The Major Genetic Risk Factor for Severe Covid-19 is Inherited from Neanderthals

The Slog's illustrious technical advisor Pierre Jelenc - who curmudges 99.99% of science news for being both banal and sensational (bansational?) - sends the following. His language choices signal an emotional pitch that, for Pierre, represents swooning enthusiasm:

The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals, courtesy of Nature

(Svante Pääbo is the god of ancient DNA)

Discussion and glosses

We mere mortals would do best with the second ("glosses") link.

The Antagonists of Creativity

"Deliciousness"
When would-be chef Joe Randazzo applied for cooking jobs, he'd whip up blow-out demonstration meals for prospective employers. Beautiful spreads, every bite releasing torrents of soul and love.

The response, time and time again, was "Well, okay, great, you can cook delicious food. But anybody can do that...." and they'd continue with a miserably petty litany of irrelevant tasks one could train a monkey to perform. You know, the important stuff.

This is why nearly all food sucks; why so much of everything sucks: this is the attitude of gatekeepers. Quality is not only not an overriding goal, it's no goal at all. It's a dreamy scrap of irrelevant bullshit; something to nonchalantly grind beneath your heel like an expired cigarette. Such people utter quality terms with weary quotation marks. "Deliciousness". Yeah, you go make some "deliciousness", champ.

We're All Brilliant Jazz Players
When I was in my early 20s, I played with unbelievably cheesy wedding/bar mitzvah bands led by guys with cheap toupees and names like Hymie Lipschitz who couldn't wait for weekends to transform into show biz alter egos with impossibly waspy names ala "Hal Lane". They'd play - excruciatingly badly - Top-40 hits, horas, and tarantellas hunched between ice sculptures and chopped liver terrains. They were living the dream - the glamorous life of a musician - while I, an actual full-time musician, hid behind the speaker praying for the sweet release of death. The money, alas, was good.

The cheesiest bandleader of all was a guy named Joseph whose pot belly stretched his cumberbund to the snapping point. Joseph managed to play only half the chords of any tune - essentially a harmonica version, where everything's either blowing out or sucking in. Joseph performed on a student-model keyboard that fishtailed cheaply as he pounded it with his fat stupid fingers, and spent most of the gig screaming at his wife, Rhonda, the band's "female vocalist", her unexceptional tits polished and displayed like Harry and David grapefruit. I'd play runs at top NYC jazz clubs and sneak in a Saturday afternoon hit with these guys (the come-down to beat all come-downs), though if rent weren't due each month I'd have tipped over the buffet’s flambé station and gleefully watched it all burn.

One time, on a break, Joseph was harshly criticizing a sax player who'd substituted with the band on the previous weekend. I observed that the fellow was a brilliant jazz player. "Dude,” Joseph shmuck-splained with bottomless eye-rolling contempt, “we're all brilliant jazz players."

Creativity's Easy
A few years ago, a profoundly uncreative person I know announced, haughtily, that creativity is easy. Anyone can fuck around creatively. That's the easy, fun stuff.

Loathing
I feel inexpressibly deep loathing over these three traumatic memories. I can forgive atrocities, but these are something worse.

It's not just the dismissive hand-waving at everything that matters to me, or the immense lack of self awareness. It's that their smug contempt reveals their position as antagonists to all that is good and true. These are Devils.

The world doesn't suck due to the machinations of clear-eyed people efficiently marching the wrong way. The world sucks because oblivious slobs claw their way into positions of authority and reflexively shit all over the good stuff, people who do good stuff, and the very notion that stuff can be - much less should be - good. Once they've buried every iota of quality, they proceed to smugly work their magic, as if they'd just laid down a nice clean coat of primer.

Joe Randazzo

NYC trombonist Joe Randazzo died.

A lot of musicians never knew that, in the 90s, Joe tried to switch careers and become a chef. When he landed a gig cooking in the cafeteria of a specialty college on the Upper West Side, I heard about it and ran right over. The food was absolutely slamming. Just the sort of under-radar deliciousness I loved to discover.

