Unintentional physics lessons, anniversary, and more

December 23, 2020lifeholidays, personal, sciencefontfolly

Earlier in the month we celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary. Barely. By which I mean that it was the day before the anniversary that either of us remembered it was the anniversary¹, so while I made a slightly fancier meal than usual for dinner that night², it was something we had already planned to make at some point that week. We did manage each to have a gift to give each other, but even that had more than a bit of serendipity to it.

To tell this tale properly, I need to back up even earlier in the month. On the previous Saturday our usual gaming group gathered on line to play the next installment in our current game. We play on Saturday afternoons, chatting on Discord. And we take breaks throughout the day so every one can get fresh snacks, and/or refresh their drink, and/or take a bio break, right? And three of us in the group are into making cocktails, so frequently part way through the afternoon at one of those breaks I will assemble a cocktail instead of making another cup of tea, and we share photos of how the drinks come up.

So, I headed into the kitchen and I was already planning to make an Aviation with Empress 1908 gin³. I had run the dishwasher earlier that day, and my cocktail mixing pitcher was in the dishwasher, so I pulled it out, set it next the the bottles of booze, got a lemon and retrieved the lemon-squeezer from the drawer, right? And then I pulled a handful of ice from the freezer and dropped it into the mixing glass. I was cutting the lemon in half when I heard a distinct CLINK CLINK sound…

Enormous cracks was appearing all around my faux cut crystal cocktail mixing pitcher. I dumped out the ice and set the pitch in the sink, half expecting it to shatter any moment.

Here it is, upside down in the sink. You can see several cracks going across the bottom…

The pitcher had felt warm in my hand when I got it out of the dishwasher, but I hadn’t thought it was hot enough to have an adverse reaction the the ice. Oops⁴. I had to share a picture of the cracked glass with everyone. Even though it didn’t shatter, I figured that it’s likely to break anytime, now, and even if it doesn’t fall apart you might get tiny glass fragments in your drink. Clearly, it isn’t made out of tempered glass, and is not up to having ice dumped in it when it has been heated. Good to know.

Now, you don’t need the fancy cocktail pitcher to stir drinks in. I have a large glass shaker that can be used for stirring instead of shaking. You can also mix cocktails in a double-rocks glass, or a pint beer glass. So while it is sad to lose the pitcher, it’s something I can live without for a while. I went ahead and mixed my drink in another glass and strained it into the glass I intended to drink it from, and went back to the computer to tell the tale.

Because we’re in Gift Embargo⁷ Time, I went into my Amazon wishlist, found the pitcher (or one very much like it), and added it to my list. I can’t buy one for myself until January, but this way if someone was looking for something to buy me, and this was in their budget, I’d have one sooner, right?

I didn’t realize that Michael had, while I was telling the story, gone online and ordered me a new cocktail pitcher, in a gift bag, with the tag reading, “You need to open this early. Love, Michael.”

So it happened that the cocktail pitcher arrived in time for our anniversary. I had to duck out in the late afternoon on the day of the anniversary to pick up a present⁸ and some roses and an anniversary card. But it all worked out.

My second accidental physics lesson happened this week. Some years ago Michael gave me an aluminum seltzer bottle for a Valentine’s Day gift. So whenever I make drinks that require soda, I can make my own⁹. So I used up the last of the seltzer in the bottle the other night, and went to refill it to stick in the fridge so there would be cold seltzer whenever I needed it next.

Another present Michael got me for another Valentine’s Day is a cream whipper. So I can make my own whipped cream. Now the cream whipper uses little cartridges of nitrogen, and the seltzer bottle uses cartridges of CO2. You must not used CO2 with the whipper, because the carbon dioxide triggers a catalytic change in the heavy cream, causing the whipped cream the comes out to taste like very rotten milk. Not a good thing.

So I rinsed out the seltzer bottle, filled it with water, screwed the top on, put the cartridge in the chamber, and tightened it. The gas shot into the water, but the sound was… odd. pulled off the cartridge chamber to toss depleted cartridge into the recycle… when I noticed the cartridge was the wrong color. I had infused the water with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide.

