might start working properly in Apple's podcasts app on my iPhone. Note the items in the feed have proper guid elements, so there should be no need to use the title as a guid, but it seems that Apple's podcast app does, because when I changed the titles of the five most recent episodes, voila -- they show up in the Apple podcasts app. This was suggested on Twitter by OG podcaster Madge Weinstein. Bottom-line: there appears to be an easy-to-fix bug in Apple's podcasts app on iOS.#

Problems with the Cuomo podcast in Apple's podcasts app? I have subscribed to it, of course, but it hasn't updated since the Boris Johnson special. But it keeps floating to the top of the list, and indicates that it has updated, but no new episodes show up. Yesterday I saw a complaint from a user about this. What's going wrong? We go to the trouble of updating this podcast feed every day with the latest Cuomo briefing, but if people aren't hearing it, what's the point? If you have a comment please post it here on Twitter.#

Sarah Cooper: "Having the Blue Angels fly over the city for healthcare workers is like when I ask my husband for help around the house and he buys me flowers."#

It's fair to say that the old way of producing video entertainment is now as toxic as nursing homes, airplanes and meat plants, yet there's more demand than ever for video entertaiment. Something's gotta give. Real actors showing up in virtual environments, sort of a flip of GEICO's excellent gecko spokesmodel? I have no idea. But this could be as profound a transition as the switch to sound in the 1930s (also a depression era). More animations with human voices like the incredibly excellent Bojack Horseman? #

Jay Rosen is speaking clearly to the journalism industry again. He's gotta stop doing that (just kidding). As a former entrepreneur, I have a bit of advice myself. Listen to your users. This, surprising to me, has been something journalism explains they don't do, presumably because it would taint their objectivity. They're humans like the rest of us and the reason is probably more that it complicates their already-complicated lives. But the answer to their problems imho lie there. Every user of news will tell you that they aren't going to subscribe to every news org they're interested in. There must be some profitable relationship short of total commitment that will get our money into your bank account. Yet that's exactly how the industry has configured itself, as if every pub has a reasonable shot of being funded this way. Listen to users, followed by a negotiation -- that's where the answer lies. Also change your mission now to saving lives. As I've said before if you save my life I'm going to shower you with money. I'm going to drown you with money. And it's never been easier to do that, btw. Changing times call for new ideas. #

As Bob Dylan once wrote, "The answer is blowing in the wind."#

An example Node app that runs a shell script.#

Last night on @maddow we learned that the CDC is updating their website without announcements. Maybe we should have some early warning systems on that -- I bet the search engines know when there's a change on the CDC site. We could solve this problem.#

Every time I run "npm install," it reminds me that request has been deprecated. One of the most ridiculous ideas I've heard. It's as if the word "the" in the English language were deprecated. Anyway, I wonder if someone has submitted a package to NPM that perfectly emulates request. I predict it would be the most popular package ever.#

BTW, the trouble with Dropbox turned out to be their Linux install requires components that aren't there on a headless Ubuntu installation. When the software tried to update itself it failed, and that was the end. I'm guessing not many people use Dropbox on headless Linux?#

I got a Kinsa thermometer on April 14, almost two weeks ago. I've gotten in the habit of taking my temperature at the beginning and end of every day. I feel like I'm doing my part to support an early warning system. I just noticed they have a way to export your data. I was hoping it would be a nice XML or JSON format, but it's a log file format. Not sorted by anything I can see. I don't have any code that can process this format. But it was there, and that's worth something. I'd give it a B-, but most apps don't give you a way to export your own data, and for that, A+. Also, they should change their store from saying it's pre-order -- there's nothing pre about it. You can buy it. It takes a few weeks to get there because the product is so popular. #

Cecily Strong for VP. #

If Trump will sideline Fauci, Biden should start a nightly briefing with Fauci as the moderator. How about a little competition -- raise the bar on the information the people get. Give the press an option not to cover Trump's misinfo.#

Awful truth, we need to get to the point where a new Covid infection is a stop-everything event to contain the outbreak. It’s awful because the country has not even begun down that path. We have to have a real government to even begin.#

Doctors in PPE's are a new class of hero. #

I recently found out there was a season 3 of Narcos. Wow. That goes on my list. Also, I thought this season was the last for Better Call Saul. Imagine my surprise when I got to the end, and nothing was resolved. Okay, I'd better survive this virus thing so I can find out what happens to Lalo and Kim. #

