Looking through the poppies in my garden towards my old #cabin in the mountains of #Humboldt, #California.
These were wonderful times... Before the fires of the #August_Complex.
This is one of my fav photos of my old home in the serene isolation of #nature.
I had a few wonderful years here, before having to #evacuate to a world consumed by fear and uncertainty amidst the calamity of the global #Wuhan pandemic.
A while back I had the sombre duty of reporting on #WUHAN#SNOWPOCALYPSE 2024!¹ Little did I know that I would be needing to rename it to WUHAN SNOWPOCALYPSE 2024(A) because yesterday and today has given us WUHAN SNOWPOCALYPSE 2024(B)!
Unlike the first snowpocalypse, which happened in the middle of a national holiday and was thus something more suited to the kind of "we're all in this together" vibe that made surviving it easier, this snowpocalypse was far less a social event and far more an abject disaster.²
Further, the nature of the #snow was radically different. Those experienced in how snow usually works will note strangeness in this #snowfall, like it wasn't actually snow at all. Those who experienced it will also note that the snow merely falling (as in not whipped up by wind) onto bare flesh actually stung a little bit, like someone dropping sewing needles on your outstretched hand from a 2m height. And, too, how often can you hear snowfall. Through closed windows.
To say this was unusual snowfall is to put it mildly.
Most places actually closed their doors yesterday because the snow was so overwhelming. It was difficult to walk and harder to drive and every attempt to clean it up was met with cleared roads and sidewalks being covered within minutes with snow that felt more like sand at the beach underfoot.
More details can be found in the alt text, as usual.
As I reported earlier, on February 4th, 2024 Wuhan was struck by #MotherNature (that bitch!) with a two-part #IceStorm followed by a thick (for here) blanket of #HeavySnow. And while #Wuhanren faced the disaster with their usual aplomb and resilience, giving Mother Nature the finger and insisting on going out and having fun, there was serious trouble lurking underneath the mantle of white.
Even the pictures I took pre-thaw on the 7th showed the degree of the disaster this was for local trees, with fallen boughs, many already dragged off of roadways, roofs, and even electrical wires by city workers, cut up into convenient sized chunks and piled neatly for later retrieval.
By the time the thaw began, yesterday, it was clear that no plant from tree sized to large shrub sized was unscathed by the weather. But the plant life of Wuhan is as sturdy and rebellious as are its citizens. As I left my home to perform an errand I found the trees striking back, shoving a raised middle finger into the face of Mother Nature!
I apologize for the quality of these photos, but they were taken in haste while I was carrying heavy objects. In addition it was mostly playing out well over my head, making it hard to get decent photos with a mere phone. Still, what they portray, I think, will make you proud of Wuhanese trees and their stalwart streak of resistance in the face of a seemingly-overwhelming assault by Mother Nature and the dying gasp of her General Winter!
(Mastadon users will have to click through to see all the pictures, but they're only missing a single one this time.)
¹ As mentioned in the earlier Snowpocalypse post, the tone of this report is firmly tongue in cheek.
The horror of SNOWPOCALYPSE began with an ice storm on 2024-02-03. In the late morning the ice buildup had led to several very large boughs on nearby trees breaking and plummeting to earth. A short respite of melting was overcome by a second round of ice buildup in the afternoon, but by then all the boughs that were going to break had broken.
Until the snowfall started that evening.
The pictures here show the horrifying outcome! Details in alt text.
#China's communist regime has imposed #censorship to bar citizens from watching a film on the #Covid19lockdown in #Wuhan, the city known as 'ground zero' in the emergence of the #pandemic, says a report.
The producers of the #documentary Wuhan Lockdown which premiered globally on Dec. 30, 2023, were forced to flee the country to release the film, #RadioFreeAsia (#RFA) reported on Jan. 2.
I had a blood sugar crash today, so my #lunch had to be a bit of a #ComplexCarb bomb. What better way to do that than to have #Wuhan's most famous #StreetFood: 热干面 ("hot dry noodles"). (Note: famous, not best! That honour falls to 豆皮 in my considered opinion!)
This dish is a relatively recent innovation and consists of extruded (not cut or pulled) #alkaline#noodles (this gives it a very different mouthfeel and a completely different reaction to sauces used on it) which have been briefly cooked, ideally, in a complex chicken broth, pulled from the water, drizzled with sesame oil, then rapidly cooled to room temperature. The noodles are then, at the time of serving, dipped briefly into the broth again to heat them up before being dumped in the bottom of a bowl, with sesame sauce and soy sauce (only a tiny amount!) thrown on top before garnishment. (Most restaurants these days put out the garnishes in a buffet so you can decide what you want in your noodles.)
Before eating you mix the noodles, the sauce, and the garnishes together and eat with great delight. (The final three words are mandatory!)
My garnishes of choice today included: marinated seaweed, chili oil, pickled daikon radish, coriander leaves, and the omnipresent green onion.
Today's acquisition is the heftiest piece of #Dai#folklore (and indeed any #Chinese folklore of any kind) in my rather sizable collection of folklore-related books. Weighing in at nearly 900 pages it is, again, a translation of Dai ballads into both vernacular Mandarin and English. As with all of the books from this #Wuhan#University Press it is a quality work filled to the brim with footnotes (both on the Chinese side and the English, different).
It's also likely going to be a work that takes me months to years to work through.
Such is the life of a time-limited #hobbyist of folklore.
@arstechnica ☝️ It may not take any single scary subvariant to actually be a scary proposal.
Every infection — the #antivaxxers 'did their own research', so good on 'em 🤷🏻♂️ — attacks/lowers our defences and reactivates the prevalent #HSV and #EpsteinBarr viruses which appear to be behind lot of the #longcovid cases... we're approaching 100 million cases of long covid globally by the end of the year.
The best way to lower the risk of (long) covid to yourself and those you care about is by staying current on vaccinations and, yes, using a mask.
And thanks #CCP for demanding that in early 2020 flight had to be allowed to leave the #PRC and create this #pandemic it covered up.
I think we'd best have a conversation about mask efficacy in the context of time-to-infection, viral load and other highly-speculative estimations that have been proffered over the course of the pandemic thus far.
You cannot build a rock-solid scientific model on top of such things.
The interferon signal that activates the immunological system, is one of the first things that the covid blocks after it ingresses the cell.
Thus there is not symptoms until after the virus had replicated for a few days, and had obtained advantage.
My strong suspicion is Omicrons #xbb are damaging brain more & now obsessed with #Alzheimer & #dementia not in terms of prevention, but progression signs
This is like watching a car crash in slow motion💔but people all see us merely as a #HennyPenny 🐓😣
Intelligence Report Says Safety Training at Chinese Government Lab Complex in #Wuhan Before the #Pandemic Appears Routine
The view of the intelligence community contrasts with a 2022 report by the #Republican oversight staff of a #Senate committee that saw the training as a response to a #biosafety problem.
A Chinese scientist accused of being the pandemic’s patient zero denies being sick in 2019 and that his research had anything to do with the emergence of COVID-19.
Two new studies provide more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan, China market where live animals were sold – further bolstering the theory that the virus emerged in the wild rather than escaping from a Chinese lab.
Testimony of Dr. Kristian G. Andersen, PhD | Professor | Scripps Research | Before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic [PDF] (oversight.house.gov)
....Let me categorically say that these allegations are absurd and false.
New studies bolster theory coronavirus emerged from the wild (apnews.com)
Two new studies provide more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan, China market where live animals were sold – further bolstering the theory that the virus emerged in the wild rather than escaping from a Chinese lab.