I wrote it up in NY Press, but my time there was strange. Some places I raved about (Mississippi BBQ Shack, Kabab Cafe, Arepa Lady, DiFara Pizza, etc) became sensations, while others, equally good, garnered no movement at all. I was never able to figure out the formula.

Despite the disappointing lack of interest, Joe was excited to have his name in print, and tried to parlay it into better gigs, but industry types wanted to hire sharp, culinary school type chefs, not soulful street-smart jazzbos who could make veal sing.

Joe returned to trombone, we lost touch, and now he's gone.

RIP, Joe. Bone appetit.

Joining Team Walter

Walter the Substitute Bus Driver
When I was very young, there was a substitute school bus driver named Walter, an older gentleman who'd periodically appear, like an apparition, and give out bubblegum to kids as they got on the bus.

It gobsmacked me that such a person could exist. Bus drivers - I recognized with the instinctive reflex of those low on a food chain - were a nemesis for children to fear and avoid. You don't need to be a particularly clever bunny rabbit to know to run like crazy when a german shephard comes prowling. So you get on the stupid bus, walk all the way to the back, and try to avoid setting off the driver at all costs.

Imagine if you discovered that a certain mosquito, once you slow down its whine, is actually singing Mozart arias just to soothe you.

Walter Crowther rocked my world. Representing more than just a good version of a bad thing, he spurred a fundamental shift in my childhood experience. It had never occurred to me that anything positive could ever come from a bus driver. I suddenly realized, thunderstruck, that the world was studded with hidden and delightful Easter Eggs. A hunk of bubblegum had squarely launched me on my life path.


The Fabulous Mrs. Montesano
My first grade teacher was a sourpuss; a stuck-up, humorless horror. I just barely made it through the year, and was trepidatious about returning to school the next September. But I was assigned, for second grade, the fabulous Mrs. Gloria Montesano.

The prototypical Mrs. Montesano vignette took place the day Steven Bazone raised his hand and asked what "dash" meant. Without hesitation - not even a blink - Mrs. Montesano kicked off her heels and ran out the door.

She disappeared, leaving us unsupervised and completely mystified, for several minutes. Finally, someone pointed eagerly - almost hysterically - out the classroom window to the distant football field, which Mrs. Montesano was traversing at a very impressive speed.

We all gathered around the window screaming our heads off, pointing and jumping around in utter delight as Mrs. Montesano ran as if her life depended on it. Frankly, I'd never realized she was so athletic.

Finally, she arrived back at the classroom, winded and gasping. She put on her heels, and, with her remaining breath, explained that that's what dashing is.

It goes without saying that after my arteries harden in old age, the very final memory to vanish down my cognitive sink hole will be this word. I'll forget pizza, "2001", the 1973 Mets, and my own name long before I forget what it is to "dash".

Not all of Mrs. Montesano's lessons were flamboyant. I remember vividly how she explained how to remember "desert" versus "dessert". You want more “dessert” than “desert”. More esses! She explained this with such relish that it wasn't just a memory trick, it was like she'd initiated an entirely new way of seeing the world. Plentitude, even of mere consonants, felt like a gift.

I wish Mrs. Montesano had explained everything to me, but, alas, I had only one short year with her before it was back to the prigs.

Mrs. Montesano always encouraged my writing, and when I published my first book, I dedicated it to her, though I was too overwhelmed at the time (creating Chowhound) to get around to sending her a copy (I hadn't spoken to her since 1974). Finally, in late 2004, right at the time my life was turning upside down, I was going through my childhood boxes and found this ancient postcard from her, and I photocopied it and send it to her along with this reply.


The Painters
I mentioned a few postings ago that I've been having the exterior of my house painted. Every day, I served the workers lunch. Really good lunch. And generally treated them like family. I blasted Radio Guatemala out of my windows all day and we shared beer at the end of most workdays. It was more like summer camp than a job. They called it "Camp Jimmy".

This is how I do it because of a tenet of Christianity that I particularly like - which also happens to be, in my opinion, badly misunderstood.

Everyone assumes "Love thy neighbor" refers to the person in the condo next door. But I am convinced that's not what it means. It means whoever you encounter right here right now. The clerk at CVS. The FedEx guy. The house painters.