On April 14, a single bottle of hand sanitizer arrived via USPS at my local post office. Ordered via Amazon on March 14. $11.99. Shipped via China Post, China's equivalent of the USPS. It arrived in Hawthorne, CA on March 24 on its way to my kitchen in upstate NY. #

A sound of summer. Frogs. (Yes, and crickets too.)#

This woman speaks just like our president. #

Hold on here's another woman who speaks like Trump too. #

Trump has to keep escalating the outrage to keep your attention. Look at how much outrage it takes now. 50,000 Americans dead. What's next?#

More men die from Covid than women. Older people and people with other problems like heart disease, diabetes, hypertension make up a large share of the deaths. From that, we conclude that people in these groups are more likely to die than not if they get the virus. But that's not a logical inference. I'd love to hear the numbers expressed the other way. If you have some or all of these conditions, and you get the disease, what's the probability that you will die.#

Also, are there degrees of herd immunity? Does the rate of infection go down as more people are immune? #

Elizabeth Warren's oldest brother died of coronavirus on Tuesday.#

Working my way through the last season of Better Call Saul. It's great, but the most striking thing are the ads. When the first show aired, on February 23, there was no awareness of the virus in advertising. As the season progressed, at times I forgot I was watching something from nine weeks ago. An ad for a bank that has turned itself into a coffee shop. Whoa that's optimistic, I thought to myself, and then realized this was the old reality. The full series makes a very interesting window into the transition our culture is making. I'm reminded of when my mom died, we didn't do a video walkthrough of the house we grew up in. Didn't think of it, because it seemed normal to be there, not realizing soon this would all be gone, and in the future it would be anything but normal. Now we're repeating it on a much much larger scale. When this show turns up on Netflix it won't have the ads, and we'll miss the transition, which is in every way as interesting as the show, which as I said is fantastic. #

Republican will be one of the most reviled names in human history.#

Ever notice how I put images in the right margin of posts on Scripting News? That tradition goes all the way back to the mid-90s. I'm always looking for evocative images that aren't too large, that have empty backgrounds. Imagine how happy I was when I discovered the Wee People font. A collection of silhouettes of people gesturing in easily identified ways. I admit I'm making this post extra long so there's room to put one of the images in the right margin. Please forgive me. Now I wonder which one I should use? Let's see. How about a person of indeterminate gender talking on a phone? #

Frontline: Coronavirus Pandemic. #

I was going to write a bit about Kobol vs COBOL, an ancient programming language which is in the news these days. Kobol is the homeworld of the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica. I've watched the full series twice. But the synopsis on the Wikipedia page is riveting. I often forget how simple and beautiful the overall structure of the plot is. BSG plot. And of course the execution. I'd have to say, even though it has cheezy sets and special effects, it's pretty much a perfect multi-part scifi drama. I just watched The Expanse, which is also good, but BSG is still tops with me. #

A friend told the story of a hospital in upstate NY that's losing $1 million a day because they have only a handful of Covid-19 patients. Not sure of all the reasons they can't take other kinds of patients now, but there is a statewide ban on elective surgery. #

They buried the lede. A pulse oximeter may be more essential to saving Covid patient's lives than respirators. They're cheap, and widely available. Huge.#

One of the big advantages Glitch has over Heroku is that everything is done in the browser. It's such a big difference you don't even see it at first. The thread is here. #

Pet peeve: Corporate robo calls that don't take into account that my calls are screened. So I get to hear them say goodbye when I connect. Come on your computer can learn how to talk to mine. #

I took a survey class in programming languages in grad school, and COBOL was of course one of them. It was in the mid-late 70s when people were still creating new systems in COBOL. It was one of the first attempts to make programming like English instead of like programming, so managers could do it, you wouldn't need programmers. To anyone who really knew about programming, it was obvious that this would not work. People would want features for which there were no human language equivalents, like looping and recursion, nesting, local variables, procedures, closures, objects, async, etc etc. We keep discovering new concepts for which you can't say "this is just like.." COBOL may have been the first programming language to reject programming, but it was not the last. Later attempts include Hypercard and AppleScript. I'm sure there were many others. I've always been most comfortable with Algol-like languages, C, Pascal, JavaScript. My own invented language, UserTalk, is Algol-like. There is a grammar somewhere for UserTalk. I'll find it later. 🚀#

