3/19/20
Welcome to https://www.covidtotals.com/
I am increasingly concerned, trying to find as much information as possible, and needed to build a single dashboard that would give high-level, as well as detailed information at a glance.
So, I built: https://www.covidtotals.com/
For now, we’re going with data provided by Johns Hopkins University and visualized utilizing the datawrapper data visualization tools.
This is an evolving project. Please stay tuned and “pardon our dust.”
This is a typical news brief. I did many hundreds of these over the years. Whatever I was reading, that I though was interesting, or that I picked up along my travels, I would capture and drop into a list for others.
Since October 2018, we’ve been on the road wrestling, training, and putting on shows. Dash has wrestled in front of thousands of fans, learned about the business of professional wrestling, and has performed at over 50 live shows.
Pure Pro Wrestling and it’s owner Joe Byrd (Xavier Justice) have become part of our extended family and most of the entire company as well.
We’ve been training kids for over 14 months now and our program has grown from six to nearly forty students. Some of the kids are definitely not going to be ever “picked for the team” and have long been ostracized from organized athletics programs. But, at Pure Pro Wrestling’s Jr Grapplers program, they are welcomed.
I’ve watched kids swell with confidence, enjoy the benefits of fellowship, improve in school, and live out their dreams in front of a live audience of hundreds of people. Some of them doing so well, that they are growing beyond our own hopes. Some of them, having disabilities, have finally found something that they can do and have been accepted into unquestioningly.
Professional wrestling, often dismissed, looked down upon, or even ridiculed, is one of the last pure forms of performing folk art around. The work they do, the love that wrestlers have for their craft, and the real risks they endure at each performance and practice are very real.
I think that a proper analog for this form of athletic art could be considered as “athletics theater.” In fact, there are many parallels with traditional live performing theater. There is plot, a written script, sets, costumes, a great amount of effort in setup, and the actual performance.
I couldn’t be happier with my wrestling family and I couldn’t be prouder of our entire organization. If you’re in Michigan, please come out and see our next show. You can buy tickets in the box below.
We launched the Meridian Weekly website a couple of days ago. There were a number of difficult things to overcome, but it’s live. Also created facebook and twitter accounts for them to begin using.
The Weekly is published in Ovid Michigan by a small staff and is living proof that print not only isn’t dead, it lives in small and almost unnoticed segments in our society. It’s just not what we think that it is, or rather what our idea of it was.
Anyway, check them out, give them a follow. Support your local media content producers.
My friend Gary passed away. He was a great person and I was not a great friend. I will miss him.
He was one of the reasons that I started my career in computers. I met him at a computer club meeting at Mott Community College in Flint, MI. We spent a lot of time early on in the x86 days with early versions of DOS, Windows, and the first releases of Linux. He was among the most knowledgeable computer people that I have ever met.
He was a gifted systems engineer, software developer, and a great overall computing enthusiast. He embodied all that was fun about computing for the early era of home computing. He was an avid gamer, made original midi compositions, and published several freeware applications.
He supported himself, in small part, by providing technical support to his friends, family, co-workers, and small business. Mostly for a nominal fee. He did much more than he was compensated for.
He was a gifted chess player. I witnessed him win several tournaments, perform demonstration matches against 12 opponents simultaneously, and he developed software and hardware for computing chess applications. At the time of his death, he was a well ranked player and State of Michigan seniors champion in 2018.
I’ll miss my friend Gary, whom I have many, many stories about and a great lot of love for.
Edit: 2/29/20 – Gary was very, very funny. When I think of something, I’ll drop back in here and write it up.
Here’s one:
Gary told of a health-related party, or some alternative medicine (likely a product promotional) gathering he was attending. The hostess asked him, “Gary have you ever had a high colonic?” Gary said he replied, “Oh no, I never drink.” To which the lady blinked wordlessly and wandered away.