I didn’t know if that was a bad thing, or not. I mean, since the nitrogen is safe in cream (and some other things you can put in the whipper), it ought to be okay, but I didn’t want to go research it right then. So I held the handle down and expelled all the water down the drain, unscrewed the seltzer bottle top assemble, made sure I had a CO2 cartridge this time, reassembled everything, put the cartridge in the chamber, screwed it down, and listened tot he carbon dioxide flood into the pitcher.

And when it did, the sound was wrong, but this time in a new way. As soon as I lifted the seltzer bottle I realized the new problem. I hadn’t filled it with tap water after emptying it of the nitrogen-infused water. So I laughed at myself, held down the handle and sprayed out the CO2, and unscrewed the top assembly.

There was a strange, white foamy/powdery substance on part of the mechanism under the top assembly that I didn’t recognize. When I tried to touch it, it just evaporated. That’s when I realized the top assembly was a lot colder in my hand than usual. So clearly the white substance was dry ice, which had formed inside the bottle while I was expelling the CO2. I since holding the top assembling was mildly painful from the cold, but didn’t actually burn my skin, I assume that I hadn’t gotten the interior of the bottle cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide¹³ under normal circumstances, but under the heightened pressure¹⁴ that had existed in the bottle temporarily had combined with the cooling effect of expelling first the nitrous-infused water and then the over pressured air¹⁶.

Eventually, I did get the proper combination of water and CO2 into the bottle and stuck it in the fridge.

Compared to other things going wrong in the world, this was more amusing that anything else.

Footnotes:

1. This isn’t the first time that the anniversary has snuck up on at least one of us. Part of the issue is that the date of our wedding wasn’t exactly of our own choosing. We held the ceremony on the first day that same sex couples were legally allowed to marry in our state. But I also blame the fact that the pandemic has turned time into a fog.

2. Beef stroganoff, which is something that I make almost once a month. It’s one of those recipes I can almost do in my sleep. It’s really good and it sounds complicated, and it is a little more work that what we often put into a work night dinner.

3. The Empress gin, instead of being a clear liquid like most gins, is a deep indigo color. And when you mix in citrus of any kind, the cocktail turns a really lovely shade of lavender. It makes for a very cool looking drink.

4. Part of the issue might be that I think I grabbed the glass with my right hand, and never touched it with my left hand. I have extensive nerve damage in the right hand because of an accident when I was a teen-ager. One of the things I can’t reliably feel with that hand is heat⁵.

5. Yes, I had sometimes grabbed hot dishes without potholder, and the reflexes of my left hand immediately drops it, while my right will hold on and make a nice sizzling noise.

6. I should explain the physics lesson: when an object is heated, not matter what it is made out of, it expands (physically gets bigger). When it cools, it contracts (gets smaller). Glass object does not have a high internal thermal conductivity. Normally we like this, because acts as at least a bit of an insulator between our hands and the food/drink contained inside. However, in the case of a glass object—such as a cocktail mixing glass, becoming heated because of the hot water in the dishwasher, and then staying heated because of the heating coil the helps dry off the dishes after the wash cycle is complete—and then being cooled rapidly by either the addition of cool water or cold ice, the surface exposed to the cold object contracts faster then the interior molecules of glass, causing stress. Glass is hard, but it is also brittle. That means it isn’t flexible to deal with that stress, and so instead it cracks.

7. Some years ago my husband had to scold me for buying myself some DVDs and books not long before Christmas. And of course, it turned out one of our friends had bought me one of the things I bought myself, and handed me the pretty wrapped package at the Christmas party that year. Anyway, the rule now is that started a few weeks before my birthday, through Christmas, I’m only allowed to buy myself things like food, certain types of clothing, and medicine.

8. I got him a wok. We used to have an enormous wok, and Michael used it for cooking all kinds of things, not just stir fry. But it was more useful back when we were regularly hosting at least two group get-togethers every month, but he was reluctant to use the big thing when it was just the two of us. So when we were getting rid of things we seldom use prepping to move a few years ago, the wok was donated, and Michael said we could get a smaller one if we decided we needed it.

9. So, rather than having to keep bottles of tonic in stock in order to make gin & tonics, I can keep a bottle of tonic syrup and then use the seltzer bottle to turn a small amount of syrup into a large amount of tonic. Then there are Aperol Spritzes, Whiskey and Sodas, or Rock n Rye and Sodas¹⁰ and so forth.