Here's the new American of the year. #

My mind insists, over and over, that today is Saturday.#

Today is April 20. It's a day like no other. #

Chuck Shotton suggested I look at the Node package require-from-string as a good basis for plugins for Node apps. I had done something similar with plain old require. Here's a Hello World app I wrote to get an idea how I might use it. #

I'm going to be the last person to emerge from the shutdown. First I want to see how the rest of you do. When are you coming out? Poll.#

A thread from a epidemiologist saying there isn't enough awareness of the damage the virus causes people who survive. It's like the mass shootings. They only count those who were killed. But some people are so damaged they never get to resume anything like a normal life. We'll be living with the (still unknown) after-effects of Covid-19 for a long time to come. #

It appears the first mention of the virus on my blog was on February 17. I suggested a question about it in the upcoming debate.#

It may be bad for the economy but overall it's good that there is lower demand for oil.#

I record shows I love so I can binge-watch them on my own schedule. Last night I watched the first episode of season 5 of Better Call Saul. It was good of course, but the commercials are so dated. Like reading a magazine from the 1950s. The episode aired Feb 23. #

Shake Shack returning the $20 million is like Cubs fans throwing opposing team home runs back on the field. It's American. It will make you beloved. Keeping the money is unfortunately also American. But reviled and deposed. #

Prediction: The Trump-inspired protests will fade out within about 14 days.#

My server on Glitch keeps on rolling. Even with the startup delay it's nice and snappy. Still thinking about where I want to go next. I have to figure out how to get more bits of code running on one instance. #

The next in a series of eye-opening NYT pieces from Donald McNeil about the coronavirus. It's mostly about the long miserable slog it's going to be, with one bright spot. "In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu." An example, the majority of Roosevelt sailors with Covid-19 are asymptomatic. #

If we had a vaccine tomorrow and it was quickly distributed to everyone in the world, or we found another way to eradicate the virus, would you go back to the way you were living before? Could you?#

This may be the best thing on Twitter now. You can thank me later. #

Question about Zoom. I know there have been concerns about its security. Is it safe to install on a Mac? Please answer on Twitter. (PS: I used the browser version for the meetup and it worked well.)#

A couple of nights ago I dreamed I was still a smoker, and felt guilty about lying to everyone that I had stopped. In the dream I'm going from store to store looking for my brand. It's so weird, I quit 6519 days ago. Not one cigarette in all that time. So why in my subconscious do I feel like a loser for cheating?#

Maybe the best end of any movie ever. It's now the header image here. I didn't like the picture that was there before, but spring hasn't happened here yet, and until then I have nothing to replace it with. Thelma and Louise should be the default header here, as it is the permanent one on my Twitter feed. BTW, I've been meaning to say this, if you want to get the most out of this blog you should have an account on Twitter so you can, for example, go there and vote in the polls. Twitter has a useful set of functionality, and they let me use their API and identity system for $0. Pretty good deal. You don't have to do it of course. 🚀 #

Look at the units on the Y axis of this typical graph of the rate of deaths in various countries. If it were drawn to scale, you'd barely be able to see the ones near the bottom. I don't think most people notice this and are misled.#

Here I am at 20, facing the camera in the loud jacket. My mom is on the right, grandmother on the left, brother with his back to the camera. My father probably taking the picture. This was at my college graduation in 1976 at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. I wrote about this picture in 2009. #

I understand we're at risk of losing journalism. I propose something grand, like what we're doing with the economy. Merge all the different news orgs in America, like the states are linking up at governor level, and then put your heads together and stop doing stuff that makes the problems worse, and get busy with the new reality. Stop duplicating efforts, chasing gotchas, going through the loops with Trump, and making users give each of you their information just to give you money. Reduce friction, build a new journalism we can all be proud of. #

Poll: Why does Trump want to be re-elected?#

Poll: Suppose the US magically “reopens” on May 1, you will..#

If they were going to choose a special Time person of the year, I'd nominate The Governor. We're depending on them, given who the president is, and they appear to be coming through, setting an incredible example by working together against the odds and against the norms of the last 30 years. #

