Quickies: Black holes, dealing with anxiety, buzzing your hair, and more on COVID…

Hello, all! What differentiates the weekend from a weekday for those of us stuck working at home? Less Zoom professional meetings and more Zoom happy hours.

COVID-related stories:

• Check out this long and good read, Our Pandemic Summer, on why we shouldn’t expect to “get back to normal.”
• The death rate is Not Like the Flu, Not Like Car Crashes, Not Like… anything else you want to compare it to. Well-explained and with helpful graphs.
• Continuing on the theme from last week’s story of a black man who felt unsafe with OR without a mask, we have this article on why living in a racist country as a person of color is a risk factor.
• Some good news… you probably don’t have to disinfect all your groceries. In fact, you should probably beware of cleaning products leeching through your food wrap material.

Non-COVID stories (though somehow they all have a link to the way we’re living because of it):

• TONIGHT, Saturday, April 18th at 7pm EDT, check out this live talk about how astronomers imaged a supermassive black hole for the first time. This virtual public lecture is one of the positives of having academic conferences move to virtual formats.
• Miriam Mogilevsky, LISW, shares this wonderful worksheet to help those of us with anxiety in this trying time. It’s called the Circles of Control.
• With props to my buddy Jim for the link, here are some women who have buzzed their hair in quarantine, and they’re loving it. (Count me as one!)

Cute Animal Cuteness:

• Ever wanted to see an animal that’s almost 400 feet long? A type of siphonophore known as Apolemia, actually a string of jelly-fish-like clones acting as one organism, was caught on video. via Muscadine
• Betty the Weathercat wins fans all over the world as she becomes part of her human’s work-from-home meteorology broadcasts.
• Meerkat babies are FREAKING ADORABLE! But you don’t want a meerkat as a pet, as I learned after a student shared this bizarre picture of a meerkat on a leash.

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