10. I still need to do a post about how I started making homemade Rock n Rye to open at our Christmas Party every year, and then the drinks I have invented that use the leftover Rock n Rye¹¹ when I don’t feel like straight shots.

11. It’s kind of fun, and you never know exactly how it’s going to taste until it is done.

12. At this point, I should probably have decided that just before bedtime after having two Rock n Rye and
Sodas might not be the best time to accomplish anything but super simple tasks, but…

13. Which is -109 degrees Fahrenheit or -78 degrees Celsius.

14. Higher air pressure lowers the freezing point of any substance¹⁵.

15. Well, if I am to be pedantic, the temperatures we humans usually list as freezing and boiling points of various substances assumes exactly one atmosphere of pressure. So if the air pressure is either lower or higher than one atmosphere, then the freezing and boiling points change.

16. When a gas expands, it cools off, this is why, for instance, either the nitrous or CO2 cartridges turn very cold after as you empty them.

A proper Christmas… however you define it

December 22, 2020lifeholiday, holiday food, holidays, life, personal, traditionfontfolly

My husband pointed me to a twitter thread by a Muslim American who has never celebrated Christmas, before, who is letting his Quarantine Roommates teach him how to have his first proper Christmas. It’s a funny and relatively short thread that has some good commentary on the way Americans tend to observe Christmas. I like his first characterization of Christmas as being a part-time job from mid-November to the end of December. I’ll link to the thread at the end of this post.

A proper Christmas means different things to different people, and I think that’s a good thing. I remember a few years ago when I was discussing this topic with a couple of friends, that one explained that what she liked about Christmas was that she could put up pretty lights and ornaments. The other friend interjected that what he liked about it was that you get to decide what “pretty” is, and if other people comment unfavorably on whatever outlandish or silly decorations, you could just gasp and claim that this is how your family always did it, and the person was socially obligated to accept that that was your tradition (whether it actually had been a family tradition or not).

It got me thinking about what sort of informal family traditions my family had observed. Most were pretty mundane, and some were the result of other circumstances. Unless there was an overwhelming reason, we always spent Christmas morning at my paternal grandparents’ house. Sometimes Dad’s sister’s family was there, too. Because Dad’s oil field job was nomadic, how far we had to drive to get there varied most years. If we got to the town where my grandparents lived early enough on Christmas Eve, we’d get to go visit my maternal grandmother and great-grandparents this evening. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get to see them until after Christmas dinner¹.

By the time my great-grandparents died, my maternal grandmother was living 1200 miles away. But then my parents divorced and Mom, my sister², and I relocated to the same part of southwest Washington, where I found out that grandma hosted a Christmas Eve open house every year, attended by relatives, in-laws, old family friends, and others. So for the next many years one of the traditions became you’d see all the extended family on Christmas Eve³, then Christmas morning would be each individual family opening presents together.

All the Christmas trees put up by my extended family were a bit chaotic. Everyone seemed to have some special ornaments that had been passed down from earlier generations, as well as an eclectic collection of glass balls and the like. The trees would thus have a whole lot of different colors, and since any kids in the home had done part of the decorating, there often wasn’t any sort of design involved in the placement of the ornaments, other than the star or angel⁴ always went on top.

I think I was nine when I saw my first non-chaotic tree in the home of someone I knew. I can close my eyes and still see it: a flocked white tree decorated with dozens of identical blue satin balls and blue satin ribbons, with a blue and silver angel on top. I was really shocked, and couldn’t imagine why someone would do that. A few years later another family I knew had a tree where the ornaments were red, green, and gold, and the mother of the family had very strict rules about which size of ornaments went how high on the tree⁶, and that the three colors had to be as evenly distributed as possible.

Of course, many years later Ray and I did trees all in a fairly simple color scheme… but even then there was a bit of chaos, because either of us could pick any “favorites” to go on the tree no matter what the color scheme was. Just as this year’s tree at our house has mostly purple and pink ornaments, but some of the traditional ones I put on every year⁷, and then just about anything I could justify as being gay.