I ran a poll early this morning asking people to pick one of four women as Biden's running mate. They were Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams, in that order. Not surprisingly Whitmer is getting the fewest votes, but I think she's the best choice. Midwestern governor. Very composed, take-charge person, but also compassionate. Young but not too young. She's under incredible pressure, and apparently doing well. Maybe I like her so much because I don't know much about her. It's possible. But it's her moment now, and there's something to be said for pulling the in-the-moment energy into the campaign. He can't choose Andrew Cuomo because of his pledge, but Whitmer might be even better. Now could she campaign and deal with the problems of Michigan, which are substantial. That might be a very good way to campaign, actually. And she seems to pass the most important test -- she would be a good chief executive for the country if she is needed for that. #

Lawrence Tribe says we're all going to have to get the virus and a lot of us will die. I don't know if that's true, but life isn't over until it's over. We're still here. There's sometimes a surprise around the corner. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. #

I went grocery shopping today. Took a couple of hours all-told. The supermarket was reconfigured with new protocols for moving through the aisles and waiting for checkout. Not too crowded, and almost everything I needed was there. Pasta is now the item in short supply. They had lots of cleaning products, I chose three, but they would only let me buy one. I got Clean Freak because I loved the concept and the name. Yes packaging and branding still matter, even in post-apocalypse America. The only bacon they had was maple-flavored. Never heard of such a thing. On coming home I fried some up, and now the whole house smells of maple syrup. Not a good thing imho. Also -- they had toilet paper. Everyone I saw got some. #

It's almost worth risking one's life to travel by airplane just to have the post-apocalyptic experience that air travel has become.#

Yvonne spotted an Oakland A's mask at Costco in Richmond. #

Poll: Which is the worse disaster, Trump or the virus?#

When will we see branded promotional masks?#

Covering Trump's nonsense is worse than not-news, it blocks news. Takes up space that should be used by actual news. #

New version of LO2 with a nice-to-have command that downloads all your outline and configuration files on my server onto your local computer. Now you can do a full backup whenever you like. Please use it regularly. If you have questions or comments, please post them here. #

Demo of new Download My Files command in LO2. #

What Trump will do is not impotent or unobvious. He decrees (say) May 10 to be the date to re-open. States that don't re-open won't get any stimulus money. If you won't help yourselves, he'll say, why should the Federal government help you? That will "make sense" to his base as they rush off to their deaths. What happens after that, I don't imagine Trump has thought through.#

Power user tip. If you're running Dropbox, esp on a server, if your disk space gets low, empty the cache. #

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?#

The pricing model of online pubs is as if each is publishing a whole magazine or newspaper, as they did before the web. I'm sure that's still their internal model, how their organizations work, but it's not the way we read them. We read an article here, another one there. Their pricing is utterly inflexible. It's a shame to waste a crisis. We need information like never before. And they need money because advertising is evaporating. Can't we arrive at a compromise? #

It would be smart imho for them to finally allow us to subscribe centrally so we didn't have to create accounts on each site. They have been unwilling to budge on this. I bet there's a ton of revenue out there they can have if each of them would stop trying to be world dominant.#

Milestone. Last night, my first dream that incorporated the logic of social distancing. So apparently my subconscious has learned about this. #

We need a fundamental attitude shift from journalism when there is a complete lack of leadership from the president. Stop covering him, and instead find expertise that knows what we should be doing to save lives, and tell us about that.#

I wonder if McConnell has any understanding of systems? He might not have a clue. All the judges in the world won't matter if the country world is reduced to rubble.#

It's really sad what the trumps did to America.#

Stop everything and watch this presentation by Prime Minister Johnson of the UK. Incredibly powerful, credible, a perfect call for the British people. Now maybe he can knock some sense into the Republican leadership in the US. Also doesn't this make you wish we had an NHS in the US. I thought this was such a noteworthy speech we added it to the Cuomo podcast as a "special enclosure."#

Worth mentioning. All six key swing states—FL, NC, AZ, MI, PA, and WI—already allow their residents to vote by mail, for any reason. So Trump doesn't have to try to destroy the US Postal Service. #

I'm getting the Kinsa thermometer tomorrow, but I already have my pulse oximeter, it came via Fedex on Friday. It's that thing they put over your finger that says how fast your heart is beating and how much oxygen is in your blood. My numbers are good. #

