mike carey

Whether there are events in those or other places is a separate discussion. The DC event and the Palm Springs weekend are what could be called 'destination' event for the participants, not gatherings aimed at the community where they are held, although they are certainly convenient for those locals. They depend for their success on people travelling from around the country and beyond (Exhibit A for the latter right here), and indeed for this event this year an organiser who lives on the west coast. Staging another similar event elsewhere would work best at a location that is a drawcard (for whatever reason) in its own right, so a destination city or an airline hub. There have been events attempted in places like New York and Chicago but none has been enduring, so perhaps the key to success is a city that is not too much of a destination: if people really want to go there (or have to) they would do it anyway, and the event wouldn't prompt them to make a special trip, whereas for an event at a place people sort of want to go could be the trigger for them to make the trip. I can't talk to Philly's status as a drawcard, although I am aware of its historical significance as the first seat of Congress, amongst other things, so I don't know where it fits into the scale of likely host cities. Princeton and I suspect Philly are candidates for locals to organise a meeting, and perhaps advertise it for wider attendance from forum members but I doubt either will become the next, or another 'forum regular' gathering. Don't die wondering, try to organise something local, but history suggests that something more even that a few initially enthusiastic locals is needed for an enduing event. Good luck!

From the commentary here among usually reliable suspects, I mean sources, RATs are useful, less expensive but less reliable than PCRs. They are useful for targeted testing of cohorts of people who are likely or known to be contacts and for surveillance testing in vulnerable groups or groups of people who would pose a particular risk if they were unknowingly infectious. They are not all that much use to test someone at a single point in time but are useful to chart the emergence of disease in a cohort by testing them frequently. So, for example a single positive or a single negative doesn't say much (although depending who it was it may be advisable for a single positive result to be referred for a PCR test). Two negative tests followed by a third that is positive is a more reliable indicator of an actual positive case. One thing that's come out here in the last couple of days is that there are indications that Omicron is more concentrated in the throat, so using just a swab of the nose for the RAT sample is likely to be far less reliable, and both the nose and the back of the throat should be swabbed. There are certainly times when a negative RAT delivers false reassurance to the person and those they plan to meet. Perhaps if you are told you need an RAT to attend a social function deciding not to attend might be the wisest course of action. You may not have Covid, but you cannot be reasonably sure that some random who tested negative and goes doesn't have it anyway. This concern too will pass as people become more confident of their triple (or more?) vaccinations, but there's a way to go.

My access this time was courtesy of my airline status (rolled over successively since the start of the pandemic). I only needed one flight in my last membership year to retain status and I think with this flight, or perhaps one or two more, I'll be good for yet another year's extension. Unlike the US, here lounge access is the main benefit of status. So, getting any ticket on Qantas is the easiest way for me to achieve my 'lounge' ambition for the year.You also receive access if you're travelling in Business on a revenue ticket, an award flight or a points upgrade. None of those would have been much use to someone like you who didn't get to fly at all. I'm not sure where QF is with paid memberships now, but for some time they just stopped the clock on expiry rather than extend memberships for a year. They have enough lounges open for them to have ended that pause. (They sell memberships for a year from the date you buy it not by the calendar year. I still have a short period of paid membership waiting for when, or if, my status runs out.) Oh, and the flight ended up being delayed two and a half hours. I didn't take advantage of the complimentary wine they served on the flight.

Some people can just read the room straight away!

I couldn't possibly comment!

Plenty of people have been to these events over the years, so in general I don't think that they're lazy. Some of us have missed a couple of weeks of high summer to freeze our butts off in DC. Covid is why I won't be there.

Hmm, arrived at the airport in plenty of time for my flight. It's delayed. An hour. I'm in the lounge sipping on a flat white (QF has two lounges in Canberra, so far only one is open, but it's the upper tier one, for all people eligible for either). I can already hear a glass of bubbly calling me. I don't propose to report back on whether it won. Perhaps I might add an ambition to only book flights where I have lounge access.

I had watched the new year in (which, by the things I have posted elsewhere here, some would have noticed), and even thought at 4pm the Times Square event would have been easy to manage, I didn't watch it, or even look to see if it was on TV here (I would be surprised if it were not). The stations here that would broadcast the event would most likely take a feed of the vision, not a US network's full coverage), but in any event I missed the fun/drama/cringe of CNN's coverage.