You don't have to make an ostentatious big deal. You don't need to slap birthday hats on their heads and tell them how wonderful they are. But I go Pashtun. If you smash your thumb, you're going to get ice from me, stat, carefully wrapped, and you're going to eat a lunch that's the very best I can whip up - likely better than what I myself eat for lunch. With dessert, too (double "s" 'cuz you want more of it). Plus a bottle of really good beer to take home at the end of the day. And jokes. And respect. And knowing when to leave you the hell alone because it's not all about me.

But the one week job stretched to three weeks. So the expense went far beyond what I'd expected. With the guys working six days/week for three weeks, I likely blew close to four figures on hospitality expenses. Yikes.

By week three, it began to hurt a little, and I welcomed that pain. It signaled the collision of my vanity - my image of myself as a good person - with actual stakes. Everyone's a philanthropist with orange peels and used toilet paper. This was a test to see if I really meant it.

I welcomed the test. I embraced the raised stakes. Lunch got better and better. The sole problem in this scenario was my own discomfort, so I made an antagonist of it. No longer dressing panini with raw spinach, I'd begun to sauté the greens...and then escalated by sautéing with garlic. If they'd remained another few weeks, I'd have shaved in white truffles and sold computer equipment to finance purchase of rare caviar.

I steered straight into the skid, into my discomfort (and the residual wisps of hypocrisy lurking just behind it). I applied my Mazlow Hammer of commitment, upping my game. A friend asked why I was doing all this, and I explained about Christianity. He replied, yeah, great, lovely, but why are you actually doing it?

Switching Teams
I had to ponder the question for a few weeks (I can be very slow), but suddenly Walter's face flashed in my mind, and I realized this is the same irrational impulse that compelled Walter and Mrs. Montesano to induce delight. Not hoping that I, myself, would be considered delightful (hardly a risk for me, fortunately, as I don’t seem so, and seeming is everything), but just for its own sake.

I hadn’t planned it that way, so I never registered a point where I went from perennially wishing for a Walter to becoming a Walter ("being the change"). I'm just living out the spin imparted in me by he and Mrs. Montesano. Someone, many links back in the chain, had found a different way of doing things, and Walter, Mrs. Montesano, and I...and now the painters (and you!) were haplessly caught in the ripple effect.

Perhaps a blogger in 2060 will recall the dude who delighted him with delicious panini during his youthful summer painting job. But I'm not shooting for that. It's not about me. The guys were here. They got fed. Full stop. Why does there need to be further rationale? Does it really make so little sense as-is? That's why Walter gave out gum, and why Mrs. Montesano went overboard to teach not-especially-significant words. They were just moved to do what they did. Not much self-consciousness was involved.

I'm a bit more self-conscious, because I need to intellectually understand myself and my world or else I start feeling very lost and confused (hence this Slog). Yet I never noticed myself switching teams; from being a grateful admirer of Walter to being Walter. I never made a mental story out of it. It was just what happened. It took a while to even notice.

I remain a grateful admirer of Walter and Mrs. Montesano. More than ever, in fact. And I can't imagine placing myself fully in their pantheon. I'm not all that. I'll just keep making panini and icing thumbs and blasting Radio Guatemala, when appropriate, here at Camp Jimmy, and explaining my weirdo ideas here for the scattering of readers who offer their attention. I don’t think I’ll ever come up with a better explanation of my motivation. I’m comfortable with it as-is. I conjure up memories of Walter and Mrs. Montesano, and feel relieved to be preserving, in my small way, the customs of our random little tribe.


Further reading: The Generosity Impulse

The Susan Feldman Incident

The seminal event of my childhood was when, in first grade, Susan Feldman - the apple of my eye (aside, of course, from the utterly aloof and unattainable Suzanne Castrino) - told me, in front of the whole lunchroom table, "I can't believe I liked you in kindergarten!"

It was my first experience with ambivalence. My immediate reaction was "What...wait...Susan Feldman liked me in kindergarten???" I'd had no idea (this was also my introduction to the opaqueness of female attraction). But the part about my having grown into an unappealing schlub struck me as sad but fair. I'd peaked, sexually, at age 6. I knew it, everyone knew it. Susan was merely stating the obvious.