Silicon Valley hasn't changed in all these years. #

LittleOutliner v1.8.12. Lots of fixes, tweaks. #

PagePark v0.8.6. Mirrors, and a new feature for plugins. #

I am listening to this song a lot these days. "Burn down the mission If we're gonna stay alive. Watch the black smoke fly to heaven. See the red flame light the sky." A theme song for this era. We're going to have to burn it down. We've been putting it off for too long and now are living with the consequences. That's why this hurts so much, we created this moment as much as the Tea Party people did.#

It took about a half hour to realize the thermometer I got in the mail today was not the Kinsa thermometer and that's why I couldn't configure the Kinsa app to talk to it. D'oh. God is goofing on me today. I ordered the thermometer in March as a test to see if the world would still be here in May. Haha joke's on me, it is. PS: It got here a month early.#

I have mixed feelings about our demonstrations for health care workers. It could be interpreted not so much as appreciation as "please save us." The health care worker might resent this. I would. Why couldn't you heed the warning sooner? But it's good because it's a reminder to ourselves that there will be no simplistic solution to this problem. The applause is for us, for having the resolve and discipline to stick with it. And knowing no matter how painful it is for us, we have it easy. #

There's a myth that every dollar the government spends is from taxes, i.e. taxpayer money. Far from it, It's at least partially invented money or borrowed money, esp when it comes to bailouts and pointless wars. It's all good when the money is invested in a positive way, that creates growth, or value for the citizens of the country, now and especially future. Education is one great example, health care, and esp public health (as we're learning now). When we burn the money by blowing up far-away countries, or give the money to big companies for no reason, or the super-rich, it does nothing for us, or really for them. It's like scattering the money to the wind. #

Here's a new service for LO2 users. Use this kind of outline for documents you want to add to or refine over time. FAQs, guidelines, instructions, screeds. Definitely not for blog posts, since there's no time element in it. There's lots of depth to this kind of outline, and it's easy for me to add new features. So that's an extra bonus. If a small community of writers develops here, I will have incentive to show you how to use the other features, and perhaps add new ones. #

I chose this route for rolling out rendering for outlines very deliberately because it didn't include blogging features. It's focused on writing. There are already countless ways to blog. But there's a common feature set between the this.how docs and Old School blogs, so any skills you pick up here can work for blogs too, if there's ever a need to go that far. I have found this format useful even though I have a blog. So when you think -- I should write some guidelines for this, or a FAQ or directions for cooking a type of bread, writing that isn't of-the-moment, then you can use LO2 to write and revise it, and send people the URL of the my.this.how rendering of it. #

If the airlines thought they would lose all that money from a shutdown, instead of being bailed out, maybe they would have pressured the government to act more aggressively against the virus.#

McConnell had polio as a child, it left him disabled for life. I grew up after there was a vaccine, but just barely. The vaccine came out in 1954, I was born in 1955. So there were polio victims in school when I was. There was a girl, Bridgett, who played with us in a wheel chair.#

It's pretty obvious that Cuomo should be the Democratic nominee. What's happening now is a much more rigorous vetting than the primary debates (a reality show).#

I have a question about Apple podcasts. The new Cuomo podcast shows up in my iPhone podcasts app. Screen shot. It also shows as having updated. But when I look at the page for the podcast it only shows episodes through Tuesday. Today is Friday. Is there something wrong with my feed? I want to get this working properly. I also noted that Sunday and Monday are missing too. They are most definitely in the RSS feed. #

I've heard it said in the news that the virus is "peaking" in the US. Pretty sure that's not true. It may be peaking on its first go-around in NYC, but elsewhere it's just ramping up. #

I remember how hard it was to stop smoking in the years before I actually did. I would make a little progress, and feel okay I can have one now, I've been good, and then I go right back to two packs a day. Getting rid of the virus is going to be like that. Just when we feel like we have it licked is when you have to double-down on the commitment. It's so easy to let up, relax. And go back to the thing that was killing you. #

2002: "Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward."#

Yesterday Jeff Bezos visited an Amazon warehouse and a Whole Foods supermarket. The video would have been hard to anticipate just a few weeks ago. Why is he walking around like that, alone, not shaking anyone's hand. If that were a scene in a movie it would win an award. Foreboding. Ominous. Weird. #