Edit: 3/22/21 – Here’s another, in fact, enema-related story:
Once, we were eating at the US Coney Island on Dort Hwy and Bristol Rd near Flint, MI. He started telling me the story of his hospitalization following a motorcycle accident. He went into great detail of his being in traction and not being able to move. He was impacted, apparently at some point, and described in great detail the enema procedure. “That nurse was thumping that tube with her finger as hard as she could… it felt like it was connected to my spine!” and how the removal process was like, “She was trying to start a lawn mower!” Needless to say, the couple behind Gary in the adjacent booth left, and the couple to our right moved across the restaurant. Sometimes, he was less self-aware than even me, or at least pretended to be for the effect of humor. Sometimes he knew exactly what he was doing.
Now, mind you… the story was less about the fact that he may have been in hospital and may have been in some sort of situation with a nurse and an enema tube, and more about the fact that they were giving us the stink eye as we smoked. They were seated in the smoking section, but were not smoking themselves. Gary was a dedicated tobacco enthusiast. Unapologetic, and militant toward even the slightest hint of smoker shaming (for lack of a better term).
He told that story to make them squirm as if the smoking was not bad enough.
I’ll keep dropping stories here as I think of them. Hopefully, they won’t all be enema-related stories. They might, however. In the meantime, I’m archiving his website, for storage here. After that is complete, I’ll let the ais.org admins know that he’s passed.
Edit: 9/13/21 – Here’s a story that is (finally) not related to the digestive tract in some way.
Back in 1996 (I believe) I went to a Microsoft conference of some kind. It might have been related to Windows NT, or maybe it was Visual Studio. There were many giveaways, the 90’s were resplendent with branded SWAG: pens, pencils, planners, cups, mousepads, stress balls, calculators… and countless other things that populate thrift stores and landfills now. I grabbed 2x of whatever they had and gave the other half to Gary.
Among those things Microsoft had a small little watch / timer on a lanyard. I mean it was tiny, about the size of a quarter and about 1/2 inch thick. For some reason, it had an alarm that went off every 12 hours. Which was fine, though he never figured out how to shut it off… and then he lost it somewhere in the house. It would beep about exactly five times, from wherever it was and then go silent for the next 12 hours.
This doesn’t sound like much of a problem, until you think of a very high-pitched beep, only sounding for a few seconds, and from an impossible to determine location. It drove him nuts for about 3 years until the batteries finally died in it.
He never did find it and I don’t know if his family found it after cleaning his house. I would have loved to have had that miserable little charm… it had provenance.
Last space shuttle tank leaves New Orleans — by sea, not air — for its journey to L.A.
Titanic sinks in real-time – A 2 hour and 41 minute simulation. Fascinating.
1906 San Francisco earthquake photos are captivating
The British Library has begun streaming more than 1,000 recordings made in India between 1912-1938.
On Vanishing – Alizheimers and it’s invisible caregivers
Waze is an awesome driving app that also lets hackers stalk you
There is a subreddit for anything
How the Myth of the “Irish slaves” Became a Favorite Meme of Racists Online
30 years after Chernobyl – Some of my friends would probably go mushroom hunting there… ffs.
Netflix remakes Watership Down – Wow.
Those who know me, know that I’m how happy that I am to report this.
Tinker with a neural network
The Guardian’s breakdown of the Panama Papers
The Verge reviews the phone I was most anticipating this year, the HTC 10. I’m disappointed. On to the Google Nexus 6p, most likely, or wait for the Galaxy Note 6.
Remember that time Ted Cruz hated dildos?
What is voter suppression really about?
There’s a new 2+2 Buick convertible. The Cascade? Casandra Casaccaa? Quesadilla? Anyway it has all the appeal of a 2002 Pontiac Sunfire… *whomp wom*
Charity analysis of the 50 biggest US businesses claims Apple have $181bn held offshore, while General Electric has $119bn and Microsoft $108bn
Astronomers find a supersized black hole in a cosmic small town – It’s 17 billion times bigger than our sun
Well, it really is… we all are.
On my block. No one know what house, or who snitched
Millennials trash talking themselves
New, new Godzilla movie, Godzilla Resurgence.
