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dolorosa_12I have pretty negative feelings about the Olympics going ahead, and they're warring with my ex-gymnast feelings of absolute delight at the excellent quality of gymnastics that we're going to get, particularly from the US women's gymnastics team. I feel lucky to be alive to witness the career of Simone Biles, and I expect her to equal or better her achievements in the last Olympics.
However, when I was a gymnast, my favourite apparatus — and the one I was best at — was uneven bars. Bars is Simone Biles's weakest apparatus (obviously this is not really saying much — her 'weakest' event is still incredible, she's just better at beam, floor and vault). But the US team also has Sunisa Lee, whose bar routine is so difficult, and so (mostly) perfectly executed that it leaves me speechless and filled with joy.
(There are various technical reasons why it's so difficult: mainly the many, many 'release' moves where she releases hold of the bar to either flip/twist and catch hold of the same bar again, or releases hold of one bar to move to the other. These are particularly difficult because they're done in quick succession, and because a lot of them involve rotating and/or losing sight of the bar she's meant to catch.)
As I say, the Olympics should not be taking place, but I'm still in awe at these gymnasts.
Meanwhile, my mother has spent the past day arguing with her Australian boomer friends on Facebook, who have latched onto a single story of a woman developing blood clots in relation to the AstraZeneca vaccine and declared that they are 'waiting for Pfizer'. (For context: Australia has quite a lot of AZ, and can also manufacture it locally, but has lost its mind over the minuscule risk of side effects, with the result that many people eligible for vaccines have not booked an appointment. Australia has extremely limited supplies of Pfizer and will not get much more until later in the year. There has been a Covid outbreak in Sydney, and the result of having a mostly unvaccinated population is that the city has been in hard lockdown for weeks with no end in sight.)
(In my family, after some initial wavering from one aunt, everyone who is eligible to be vaccinated is partly/fully vaccinated, and Mum is getting her second AZ dose on Tuesday.)
Whenever I hear about these 'waiting for Pfizer' Australians I become so upset that I almost lose the ability to communicate coherently. A part of me wants to send them footage of the Spanish military having to essentially move corpses in military vehicles and bury them in mass graves due to the number of Covid deaths they had last year, or the videos of sobbing, hysterical NHS doctors and nurses that were a fixture of UK TV and social media early on in the pandemic. One of my friends was telling me last week about the experiences of her brother in Thailand. Over there, two vaccines are available — Sinovax and AZ. In practice, AZ is only available to the military, oligarchs, and those who pay bribes. Her brother was able to get AZ because his father-in-law is the chauffeur to an oligarch, who wanted his staff and their close contacts to be vaccinated with an effective vaccine. So we have a situation in Thailand where the elite, and those who pay money under the table have access to a vaccine towards which ordinary Australians are turning up their noses. The selfishness and self-centredness of 'waiting for Pfizer' when there is a perfectly good vaccine lying around, unused, is just beyond belief.
However, when I was a gymnast, my favourite apparatus — and the one I was best at — was uneven bars. Bars is Simone Biles's weakest apparatus (obviously this is not really saying much — her 'weakest' event is still incredible, she's just better at beam, floor and vault). But the US team also has Sunisa Lee, whose bar routine is so difficult, and so (mostly) perfectly executed that it leaves me speechless and filled with joy.
(There are various technical reasons why it's so difficult: mainly the many, many 'release' moves where she releases hold of the bar to either flip/twist and catch hold of the same bar again, or releases hold of one bar to move to the other. These are particularly difficult because they're done in quick succession, and because a lot of them involve rotating and/or losing sight of the bar she's meant to catch.)
As I say, the Olympics should not be taking place, but I'm still in awe at these gymnasts.