I find that I am more concerned with food at Thanksgiving than at Christmas. I have certain favorite dishes that we always had at Thanksgiving when I was a kid that I crave on that day now, but Christmas food doesn’t get me quite the same way. I don’t know if that is because as a kid that the big part of Christmas was the presents and everything else was secondary, or if the family dinners were just more flexible at Christmas. I mean, as far as I remember, anything that was an accepted side dish at Thanksgiving could appear on the Christmas dinner, so you would think I’d always have a strong craving for some of those things.

Michael and I have had the tradition since our first Christmas that we make a nice dinner for Christmas Eve, as well as a big dinner for Christmas, and a nice dinner for New Year’s Eve. And we start planning the three together a few weeks before the holidays. But we don’t do the same things each year at those three events. Mostly. I mean, New Year’s Eve is often beef… unless we had decided to do steaks for Christmas Eve or something. At this point we’re a few days out from Christmas Eve/Christmas, and the plan is that we’ll pull either the ham, or the turkey breast, or the pork roast out of the freezer for those, and the small prime rib roast I found at a not entirely outrageous price we’re saving for New Year’s… maybe⁹.

When I started this blog post, I thought I would vamp for a little bit on some odd traditions, and then start talking about one very specific tradition I started about five years ago. But I see that the word count of this entry is getting up there, so maybe I should save that for later.

In the meantime, you should read the whole twitter thread if you haven’t yet.

Growing up, my Muslim family never celebrated Christmas. This year I am not going home, because pandemic, so my roommates are teaching me how to have my first proper Christmas.

I am approaching this with anthropological precision.

Here are a few observations. pic.twitter.com/1WARv5nax4

— Mohammad Hussain (@MohammadHussain) December 19, 2020

Footnotes:

1. When I was very young, this just seemed to be the way things were. It wasn’t until I was about 10 or 11 years old that I realized that Dad’s parents (specifically his mother) always got priority over everyone else, or else.

2. My half-brothers and half-sister remained with Dad and their mother, of course.

3. And you could use Grandma’s party as an opportunity to deliver gifts, but generally opening presents that night was frowned upon.

4. Almost everyone had either a star or an angel. I mostly only saw the spire or steeple style tree-toppers in stores or on neighbor’s trees. As an adult, for a while it was always either a star or one of the spires. Until we started getting more creative. This year, for instance, we have a flying fairy⁵.

5. It is most definitely not an angel.

6. Largest at the bottom of the tree, medium sized in the middle, small one near the top.

7. I have three small glass ball ornaments—one red, one pink, and one green—which belonged to my great-grandmother. I have three sets of crocheted bells that were made by my grandma. We have a pair of December Diamond Goom Mermen that were a present from a group of friends on the occasion of our legal wedding on the first day we legally could in our state—which happened to be in December. The two of them go on the tree side by side no matter what the theme is⁸.

8. This year they just happen to fit the Gay part of the theme.

9. I an totally blaming the pandemic on why we are less decided on the meals at this stage than usual¹⁰.

10. I mean, we’ve also got a beef brisket in the freezer, and we were talking about doing in on New Year’s… and then the prime rib could get shuffled to one of the other days¹¹.

11. And I still need to run to the store before the holiday because I know we’re missing some ingredients for some of the side dishes we’ve discussed… and I might find something on sale that would completely change our minds on the other possibilities.

Playing catchup, virtual party, and counting down to Christmas

December 21, 2020lifechristmas, holiday, life, personalfontfolly

This year’s theme is The Big Gay Christmas Tree™️ (photo by my husband)

I haven’t been posting much all month. November’s semi-hiatus was planned, because I was doing NaNoWriMo¹, so I was trying to put all of the time when I wasn’t working to writing for NaNo, rather than blogging. Once November was over I needed to shift gears to try to get the Christmas Ghost Story² finished before the virtual Christmas Party, but I didn’t expect to almost completely stop blogging!

Part of the issue, I realize, is that things at work went super intense because we had an outlandish³ number of software releases scheduled to push out to customers before everyone goes into holiday hiatus, so I was working late several days of every week, and found myself so exhausted I needed to take naps a couple of nights each week.

