About who gets vaccinated in the USA, the signs are clarifying: Republicans and the less-educated working class (including Republicans, but, mostly meaning Blacks and Hispanics) are showing reluctance. From the New York Times this morning:
The two groups seem to have different motivations. For Republicans, the attitude is connected to a general skepticism of government and science. For Black and Hispanic Americans, it appears to stem from the country’s legacy of providing substandard medical treatment, and sometimes doing outright harm, to minorities. |
This poll did not break out Asian-Americans, but other Kaiser surveys have, and it’s consistent: Asian-Americans have a higher median income than Black, Hispanic or white Americans and also a higher vaccination rate. |
One more bit of info from the NYT:
About 25 percent of unvaccinated people remain unsure whether somebody who previously had Covid should still get the vaccine, according to Kaiser. The answer is yes: Almost everybody 12 and older should.
You would think that if you've contracted this virus, you would be both immune and, as you're cured, you cannot transmit the disease. Frankly, I don't quite understand why this group needs to be vaccinated. But the positive side to all this is that if only those who indicated they would get the necessary shots, do, then the nation might get into herd immunity because there will be a whole lot of this group, plus all those asymptomatics, who are largely "safe."
On the other hand, from National Public Radio:
I got too sleepy to finish watching the 3-hour American Idol final last night, but the winner was Chayce Beckham.
Not a nice thing to say, but I wonder if the excess weight of the other two in the finals was their undoing.
Click on that link to view their photos. And it's not really their fault, for in the viewing of their reunion with their respective families, virtually every adult was morbidly obese. We do have a national problem with obesity, for this group
increased by 70% during the past decade.
Oh well, thought I'd review
Nomadland, the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture this year. Also gained Academy Award wins for Best Director and Best Actress. Perhaps it is the Pandemic, but never got to earlier watch it, and might never have bothered were it not for two steering events. First, TCM played
Fargo during their month of Oscar films, so, for the first time I saw this 1996 film, where Frances McDormand won the Best Actress award. The movie also got nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, paralleling in many ways
Nomadland, including being filmed in Cold Country, evoking snow and cold, plus the agony of a boring life.
I primarily didn't bother much with Nomadland because the thought of spending two hours on a wandering effort in the freeze with no real purpose left me cold. Then it won the Oscar. So I checked Amazon Prime, and it was there, but for $5.99. So I skipped. Then this weekend the 15 Craigside channel paid for that cost, which was enough for me to turn it on. It was also intriguing that Frances McDormand now had two Best Actress awards. Actually she also won for the 2017 Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, and a fourth, for she was one of the producers of Nomadland, which won for Best Picture. The most startling thing of all, though, is that she hasn't physically changed in the past quarter century. She looked old in the 1996 Fargo (when she was 39), and still looks old (to be 64 next month), but closely similar, in Nomadland.
Another couple of things about McDormand are that she graduated from Yale and now has been married to Joel Coen (
director of Fargo, with his brother) for 37 years. Another is that
Chloe Zhao (
right) won for Best Director, the first Asian female. She was born in Beijing 39 years ago, but this film and mention of her Oscars are banned in China for some choice political comments (
a place where are lies everywhere) she made about that country. Her film professor was Spike Lee when she studied at New York University's Tisch School of Arts. She has several productions in the pipeline, and in one of them, she will be the writer, producer and director of
Dracula, but this one being a futuristic sci-fi western.
Nomadland gained 94/82 ratings from
Rotten Tomatoes. Fargo got similar scores from RT: 93/84
. Nomadland was as expected: drawn out, slow-moving, depressing...the kind of film you might want to watch if you want to compare your life to something so trying that yours got to be better. The stars of the movie had to be those real life houseless (they lived in vans, moving about into another part-time job), more elderly nomads, who nevertheless have the freedom to do this. Not something for me, but people are different because of their life circumstances.
One interesting feature is that the real stars were actual nomads who played themselves: Linda May, Swankie and Bob Wells. Their goodbyes are not final, for they sometimes meet again somewhere else, and perhaps will again in Heaven. There was no finality to the film. I liked the
soundtrack (
full 48 minutes version--original score by Ludovico Einaudi, but snippets of NK Cole's Answer Me My Love, Willie Nelson's On the Road Again, etc.).
My meals this weekend, featuring tacos, wagyu and chu-toro, showing only my special tacos where the beef mix is first fried in wagyu fat:
Finally, a nice double- rainbow:
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