A couple of months ago it started to bug me that I didn't have a DVR for my TV, haven't had one since I gave up my TiVO when I left Massachusetts in 2004. Now my cable setup is Spectrum, because that's the only cable supplier where I live, and their TV package, including HBO, Showtime, and the rest of the stuff. I used it mainly for HBO, MSNBC, Law & Order and the occasional Knicks game. I set out on a quest for an alternative, and the best I came up with is YouTube TV which I am now subscribed to. The other choice was Hulu, which I have used and liked. Not sure which is better. Anyway, I got my DVR, so I can watch last night's Maddow when The Trump Show is on in the early evening. And I don't need sports, because there aren't any. And I use the HBO app, along with Netflix and Amazon. It's a good setup. #

The Fake Friends of Facebook are getting so freaking obvious and numerous. Every day I get ten or twenty friend requests from "people" who are obviously made-up. Here's a screen shot of some of them. I'm amazed Facebook's algorithm can't filter these.#

We can't wait until 2021 for Trump to leave office. Too many Americans will die needlessly. I don't want to be one of them, do you?#

According to this emergency room doctor in NYC, Covid-19 is a new disease. Not ARDS. The disease is like being dropped at the summit of Mt Everest without acclimation. He says the standard treatment hurts the patients. Here's the writeup in Stat. #

A new thread. Pornography of the future. We will watch movies of beautiful happy people in social settings with other beautiful happy people, exchanging in-person conversation, experiencing exotic smells and waves of oxytocin. Multitudes of beautiful, interesting and happy people wander by, exchanging knowing glances and suggestive smiles. No one is wearing a mask. Their faces are literally naked. In public. Naked. Va va voom. #

Occam's News says that Trump threatened to withhold money from the World Health Organization because their test worked and his didn't and that made him look bad. #

The Cuomo briefing podcast is now available in the iTunes store. And of course it's available via RSS. Tell your friends.#

When I sit down at a lovely dinner, with interesting, humor-filled friends in a beautiful spot, I am as rich as I can possibly be. A billionaire couldn't have more. I first realized this at a sushi restaurant in Sausalito, where the chef had prepared the most amazing looking and tasting bouquet of fresh fish and rice. Literally this is as rich as you can get.#

I'd like to see one of the cable channels continue their regular broadcast without airing The Trump Show every night. It's very bad for our country, in the spirit of Jon Stewart's appeal to the Crossfire guys so many years ago. They never did help us, and now thousands of Americans are dying. What will it take to wake the owners of the networks up. And the people, why are you watching this deadly animal garbage? Don't you get it? If you didn't watch they wouldn't broadcast. Don't you care about your own lives?#

I don't understand how this clip from The Dark Knight hasn't become viral, it's such a premonition of Trump. Where's the plan you ask? There is no plan. He's the dog who caught the car. He has no idea what to do with it.#

Is there a website you can go to, to find out if Trump's daily-court-holding is over?#

It's amazing how many podcasts suck for the simple reason that they put 15-20 minutes overhead up front. You keep waiting for them to start. My mainstays all have one thing in common, they start quickly.#

New slogan: Wash your hands. #

When I edited yesterday's piece about my grandfather Rudy Kiesler, I stumbled across a reference to him as a "German Jewish communist," on a page about Arno Schmidt, who was my grandmother's brother, Rudy's brother-in-law, my mother's uncle and my great uncle. I thought that was super interesting. Because if you met Rudy you'd have thought he was a Republican, at least today you would. But he wasn't at all. He was super liberal. Our whole family was. It never occurred to me that he was a communist, but he might have been, esp from the point of view of Uncle Arno (who I never actually met). #

Also, Rudy's company, United Pioneer, still exists. Apparently Salant shut it down when they went bankrupt in the 80s, they must have sold the name to Bernie Braverman, who worked for Rudy. I remember him, since I worked in the office one summer (the summer of the Watergate hearings). United Pioneer, amazingly, still exists, but they wrote Rudy Kiesler out of the story. I've seen this happen many times, even with my own work. It must run in the family. Anyway the web is amazing, the trails are there for all of this, you just have to look, and now this is part of the story too. #

At next press conference, please ask Trump if he has considered resigning. Repeat until he resigns. #

In the past our idiocracy killed people in far-away places. Now as they say, the chickens have come home to roost. Now you can't look the other way.#

Kudlow: "I don't believe anybody could have predicted the exponential rise of this." OK that right there is why you get people who know math and biology to run the response to a pandemic. #

It really should be Cuomo v Trump in the November election, assuming Trump hasn't resigned by then.#

