Michael Lewis' latest: An Unputdownable Pandemic Story

 I recently finished this one:

And it was so good, I read it again almost immediately!

The book is an interwoven bunch of stories of the people who were behind the working parts of the government's pandemic response, including the "social distancing" stuff we've all been doing the past year plus. It turns out the initial reading of the 1918 flu pandemic showed that social distancing didn't work, but these researchers looked at the original sources. They found that it didn't work in Philadelphia because the city leaders waited too long to put it in practice.

I'll spare you the actual picture of Philadelphia in those days, where "bodies were stacked up like cordwood."

In St. Louis, where they got going on it faster, it worked much better.

But they had the same stuff going on then that we have today, with business leaders lobbying to relax social distancing rules.The cities that caved into this experienced big second waves of disease; those that didn't, avoided them.

The star of the book is Dr. Charity Dean, who was a public health physician who was tasked with keeping track of tuberculosis and hepatitis C in Santa Barbara county at the beginning of the book, then has a big role to play later when the pandemic starts.

Just get a copy of the book! You can get one from your local library in about a year ... or if you're in more of a hurry, it's  available wherever books are sold ... and where they haven't yet run out.

This is my favorite work of nonfiction for at least the last 5 years. Thank you, Michael Lewis!

A Driving Safety improvement: My new Bluetooth Speaker

 I like to listen mostly to podcasts from my phone as I drive. I have read the research on phone use and driving, and I have been mostly very careful not to be messing with the phone while the car is moving.

But ... My phone is 3 years old now, and the formerly 3.5mm receptor for audio plugs is now 3.77mm or something, anyway big enough that the receptor can jiggle out when the car hits a bump. This is not only highly aggravating; it also tempts me to fix the situation while the car is moving.

My wife's car has bluetooth, and that solves the problem ... play the audio through bluetooth and you can set it and forget it!

One nuance of bluetooth that I was not expecting: even in Do Not Disturb mode, the phone will still ring via bluetooth. On my phone, I have to set my phone to Total Silence to turn this off, which keeps me from podcasts ... I don't have a good solution to this except for ignoring the phone's rings when driving. [UPDATE: I found this in the Android Settings for Bluetooth

My phone's menu is similar ... just unselect the Phone Calls menu item!]

I finally realized that I could buy a bluetooth speaker for my non-bluetooth-enabled car and have the same benefits there. I found this one:

One thing I hadn't expected: I was listening to a podcast when driving and got this BOOP BOOP sound, first thinking it was on the podcast. But no, it happened repeatedly. Turned out it was the speaker crying "CHARGE MY BATTERY!" ... Otherwise it boops saying THAT"S AS LOUD AS I CAN GO, SORRY.

Overall, for $19 well worth and much safer than trying to get the phone to stay connected in its increasingly widening connector.