RESIDENT ALIEN

 From the Miami Herald:  Where are you most likely to catch COVID?

• Poorly ventilated movie theater with mostly unmasked audience:  14%.
• But jumps to 54% if you're unmasked and people are talking a lot.
• If the crowd is masked, the risk of infection drops to 5.3% with no talking and 24% with talking.
• DON'T GO TO A MOVIE THEATER YET!
• Heavy exercise in a poorly ventilated placed packed with maskless people:  99%.  Yikes.
• Just working out for a short amount of time in a well-ventilated gym with no one wearing masks:  17%.
• Poorly ventilated:  67%.

From the New York Times this morning:

• More than three-quarters of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths have occurred among people 65 and older.
• Yet, seniors seem not be particularly concerned:

• The plausible explanation provided is that seniors tend to lean to the right (Republican), while younger generations to the left (Democrat).
• Of course you know this:

• Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives, even as their skepticism of vaccines means that the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats. The Covid vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing serious illness. If you’re vaccinated, your chances of getting severely sick are extremely low. Even among people 65 and older, the combination of the vaccines’ effectiveness and the Omicron variant’s relative mildness means that Covid now appears to present less danger than a normal flu. That was the crux of my posting yesterday.  Tomorrow I will take this one step further and suggest that the Omicron variant is catalyzing the decline of the Republican Party.

• Interestingly enough, the unvaccinated are still least worried about being infected, even today:

There is a clue here as to why some just don't get unvaccinated.  This irrationality has to do with an emotional sense of freedom that overrides science, sense and logic.

Growing up as a youth, in the early 1950's I went to the Woody Woodpecker Saturday morning Kewalo Theater show.  Cost 10 cents, with the same for both coke and popcorn.  There was a cartoon, followed by a newsreel, then some sort of program with audience participation, one episode of a cliffhanger chapter and the movie, many times a western.

Then later that decade, TV arrived, with programs like the weekly I Love Lucy Show.  Like on radio much earlier, soap operas came to TV in the 1960s.  Also, late-night TV brought The Tonight Show, then others.  Of course weekly shows like MASH and Love Boat (interesting pilot, one hour long) programs, with ambitious series presentations also appearing like Alex Haley's Roots, which went on for 12 episodes.  ABC, CBS and NBC enjoyed an oligopoly.

In the 80's came came cable TV, delivering national stations and community television.  I remember in 1962 arriving in Naalehu, the southernmost community in the USA, not even having daytime TV nor even radio stations.  We were too far away from Hilo, and the Honolulu stations were blocked by Mauna Loa.  Conversely, most of my classmates who went into the Peace Corps, to places in Africa and the South Pacific, The had access to at least radio.

Actually, Home Box Office (HBO) appeared in 1972, offering special films with no commercials.  By 1980, 23% of American households received basic cable service, and by 1990 it was 60%.

Then came ESPN, Showtime, CNN and perhaps a hundred other channels.  Can you believe CNN has been here now for more than 40 years?  It covered the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and became an around-the-clock war channel with the Gulf War.  Quickly followed MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.   MTV debuted in 1981 and VH-1 in 1985.  Add on videocassette recorders, and the viewing world was changing.  Johnny Carson said goodbye in 1992, here kissed by Bette Midler.

What really changed TV was Amazon Prime in 2006 and Netflix in 2007.  Most of the great series I have written about in this blog were from these two channels.

From the late 1990's into the 2000's, HBO came out with The Sopranos.  Today, Spectrum is typical for cable services, and there are 2000 channels.  Yet, I many times can't find even one worthy of watching.  But Netflix/Prime, ah, I have a hundred programs just waiting to be watched, a few dozen rated 100%.

However, I read about Resident Alien a couple of weeks ago.  Checked Rotten Tomatoes, and the average audience score was an excellent 90%.  Then one day I saw in the daily guide the SyFy channel playing all ten episodes, so I recorded them.  Season 2 starts tomorrow, January 26.  Not on Netflix or Prime, but SyFy, and, also the USA Network.  Then from episode 2 on season 2, only on SyFy.  The season will be split, concluding on March 16, then some time this summer for the remainder.  Those who saw season 1 remember that Harry, the resident alien, decided not to annihilate Humanity, and just went home, until he saw young Max stowed away on the space ship.  So of course, he has to return.  Watch out, for Alex Borstein arrives as a frizzy physicist with aims for Harry.

Why is this series so endearing and maybe worthy of binge-watching, as I did?

• Excellent writing.  Fine humor.  Nice twists.
• Various meaningful relationships.
• Good songs.  Karaoke singing.
• Shameless borrowing of similar scenes from past alien films.
• About binge-watching, only ten episodes of around 45 minutes each.  Some Korean series run for 20 episodes and 80 minutes/episode.

• 
  You probably never heard of the alien, Harry Tudyk, who has been acting for a quarter century, but won an Emmy, after having early in life study at Juilliard.
• You'll recognize Linda Hamilton, who was Sarah Connor in The Terminator, and today looks all of 65, if not older, muchly so.  This Arnold S. film earned a 100% reviewers rating from Rotten Tomatoes reviewers.

In short, if you have a video recorder, channels like SyFy and Showtime are fine for you, as you can quickly skip through the commercials.  No need to do that in most of the streaming channels.  Except for the monthly charge (from $9 to $20, depending on whether you want HD,etc.), everything on Netflix is free.  Prime has some free stuff, but certainly not all.  The monthly fee of $13 also gets you mostly free shipment of items from Amazon.  Certified Fresh Movies come from Rotten Tomatoes, and are rated 75% and higher.

For space fans, the James Webb Space Telescope just arrived at Lagrange Point 2 (there are five of them), a million miles away from Planet Earth, and will return to that spot every six months.  It is now appearing that the fuel use was such that this telescope will now be able to operate for 20 years instead of 10.  Further:

• 
  For next three months engineers will try to align the 18 mirror segments to act as one, a process that needs to set the alignment of each to within 1/5000th the diameter of a human hair.
• The first viewing "photo" will return to Earth around the end of June.  The signal itself will take only 5.37 seconds to reach Earth.
• The Hubble Telescope, incidentally, now in its third decade of operation at its location only 340 miles from our planet, just succeed in revealing that black holes play a part in star formation.

Haven't mentioned Donald Trump in days, so here is yet another factual compilation of truths:

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