Jesus Muffins

I can't say these are the best muffins I've ever had, but I've never had better. Click to expand for the full effect.

I get them from an Ecuadorian chicken place in Ossining, about a mile from the jail. They don't really know what muffins are. They don't know what to call them. They can't tell you which flavor is which. There are never more than two on hand at any time of day. They don't know what they cost. They struggle to figure out which cash register button to press. They are at a loss as to how to pack them (currently they toss them individually into large supermarket paper bags and roll them up).

There is nowhere in Ecuadorian culture for muffins. These are like alien artifacts for them. And that's why I think they're so unbelievably good. My guess is someone told the owner he could make money selling muffins to his gringo customers. So he had an employee go online and get a muffin recipe. And, only since it was all so foreign, they cooked them from scratch....CAREFULLY, using only use gloriously ripe fruit and take aching care with every step (including the sugar syrup wash that leaves the tops shatteringly glass-like in their crispness).

They don't do this because they're artists. And it's not that they care deeply. It's just that they haven't yet realized they don't *have* to. Nobody told them a big truck from Indiana could pull up and deliver them dozens of sticky sweet awful muffins from some big factory (or veterinary grade pre-made batter) for mere pennies.

So this is a temporary condition, a miracle, a cosmic Jesus accident, and I'm enjoying the hell of it. I'm like a native of the Kenyan savanna lavishing in cool breezy August weather, unable to explain or even fully describe it, but out-of-his-mind with undeserved and unexpected joy.


These are as good as the muffins at Briermere Farms in Riverhead and the ones at Coffee An' in Westport, and I think they're as good as the late, lamented Michael's Muffins of Greenwich Village in the early 90's.

Value and Salability

I've been puzzling over some recent learning experiences about economic value. I'm sure all of this would be incredibly banal for an economist. But there are plenty of known economic truisms that even educated people never connect with.

For example, I've paid my bills for years via the brutally simple strategy of buying Apple stock whenever it goes way down and selling whenever it goes way up. There's nothing clever about it, yet I don't know anyone else doing it. Savvy investors execute far cleverer strategies, making less money at greater risk. Simplicity often escapes notice, even by - especially by! - smart people.

With that in mind, I have some simple observations.

Houses
I bought my current house despite two expensive issues which the previous home owners couldn't afford to fix. They lowered the price accordingly, and while I finally came along and bought it, it had sat on the market for a good long while. This should have been a premonition!

So now I'm getting ready to sell, and had to decide whether to empty my bank account to resolve those issues or to simply pass along the discount. And the reality of it became suddenly clear to me. I could try to sell a house saddled with asbestos pipe insulation and an unsightly exterior full of curling lead paint (impossible to repaint without much exorbitant work sanding away in HAZMAT suits). The house looks like hell, and "asbestos" is a scary word, but, no problem. I could just mark down the price. It's all the same in the end, no?

No!

Houses aren't soybeans or widgets. The housing market doesn't respond rationally because it's not a faceless mob. There is a limited pool of buyers, all subject to emotion. Most don't want asbestos or ugly peeling paint at any price. They'd rather avoid the hassle even if I discounted the bejesus out of it. Serious issues, even steeply discounted, would repel most prospective buyers, who don't want a fixer-upper at any price.

Let's say I offered you a late model car that had housed a dead body for a few weeks. It stinks and the interior's stained. If the car were normally worth $25,000 but I offered it to you for $6000 with the assurance that you could have it cleaned and deodorized for $19,000, would you buy? What about $5000? $4000? $800?

That's an extreme example, but you get the idea. Every issue - every nose-wrinkling sub-optimality - filters out a swathe of prospective buyers, regardless of discount. And there is not an infinitude of buyers. So your house could sit unsold for years despite a perfectly fair price, though a misreading of economics might make you think that result simply doesn't happen.