Meanwhile, my mother has spent the past day arguing with her Australian boomer friends on Facebook, who have latched onto a single story of a woman developing blood clots in relation to the AstraZeneca vaccine and declared that they are 'waiting for Pfizer'. (For context: Australia has quite a lot of AZ, and can also manufacture it locally, but has lost its mind over the minuscule risk of side effects, with the result that many people eligible for vaccines have not booked an appointment. Australia has extremely limited supplies of Pfizer and will not get much more until later in the year. There has been a Covid outbreak in Sydney, and the result of having a mostly unvaccinated population is that the city has been in hard lockdown for weeks with no end in sight.)
(In my family, after some initial wavering from one aunt, everyone who is eligible to be vaccinated is partly/fully vaccinated, and Mum is getting her second AZ dose on Tuesday.)
Whenever I hear about these 'waiting for Pfizer' Australians I become so upset that I almost lose the ability to communicate coherently. A part of me wants to send them footage of the Spanish military having to essentially move corpses in military vehicles and bury them in mass graves due to the number of Covid deaths they had last year, or the videos of sobbing, hysterical NHS doctors and nurses that were a fixture of UK TV and social media early on in the pandemic. One of my friends was telling me last week about the experiences of her brother in Thailand. Over there, two vaccines are available — Sinovax and AZ. In practice, AZ is only available to the military, oligarchs, and those who pay bribes. Her brother was able to get AZ because his father-in-law is the chauffeur to an oligarch, who wanted his staff and their close contacts to be vaccinated with an effective vaccine. So we have a situation in Thailand where the elite, and those who pay money under the table have access to a vaccine towards which ordinary Australians are turning up their noses. The selfishness and self-centredness of 'waiting for Pfizer' when there is a perfectly good vaccine lying around, unused, is just beyond belief.
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Date: 2021-07-23 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 04:35 pm (UTC)And yes, people are such bad judges of risk — I'm certain all those Australian boomers 'waiting for Pfizer' happily get into cars every single day, which is far more dangerous!
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Date: 2021-07-27 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-27 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 04:49 pm (UTC)When I write about gymnastics I use the terminology that we as gymnasts actually used. (The fact that TV commentators speak of ‘piece of apparatus,’ as in ‘beam is her weakest piece of apparatus,’ instead of just saying ‘beam is her weakest apparatus’ makes me wince every time I hear it!)
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Date: 2021-07-23 03:43 pm (UTC)As I say, the Olympics should not be taking place, but I'm still in awe at these gymnasts.
I heartily agree.
So we have a situation in Thailand where the elite, and those who pay money under the table have access to a vaccine towards which ordinary Australians are turning up their noses. The selfishness and self-centredness of 'waiting for Pfizer' when there is a perfectly good vaccine lying around, unused, is just beyond belief.
There aren't words.
There was an article here the other day about the outbreak in Mississippi and one nurse reported that people who are about to be hooked up to the ventilators are begging for the vaccine they refused to take earlier and she has to be like, "Sorry, it's too late."
I just can't deal with this.
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Date: 2021-07-23 04:44 pm (UTC)Am I right that the routines are shorter than they used to be? (And by "used to be," I mean in like the 90s and very early 00s?)
Out of interest, I had a look at Svetlana Khorkina's winning bar routine in the 2000 Olympics and it was just under 30 seconds long. Suni Lee's routine in the embedded video is around 30 seconds as well. So ... I'm not sure?
There was an article here the other day about the outbreak in Mississippi and one nurse reported that people who are about to be hooked up to the ventilators are begging for the vaccine they refused to take earlier and she has to be like, "Sorry, it's too late."
This absolutely breaks my heart. It must be awful to be a healthcare worker during the pandemic, constantly confronted not just with death and dying and pain, but also with the consequences of people's terrible (and, let's face it, selfish) choices.
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Date: 2021-07-23 05:00 pm (UTC)It could be a matter of gymnasts fitting more into the routines so they seem shorter, maybe?