I’ve been taking at least one vacation day every week since August because of some draconian changes in vacation policy. Which seems really nice until you realize that part of the draconian bit is that despite forcing most of the work force to take time off, the corporate overlords are insisting that none of the previously committed delivery dates can be adjusted. Which means that we’re still working just as many hours, but squeezing them into four work days a week instead of five.

And no, when you’re classified as a salaried and exempt employee that isn’t illegal, even though it ought to be⁴. Moving on.

Before the virtual party, my hubby arranged the presents before taking pictures to share.

I had Friday off, and I had worked very late two nights before that, but I managed to get up, moving, and out to do the shopping at a reasonable hour. I finished the Ghost Story in the wee small hours of Saturday morning⁶, as I almost always do. I always end up in a state where I’m spinning my wheels, ditching scenes and writing replacement scenes no matter how early I start the story.

I got the story finished and practiced and we were both in a good, rested headspace when it was time to log into the virtual party and start being social. I did not finish the story in time where I could both practice reading it aloud a few times and record the performance in advance to upload to either my Patreon or Youtube channel as I hoped⁷. I may still try to do that. We’ll see⁹.

Besides not getting to see people in person, another thing that was a bit disappointing about the virtual Christmas party is we didn’t have the usual gift exchange. A couple of people were willing to open presents on camera because they had received presents from some of the people on line, but it’s not the same. I could have, obviously, decided to open any number of the presents that I’ve received. But the truth is that my favorite part isn’t opening presents myself¹⁰, it’s seeing other people open presents and react to them. That’s where a lot of the laughter at the party occurs. And you get to thank the person who gave it to you right then. And you can hear the story about how the person who gave you the present found this thing and why they thought of you, when appropriate it.

So I wasn’t really chomping at the bit to open any of mine.

For the last few years Christmas day has been just Michael and I, whereas it used to be like that only on alternate years. We started this after barely getting through the first Thanksgiving after the Grifter-in-Chief was elected without punching certain relatives in the mouth¹². It was a very unpleasant holiday, all right?

So for December 2016, ’17, ’18, and ’19 I have driven down to southwest Washington a few days before Christmas to drop off presents with my Mom, one of my aunts, my sister and her family, and my grown niece and her family. It’s always a day that I have off but my husband has to work¹³. Then we have a day or more to ourselves before the actual holiday plus Christmas Day itself.

I have to admit I kind of miss getting to do that trip this year. I like seeing everyone in person, and for whatever reason¹⁷ when we’re not down there on the actual holiday they talk a lot less about the various unpleasant topics. On the other hand, given the way the weather has been this week, which would normally be the time I’m most likely to take the trip, I’m just as happy not being on the freeway.

So I’ll just keep working from home for the next couple of days, enjoy gazing at our Big Gay Christmas Tree™, and keeping counting down until Santa arrives.

Footnotes:

1. I did make my word count goal, though I didn’t exceed the last few years’ word counts as I had managed to do a few years in a row until now.

2. The annual tradition I’ve followed since 1995 is that I write an original Christmas Ghost Story to read at the party, and challenge other folks to read something they’ve written—or otherwise perform something. We’re had people sing, play a musical instruments, all sorts of things.

3. It really is edging up into the impossible at this point…

4. It is amazing how many times when I have mentioned something like this online, how many randos feel obligated to chime in to say this sort of thing is illegal. It just reminds me how many people don’t work in the sorts of industries where everyone qualifies for the IRS’s definition of exempt employee and therefore assume that hourly working regulations apply⁵.

5. It’s particularly amazing at how many of them don’t understand that virtually every company that has managed to get most of its employees thus classified does these sorts of thing to exploit their employees.

6. Sort of. I mean, I reached an ending by about 3:30am and then promptly crashed for a few hours. After I woke up I kept thinking about it and didn’t like how I’d ended it. I mean the very ending, yes, but the way I’d written the story and the fairy tale tropes I was using had prompted me to write a long denouement that a short story typically has nowadays. So sometime shortly afternoon I deleted most of the denouement, replacing it with a single sentence, and then I was much happier.