Yes and no on this idea. I started by only having one glass of wine last night, but no cold turkey for me. (Spoiler no turkey in my house this Christmas, but you know I didn't mean that sort of cold turkey.) We'll see how long that aim can be maintained, or rather lived up to.

Posted in this thread purely as it is labelled a NYE tale. https://twitter.com/HZiauddeen/status/1477053504812466176?s=20

And here's a link to it

That sounds more like agreement than disagreement!

To end the NYE coverage the ABC showed a version of Auld Lang Syne in English, Palawa kani (a composite Tasmanian language) and Wiradjuri (the language of the country I'm from) sung by the cast of Moulin Rouge.

I watched the NYE cricket match from the Adelaide Oval (in doubt for much of the day as three players on one of the teams tested positive on Friday morning). I'm watching the NYE concert from the Opera House forecourt on the ABC rather than be my curmudgeonly self of most recent NYEs and go to bed at 11pm. (It was my new normal, I was on the dock at Garden Island Naval Base with a direct view to the Harbour Bridge to welcome in 2000.) Now for the main attraction. I missed the two earlier sets of fireworks, an indigenous themed bracket (oranges and ochre colours) and a blue set to honour emergency workers. Bonne année, Happy New Year, welcome to hopefully a better 2022 than 2021 was. The Harbour fireworks are spectacular after a sombre start to 2021 and a smoke obscured opening of 2020 amidst our Black Summer.

I suspect that there are some clients here who already have you pencilled into their diaries for their next trip to London, but I could be misreading the room.

It has been said that open ocean sailing is like standing in a cold shower ripping up $100 notes. People get a buzz out of many things that others find inexplicable.

One thing I had intended to include, but seems to be better in its own post, is that one of the features of the Covid regime in NSW that was conspicuously dropped on 15 Dec has been reinstated, and that is QR code check ins. Other places didn't drop them but the emergence of Omicron has caused authorities to re-emphasise their use. The way they are being used by the authorities is changing, though. They are only being used to enable alert texts to people rather than to issue instruction to test or isolate. I had been tiring of going to the service desk to check in at shops and took the opportunity of a substantial credit card statement credit to buy a new phone (a Samsung Galaxy S21 5G in case anyone's interested). Went to my phone company's shop front to get a new SIM (this phone needed a nano) and it turned out I had just needed to pop the centre out of my existing SIM and that was it. Bonus for me was the person that helped me in the shop exported all my contacts to the SIM before swapping it over to my new phone, something I wouldn't have thought of being able to do. I had already downloaded the Check In Canberra app so I have now been able to do my first unassisted check-in.

There has been overturning of tables, slaughtering of sacred cows and general voltes-face here over the last few days. Two weeks ago four states and one territory required negative PCR test results for travellers arriving from the other three jurisdictions. The three had no restrictions on travel within or between them, and WA has since doubled down and closed its border to all the rest of the country, tested or not, vaccinated or not. (Exemptions are available, but only in the most compelling circumstances and require 14 days of supervised quarantine) Then the whole edifice began to crumble. One by one the border control jurisdictions switched to requiring only a RA test, and today the SA government abandoned any test requirement. This as in part been driven by an explosion in case numbers (the magnitude of what constitutes 'explosion' is relative, in the US or Europe what they had would be a change from nothing to eff all) leading them to conclude that the chance of a traveller from Sydney, Canberra or Melbourne having the virus were not much different to the chances of a random person from Adelaide having it. The new rule comes into force at 2359 CDT tonight (or 0829 US EST), what better way to ring in the New Year. The others are probably not far behind. Also, from today the definition of close contact has been changed nationally (a rare thing for the first ministers all to agree on something) to include only household-like contact with a confirmed case. Any other contacts have been told not to clog the testing queues by seeking a PCR test unless they develop symptoms, and in SA workers have been going along the queues asking people why they were there and turning away asymptomatic people who weren't close contacts. Predictably both the expert community and the commentariat is divided about this, with responses ranging from it being wildly reckless, through 'not a good idea but unavoidable in the circumstances' to 'about time'. The AMA has come out on the 'dangerous' half of the continuum, but not at the 'this is crazy' extreme. Some of the 'about time' mob were the same people who railed against all restrictions for the whole 22 months, so I'm happy to ignore them on that basis alone, but the reality is they aren't advocating for any more so they are irrelevant.