We ought to, instead of talking about how deficient defunct Trump is, talk about the job of POTUS, what his or her responsibilities are, for future reference, so there’s never again a doubt as to whether the incumbent is doing the job.#

I suggest we use the word "trump" (lower case) to refer to what we used to call the Republican Party. Example of usage: "That trump is really corrupt. Yeah they all are."#

Has Trump taken hydroxychloroquine himself? Why not? What has he got to lose?#

Was the Queen's speech timed to coincide with Boris Johnson's hospitalization or was it a chance event?#

Highly recommend this week's Radio Open Source interview with Laurie Garrett who is an eloquent expert on the pandemic. I had heard her interviewed elsewhere, this time she gets all 50 minutes, and she's brilliant, deeply informed and passionate. #

This is great. Stanford University is setting up a network of Americans around the country to track their symptoms and exposure to people with CV. When NakedJen traveled through Seoul on her way home, she had to install a mobile app to keep a diary of her symptoms, if any. This is how they do containment, and it's great to see a similar system starting in the US, from a credible institution like Stanford. We're on the road now. Every American reader of this blog should sign up for daily reminders, and do it. If I could make it a requirement, I would. America being smart. #

I am old enough to remember what was left after polio. Not old enough to have gotten it myself, the vaccine already existed when I was born. But there were kids in my school that had been crippled by it.#

I'm okay with people going to church as long as we can lock the doors after they're all inside. They should not be allowed to re-enter society after being so reckless with their own health. On FB they're saying they should stay inside for 14 days and those without symptoms be allowed to leave. I am reminded of the famous New Yorker cartoon. I think "never" is a better time to let them out.#

Wondering if behind the scenes Dems are polling Repub senators to see if there are 20 or 30 votes for removing Trump at this point.#

We need someone strong in a leaderly way in American journalism as much as we need a few congressional Republicans to grow a conscience and a spine. A seminal piece from a NYT columnist might do the trick, aimed at their own profession, not others.#

Last night Maddow shared two graphs from David Ho that illustrate why, unless everyone stays home at the same time, even those states that do will have a much longer and more costly pandemic. The best thing for everyone would be if we all lock down now, and wait out the virus. #

I asked a question on Twitter this morning that apparently was not understood. Let's try again. When Gov Cuomo says that NY got hit first, I want to know why other American cities didn't get hit at roughly the same time. They say a virus moves in waves. First northern Italy gets it, then the south. NY has its hospitals overloaded, but not Philadelphia. The theory is, according to Cuomo, that the virus will peak in NY, and then peak in other places. Since people move freely around the US, why wouldn't it all happen at roughly the same time. I'd like you to remember, before answering, I have a math degree, and have spent decades working with logic and numbers in computer software. Saying that Dallas has cases, as has St Louis and Cleveland, while true, is not an answer to this puzzling question. Thanks in advance for considering this. #

Heard something disturbing on WNYC earlier. A Nobel laureate in psychology said he was optimistic for society and pessimistic for himself. At his age, he said, the virus is basically a life sentence of staying isolated. He's 86.#

Sometimes iTunes won't let me drag an audio file into a playlist. I can never figure what it doesn't like. Did it ever occur to them to give us an error message of some kind?#

Stop what you're doing and watch retired general Russel L. Honoré on the fiasco of the medical equipment supply chain. Clearly we're being looted by the Trumps.#

Don't forget, we have a podcast feed for Cuomo daily briefings. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client. #

This scene from The West Wing about smallpox.#

Some of my many trees. They laugh when I say they’re mine. Long after you’re gone, they say, we will still be here.#

Continuing to update Woodstock Today list.#

It sucks that there isn't a wiki-type food ordering app that takes no percentage of sales. I want the money to go to the deliverers and the restaurants. The restaurant would pay a flat monthly fee. At this late date there is no justification for the money the middlemen make.#

I think what Bill Gates is doing is terrific, but it's ironic that the thing that helped the Mac take over from Windows were viruses, and Microsoft's refusal at first to do anything about them.#

As time goes by more of us will realize the danger we're in. Soon it will be universal. Everyone will feel it. This will have a benefit. Being right doesn't matter as much as we thought. We can be more accepting of ourselves and each other.#