7. I need to upload things to both far more often…⁸

8. Given my activity thus far this year, by “more often” I really mean “at all.”

9. I’m not sure how much appeal there would be to hearing a Christmas Ghost Story after Christmas, so if I don’t manage it in the next few days…

10. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy getting presents. That’s fun. And trying to guess what’s inside and then opening it is also a lot of fun. I particularly love those times when someone finds something I didn’t even know existed, but if I had known I would have put it on my own wishlist¹¹. That’s just amazing.

11. In the realm of books and music, my friend Mark is incredibly good at this.

12. The cliche usually mentions the racist uncle—the problem goes deeper than that. The homophobic relatives who don’t believe they are homophobic, the relatives who repeat white supremacist talking points from Fox News without thinking, et cetera, et cetera. That’s part of the reason we instituted the old rule of we would visit them for one of the big holidays each year, then stay home for the other.

13. I always got asked several times why Michael wasn’t there. They accept that I get more paid time off than he does, but I keep expecting them to start accusing me of keeping him away from them or something¹⁴.

14. I’ve mentioned before that I strongly suspect a bunch of my extended family on that side like Michael more than they do me. Which I’m perfectly happy with, because I think he’s awesome, and given how many of the family perceived my late husband, Ray, as some sort of evil person who surely must had done something diabolical to me to turn me gay¹⁵, them all enthusiastically liking my husband is a decided improvement¹⁶.

15. I have been gay for as long as I can remember, I just didn’t have words for it when I was younger, and then because I feared all the homophobic people around me once I realized what was going on after puberty hit, I hid it from them.

16. One of his reasons for not accompanying me on these trips during those years is that he doesn’t want to use up one of his more limited number of vacation days for that purpose, but also because he winds up biting his tongue a whole lot more than I do when they start parroting Fox News.

17. There are two reasons I can think of. First, there’s something about having a bunch of people together for several hours on a holiday that seems to make some folks feel obligated to fill any moments of silence with something, and so they are just more likely to spout off as the day goes on. Second, since I tend to be dropping off stuff at each individual house, and they know I have other people to get to and so on, they think of it as a visit with me, rather than a general group get-together. So topics remain focused on the social visit and catching up on our personal lives, rather then discussing world events, the coming apocalypse¹⁸, and so on.

18. I’m not exaggerating, here. The kind of Bible-thumping evangelical fundamentalism my extended family adheres sees every single world event as either a direct attack by demonic forces, or a sign that Commando Jesus is going to descend from the heavens soon, kill all the unbelievers, and take the true believes back up to rule in heaven.

Friday Five (biggest loser ever edition)

December 18, 2020bloggingfriday, friday five, friday links, links, newsfontfolly

“Trump Lost. Then he lost again. And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Biggest Loser Ever!” — Click to embiggen (Do it! Read the small print on the bumper sticker!)

We have reached the third Friday in December. And I’m still not finished writing this year’s ghost story!?!

This Saturday is our virtual Christmas party, where I need to read said ghost story. There are more than a few errands I need to get to this weekend, as well. And I need to try not to sleep most of the day away, if I can manage it.

But let’s get to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories about crooks & liars, five stories about the petty crime boss occupying the whitehouse, and five videas (plus notable obituaries).

Videos!

Presidential Concessions – If You Don’t Know, Now You Know | The Daily Social Distancing Show:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Hey! Republicans Who Refuse to Accept the Election Results:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Mitch McConnell Inspires Spicy Talk From Team Biden And A Pathetic Tweet From The President:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Rock the Runoff: Broadway for Georgia performs “Georgia On My Mind”:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

RUDOLPH THE LEAKY LAWYER – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Friday Five (enduring American asshole edition)

December 11, 2020bloggingfriday, friday five, friday links, links, newsfontfolly

We have reached the second Friday in December. Which means I ought to be further along and/or happier with t draft scenes I have for my annual Christmas Ghost Story but, alas, it does not.

Work continues to be insanely busy. A conversation I had with one of my medical specialists left me suspecting that my February sickness was more serious than it seemed, but also that it wasn’t useful on either a personal nor a species/scientific community basis at this point to test me for antibodies. Speaking with my specialist left me no less convinced that I need to take the vaccine as soon as it is available to me, but also less than optimistic about a rather large portion of the population. Let’s just say that even though I was already really f–ing angry at Fox News for turning my mother and at least two of my Aunts into sociopaths, I’m not feeling any more optimistic about the future of the general population.