Even extreme discounting would have limited effect. Most buyers want a nice house in nice condition that looks nice and presents no obvious headaches. Faults, even priced-in, require a fault-tolerant buyer, which is an edge case. As you increase your discount, you're still seeking edge cases the whole way down. There’s no price low enough to attract mainstream buyers. It takes a certain type of person to buy a corpse car at any price!

So...I painted the damn house (using lead encapsulation rather than abatement, a compromise solution with no sanding - the hazardous part - but they just scrape, power-wash, and encase remaining lead paint in a thick primer that lets new paint stick. The result is not super smooth, but it looks ok and costs half the price of full abatement) and I had the asbestos removed. When I sell the house, I'll ask full price, which would repay my outlay with, alas, no profit for my substantial hassle. But it will be attractive to 100% of the market rather than just to problem-tolerant bargain hunters. So I'll save hassle and delay. It will actually sell, which is more than a minor consideration!

Coins
On a similar tack, one of the first things newbie coin collectors need to learn is to ignore pricing lists. Well-respected sources might value your 1931-S Lincoln wheat cent at 87¢, and this may be correct, but you will never, ever, get 87¢ for that coin. It's an accurate value, but not one you can get - and the difference is absolutely not just semantic.

87¢ would be the average price of many transactions, nearly all involving dealers who can assure customers that the coins are genuine, and, for example, have never been washed (which drastically reduces value, but you need to be trained to spot it). If you were to spend $35 to have a grading service authenticate, grade, and encase the coin in a plastic slab sealed with hologram stickers, you might be able to sell it for $35.87 on eBay (though you'd lose money after paying shipping and eBay transaction costs). But, even then, it will sit forever on eBay because, while the price is correct, no one wants a stupid circulated penny that badly, except for rare and extenuating circumstances (i.e. circumstances which, in aggregate, led to the 87¢ valuation you found in your price list!).

To be sure, the coin's worth 87¢. You just can't sell it for 87¢, exactly the way my house is worth $X minus paint/asbestos cost...but no one will buy it. Value and salability are different things. Greater value increases salability, but it's rarely linear, much less predictable. So never assume you can simply adjust price in order to sell stuff. Economics, it turns out, don't actually work that way.

Puny Sacrifices for Infinitesimal Decency

I hired a painting company to do my house, and, mid-way, we're haggling over various issues, shortcomings, and miscommunications on their end. The latest was a fake $1500 carpentry job they tried to get me to sign off on.

The project manager, who stops by a couple times a week to check up on the nice Guatemalan guys who do the actual work, is, himself, a Guatemalan immigrant. But his English is good, and he's bright, and he's been fully accepted into this large white family business. That's quite an accomplishment for a Guatemalan, a nationality at the leading edge of current immigration.

He wasn't deliberately trying to screw me. In fact, he likes me. We talk in Spanish, and sometimes he comes by to share the lunches I cook for the workers. I've earned most-favored-client status with him. What happened was that one of the guys had mumbled something about problematic shingles (the shingles aren't perfect, though no one in his right mind would pay to swap them out), so the issue got automatically added to my roster, and the accounting guy affixed the usual shingle repair price, and the machinery mindlessly spit out a request that I pay $1500 for a job that clearly did not require doing.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

I made the project manager come out and look, and he freely admitted the work was completely unnecessary. He briskly slashed the line off of my file and asked whether I'd approve the remaining (legit) carpentry work. And I unloaded on him. I told him I no longer trust his company; that I am a good customer who feeds his guys and pays on time and makes no trouble. I'm not a cow to be milked (it worked better in Spanish). This was really really not okay.

He tried to explain that the worker had tagged a problem, and the system had picked it up, and, man, he can't supervise everything. I pointed out that supervising everything was literally his job, and that I had nearly paid $1500 for unnecessary work. It was effectively every bit as bad as a deliberate rip-off.

He was stricken at having let me down, plus he'd cost his company the work I'd just nixed. Serious mess-up on his end. And I could have used this tale to bolster my position in my ongoing squabbles with his company. But I didn't. I told them the project manager was doing a wonderful job. He got no blame for anything. I protected him.

Why? Because I don't like how my country is treating immigrants. By protecting him, I compensated in an infinitesimal way.