Another thing that will happen, is already happening. More art will flow through the net. It's now the main form of human expression. I predicted this, going back to the beginning. People thought I was nuts. We were building a platform for human expression. Communication with a Big C.#

I predict that this week we will finally realize, the vast majority of Americans, that Trump is a distraction, an impediment, a sideshow. Finally the focus will be where it should have been since January, the virus.#

We will all be more patient in the future. What's a few minutes compared to all the waiting we're doing now. It's funny, I could keep developing, nothing in my way, but for the first time in a long time, I can't get the excitement or even the interest to actually do the work. Not that I don't get ideas. I'm much more interested in finding a good online version of Hearts, Sorry or Risk. Or if there were a way to play Wii games online. Now that would be interesting. But I don't want to write the software, thank you very much. 💥#

Today's Daily podcast interview with Anthony Fauci may be the most consequential podcast ever. In the last ten minutes they finally get to the important stuff, i.e. what's coming. Now I understand the next phase of the virus much better. I'm also glad to hear they're considering the functioning of society in their plans. At some point we're going to have to provide health care to the people who can't afford it, if we ever want to come out of this. Imho the sooner the better, but Fauci has to take as a given that the president is who he is. I've never said anything was more of a must-listen than this podcast. I think they should play the last ten minutes on Maddow tonight. Everyone with a mind needs to hear this. #

My poor uncle, my father's brother, was murdered. I think how sad that the last person he saw was someone who had just killed him. I feel the same way about watching The Trump Show on MSNBC every evening at 6PM. He's murdering us. Why would we want to listen to him?#

Posted on Facebook by Daniel Schmachtenberger. "Hong Kong and Italy got exposed to the same virus. The pandemic is not caused by a virus, it's caused by the failure of effective governance. In other words, the huge and preventable numbers of people dying currently...are dying from the effects of dysfunctional governance."#

Think before you RT. I am once again unfollowing people who RT Trump, and I am now also unfollowing people who RT Kellyanne Conway. They make us stupid. Waste our capacity to think. Reduce everything to emotion. Trump and Conway are intellectual pneumonia. They fill your mind with emotional nonsense, crowding out your ability to think. The cure is simple. Distance yourself from them, and people who are infected with them. Even people you like.#

I ordered dish towels from Amazon, just got them! I'm a happy home maker.#

I may have finally run out of things to write about! See below. I actually write about disinfecting wipes. If you had told me, in say 1998, that by 2020 I'd be writing about wipes, I would have assumed something terrible had happened, not to the world, but to me. #

So I finally got disinfecting wipes, and they're great, I just don't know when to use them. Can you use them in place of washing hands? When would you do that?#

You know that scene in Goodfellas where the Ray Liotta character explains how they steal everything out of the bar they took over and then finally torch it to get the insurance money. That's America. Trump and friends are the wiseguys. And we're being torched right now. And we aren't doing anything about it. The press keeps waiting for him to turn into FDR or even Nixon. #

Podcast: What will it be like when the lights come back on? We've never turned off the world economy like this. We have had disasters where whole cities were decimated, but the world around them was able to absorb the flow of people, and send enough people and money in to rebuild. But what happens when there is no place to go, nor enough people to come in and help rebuild? #

Added a docs page for PagePark plugins.#

Mathew Ingram shared a relaxing clip of the creek near his house. #

I did the Census today. Noted the only choices for gender were male and female. Also they didn't ask about my occupation. I wonder if that's related to age.#

My friend told Facebook that his birthday is April 1 (it’s not) and all of the happy birthday wishes show up on his timeline as if on schedule. The best part is he doesn’t have to do a thing. Facebook does all the work.#

I'm going to turn 65 soon, so it's time to apply for Medicare. I finally got serious about it. I found the page where you apply for it, read the instructions, watched the video and thought this is going to be a breeze. I do this kind of stuff all the time. So I started to set up an account. They ask for your SSN, date of birth, address, phone, email address. I entered them all. It said no, you didn't do it right, go back and do it again. No indication which part they didn't like. So I tweaked my address. Still it doesn't like it. So I took out my middle initial, thinking my father, when he set up this account for me in 1957 or so might have left this out. They said no, and that's it for 24 hours. You can't keep doing this the message said. I guess they figured I was trying to hijack my account? So I tried calling the number they gave for assistance. Oy. I got every piece of information they think I might be looking for. It's pretty grim stuff. I left a callback number. #