But let’s get to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: three stories that have nothing to do with any of the anxiety-inducing things happening in the world, the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and allies, five stories about crooks & liars, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about the petty crime boss occupying the whitehouse, and five videas (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).

This Week In News We Need Right Now!:

The Voice: Gwen Stefani BREAKS DOWN in Tears Over Carter Rubin’s Rainbow Connection Performance>. Scroll down to the video section to watch and hear the incredible performance.

Dog Was Lost in the Woods for 10 Days With a Winter Storm on the Way – But a Drone Saved the Day>.

‘Best buddies’: Grieving pit bull finds joy again with companion, a tabby kitten rescued by a firefighter>.

Stories of the Week:

Pepperidge Farm parent company warns cookies in short supply this holiday season>.

Those Viral Hospital iPads Are a ‘Lifeline’ for Covid Patients>.

Asteroid capsule located in Australian desert>.

A Mild Case Of COVID May Cause Erectile Dysfunction – Will risk of long-term erection issues be enough to get Trump-supporting men to FINALLY wear masks>?

Conspiracy Theorists Complain 5G ‘Blockers’ Slow Their WiFi>. Who would have thought that a device which claims to block 90% of radio signals would impede the WiFi signal [/sarcams]?

This Week in News for Queers and Allies:

Lithuanian Anti-LGBTQ Lawmaker Caught with ‘Naked’ Man During Online Parliamentary Session>.

Pelosi holds firm to support for transgender kids under hostile questioning>.

‘Your kind is not welcome’: Homophobic confrontation sparks debate in Wyoming – A bigoted incident in the rural northwest part of the state has prompted others in the community to stand up and say, “Enough.”>.

Trump’s new religious exemptions for employers an invitation to discriminate, critics say>.

Frustration builds as Biden’s Cabinet includes no LGBTQ picks>.

This Week in Crooks, Liars and Other Deplorable People:

Man who claimed to have bomb at headquarters of Spokane Democrats in police custody>.

FTC and states sue Facebook for illegally stifling competition>.

He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It>.

US Marshalls apprehend fugitive gay basher in Texas>.

Giuliani Witness Melissa Carone Sent Harassing Sex Tapes To Fiancé’s Ex-Wife >.

This Week in the Pandemic:

Vaccine Advisory Committee Endorses Pfizer Covid-19 Vaccine, Paves Way For FDA Authorization>.

Trump Holds Packed Hanukkah Party at White House Amid COVID-19 Pandemic That Has Killed 289,000 in U.S.>.

Giuliani witness whose false and seemingly drunk testimony went viral Mellissa Carone says she’s not self-quarantining after Giuliani’s COVID-19 diagnosis>. Bonus:

This Is Only Going to Get Worse – The United States is entering a long, dark period, and the pandemic is already breaking records from the spring>.

The Billionaires Who Profited from the Pandemic Should Help Pay for Our Recovery – A new plan from the United Kingdom suggests that a onetime pandemic levy on a country’s wealthiest citizens could be the most practical and …>.

This Week in the Deplorable Thug Occupying the White House:

Jake Tapper Delivers Blistering Commentary on the State of the Republican Party: ‘If You Cross the President, You Actually Fear for Your Life’>.

Trying To Force States And The Supreme Court To Overturn The Election… – Trying To Force States And The Supreme Court To Overturn The Election…ON TWITTER>.

Melania Trump ‘just wants to go home’ as president continues to dispute election result – A rumoured run by Donald Trump for president in 2024 would reportedly ‘not go over well’>.

Trump asks Supreme Court to invalidate millions of votes in battleground states >.

Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller tells judge he’ll be unemployed after Dec. 15 – Despite public reporting, Trump campaign is still keeping Jason Miller’s $420,000 salary a secret — but why>?

In Memoriam:

David Lander, Squiggy in ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ Dies at 73>.

Laverne & Shirley’s David Lander Remembered by Michael McKean: ‘This Is a Loss Shared by All of Us’>.

Former Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland dies>.

Things I wrote:

Weekend Update 12/5/2020: Clearing out the tabs…>.

The magic slab of glass that contains all my friends… or not>.