That's a relief.

There was an interesting set of numbers presented by the ABC's stats guru yesterday on hospital admissions here. It's not authoritative analysis, but it provides some clues. There has been a huge surge in case numbers in NSW and Victoria over the last fortnight, but the percentage of cases ending up in hospital, while raw numbers have risen sharply, has dropped significantly. At the end of October, 10% of cases in NSW were ending up in hospital, now it's 1%. In Victoria, it has only dropped to 1.5%, but like NSW the total number of cases going to hospital has increased. In Victoria there has continued to be 6-8 deaths a day, while in NSW it's typically been one or two. One difference between the two states is that in NSW at least 80% of all cases are now Omicron, but the proportion in Victoria is much more skewed to Delta. It's not unreasonable to conclude that both the higher death rate and higher hospitalisation rate in Victoria can be attributed to a higher proportion of Delta. The NSW figures show that almost all of the hospitalised cases that have ended up in an ICU have been Delta patients, as have almost all of the deaths. There has been one case of a triple vaxed patient with Omicron dying, but he was a man in his eighties with co-morbidities, so it may be the case that he died with the disease rather than from it (of course it's difficult to be certain that Covid wasn't just the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, rather than its presence being unrelated to his death). That last parenthetic point is a hint at a complication in the analysis of Covid trends in the future. People will be admitted to hospitals after heart attacks or traffic accidents who will be tested and found to have asymptomatic Covid. They need to be tested because even without symptoms, an undetected Covid case presents an infection risk, but their inclusion in the statistics adds a wrinkle to the analytical process. The numbers here appear to confirm that Omicron is resulting in fewer hospitalisations and fewer deaths per case, but also that the sheer numbers of cases could result in increased stress on the hospital system. I'm not eligible for my third jab for another 10 days, and while I'll avoid unnecessary contact with other people, I'm becoming more confident in venturing out when I need to, and that might even include a trip to Sydney with an, ahem, liaison while I'm there.

Same sort of deal, although people will sometimes have tomato sauce on meat in a sandwich. First time I had a chicken salad sandwich in the US it caught me by surprise. I had failed to notice the difference in the name and expected a chicken and salad sandwich. Here that's chicken with some lettuce, tomato, cucumber, sliced beetroot, grated carrot, onion, or some combination of those ingredients. We also typically only call it a sandwich if it is between two slices of bread. If a bread roll is used, it would be called a ham and cheese roll (or whatever filling was being used). The wider US usage of 'sandwich' is used occasionally now that US-style fast food chains sell a variety of breakfast 'sandwiches'. The term hadn't been used when the only variety in Maccas was on English muffins. (They haven't included their biscuit 'sandwiches' on their Australian menus, perhaps fearing that people's minds would explode at the thought of egg and bacon between two biscuits (i.e. cookies).)

In a way that could be seen as confusing, that can also be called tomato sauce in Australia, although it can also be named by its use (so pasta sauce or pizza sauce) rather than by its main ingredient. Although apparently confusing, it rarely is. You can tell from the context whether they mean the condiment or the vegetable variety. You will also see bottled passata in shops here.

Kecap* and mayo is a shorthand recipe for a seafood sauce. The two together would be good in a chicken sandwich. For me sliced roast chicken (or shredded) without any sort of sauce or addition makes a good chicken sandwich. I've been doing that with my left over chicken from Christmas dinner, today with slices of tomato. *'Kecap' is the Malay word that the Brits and Americans appropriated for what in Australia is called tomato sauce. Before you ask, yes it is pronounced the same as 'ketchup' (c is a ch sound in Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia). Before spelling reform the Dutch derived version was ketjap.

It's not hard to imagine that in the controlled environment of their porn shoots they will go bare back but would decline to do so with Joe Public. There is a difference between 'I don't bareback' and 'I don't bareback with clients'.

Oops, sorry, I'll back off, I can never read the room. 😉