Persecution isn't fought via lofty oratory about multiculturalism, or raking through Twitter detecting and exterminating RACISM. It's not mitigated by windy gestures, righteous outrage, or the sloppy smiting of seeming villains. You mitigate it with your compensatory gentle touch. Maybe you willingly let certain stuff go by - even if you were wronged. Even if it might help you a little to not let it go by. This is how you tip scales. Again: infinitesimally.

When Trump took office, friends of mine went to DC to march, and they were offended by my comments here about such vain, empty gestures. Marching made them feel better, but did not help. By contrast, the incident with my project manager made me feel a little worse...and helped a (very) little. You know you're helping if you take a hit; if you come out a little worse. If you ever find yourself feeling grand and righteous, that's entirely about you. It's performance; an empty display of self-regard. It's silly and repulsive.

There's very little we can do to help. All we've got are micro-touches and micro-considerations (e.g. the meek puniness of voting). We're not studly super-heros, we're dweeby dweebs. But no one seems interested in acknowledging this. All around me, I see people - particularly young people - shouting into the hot microphones of social media or joining voices in street protests; gloriously projecting their outrage in the macro. But I don't see any consideration in the micro - i.e. in Reality. Nobody’s engaged in the non-heroism of micro-consideration (which, per previous link, is why young people don't vote). Enticed by the shiny allure of Seeming, it would scarcely occur to them to actually Do.

United Flight 93

I am replaying this posting from 2008 in honor of the anniversary. 

When I first heard that United Flight 93 had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, and that it was long enough after the World Trade Center catastrophe that people both on the ground and in the plane were aware that a similar fate was in store for this flight, and that its path had it aimed squarely at Washington DC, I assumed, as did anyone else with a functioning brain, that it had been shot down. And while I could argue both ways, there was certainly a case to be made for having done so. 

I remember seeing on CNN how tightly the crash area had been sealed off, with absolutely no journalists permitted within the perimeters. I remember how the story disseminated that heroic passengers had engineered this result, not military missles. I was skeptical, to say the least.

But when, months later, I learned that Linda Gronlund had been on board the flight, there was reason to reconsider. The Gronlunds were family friends when I was growing up, and Linda, a race car driver, karate expert, sailor, mechanic, EMT, environmentalist, and lots more, was pretty much the most can-do, resolute, fiercely determined person I've ever met. 

Linda called her sister Elsa via cellphone from the flight, and told her that the passengers understood the situation and that there was a plan to storm the cockpit. Demonstrating Linda's cool steely clarity of mind, she remembered to give Elsa precise instructions about where to find her will and other paperwork. Amazing. 

I haven't seen the films or TV movies made about Flight 93, but I understand that none of them much featured Linda. I'm absolutely sure, though, that she was on the vanguard of whatever happened on that flight. Linda was born to storm cockpits. 

Of course, what's unexplained is why the plane actually went down. One might guess that the hijackers, aware of a mob breaking down the cockpit door, executed a hard dive. But that would only have been a last ditch maneuver, as their goal wasn't to murder airplaine passengers, but to bomb the White House. I can't imagine geared-up fanatics executing an abortive dive without a fight. And, heroic as the passengers may well have been, they undoubtedly were aiming to gain control of the aircraft, rather than ditch it. So whence the downward plunge? 

My guess is that both stories are right. I think the cockpit was stormed (Linda Gronlund would not have sat quietly and failed to take action), and the plane was indeed shot down as it passed over the last rural landscape before entering more populated areas.  My heartfelt hope is that the passengers hadn't just prevailed over the hijackers when the missiles arrived. I must avoid imagining that scenario. But Linda would have understood even if it had played out that way.

Charlie Kaufman

I just caught Charlie Kaufman's new film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," which was released straight to Netflix. Since I was, for once, at home when the credits rolled instead of ambling out of a movie theater, I finally remembered to actually follow up on the mental note I always make while viewing a Kaufman film. I googled this:

"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" "Charlie Kaufman"

...but, oddly, no one on the Internet appears to have applied that old chestnut to him.

So now I've rectified that.