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Date: 2021-07-23 05:17 pm (UTC)The current US women's gymnastics team (as well as those from 2016 and 2012) ushered in an era of gymnastics where winning is determined almost solely by the difficulty of the routine, rather than the execution. (That's not to say their routines are poorly executed, just that the strategy seems to have been to pack the routines with as many highly scoring moves as possible, giving them a higher difficulty value, rather than relying on easier routines being well executed.) The result is routines cut down to the bone as much as possible — fewer extraneous fripperies that contribute nothing to the overall score but look pretty — just difficult/highly-scoring move after difficult/highly scoring move.
There's less ... breathing space, I guess?
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Date: 2021-07-24 06:29 pm (UTC)It must be awful to be a healthcare worker during the pandemic, constantly confronted not just with death and dying and pain, but also with the consequences of people's terrible (and, let's face it, selfish) choices.
Yes.
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Date: 2021-07-23 04:59 pm (UTC)Yeah, I've seen a few headlines along those lines and it just breaks my fucking heart.
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Date: 2021-07-23 03:57 pm (UTC)But yeah, the way we humans are so bad at risk evaluation really does a number on my mental health. I bet not a single one of the "waiters" hesitate to throw themselves in their cars every day? Or would gladly drive to their precious Pfizer appointment. Which...is way more dangerous than getting the AZ vaccine. (OR THE VIRUS I don't know why that part is so difficult to understand.)
Anyway, I'm still not over our PHA turning down further AZ and J&J deliveries, thus forcing everyone to wait at least 7 weeks between mRNA doses and setting the "everyone offered one shot" date back from July to September. We could literally be most of the way to actual inoculated herd immunity - instead we're not even halfway there as Delta is speeding up. Augh.
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Date: 2021-07-23 05:02 pm (UTC)Skuld is absolutely right. The thing that makes this specific situation (namely, my mother arguing with her selfish friends on Facebook) more infuriating is that the story that has sparked all this off is the story of a woman who had a bad reaction to AZ and survived — because she was taken immediately to hospital and treated! And she was interviewed from her hospital bed saying she didn't regret taking the vaccine, she just had bad luck, but everyone else should go and get their dose of AZ when they could! And yet we had this parade of selfish people lining up to post this article alongside the comment 'that's why I'm waiting for Pfizer'.
Even worse is that all these people making this declaration are (knowing the demographics of my mother's friends) wealthy, upper middle class baby boomers, most of whom are either retired, or employed in senior, well-paid positions in the media, higher education, the public service and so on — in other words, people who have nice houses with gardens for whom lockdown/working from home will be pleasant, and little different from their 'normal' lives. Meanwhile, people who are currently ineligible for any vaccine (be it AZ or the mythical Pfizer) are more likely to be precariously employed, working in industries which require face-to-face working. In other words, the selfishness of the privileged is putting the disadvantaged at further risk.
I bet not a single one of the "waiters" hesitate to throw themselves in their cars every day? Or would gladly drive to their precious Pfizer appointment. Which...is way more dangerous than getting the AZ vaccine. (OR THE VIRUS I don't know why that part is so difficult to understand.)
Well, quite. My mother was apparently commenting on every such post with questions about what other medications these people routinely take, and telling them that those medications have much higher individual risk than AZ. As to the virus, Australians have longer regarded it as some sort of distant menace, kept from their shores by their 'gold standard' extreme border controls, causing devastation to other countries whose populations were too stupid to do what clever Australia did. (I exaggerate, but only slightly. This narrative has been coming from some quarters of Australia throughout the entire pandemic, and seeing it — as someone living in Europe — has made me feel like I'm being gaslit. I do not say this lightly.) It's made them paranoid and hysterical at any breach in hotel quarantine, when they should have been hysterical about their abysmal vaccine rollout (which I've seen described as a 'stroll out' in some corners).
Anyway, I'm still not over our PHA turning down further AZ and J&J deliveries, thus forcing everyone to wait at least 7 weeks between mRNA doses and setting the "everyone offered one shot" date back from July to September. We could literally be most of the way to actual inoculated herd immunity - instead we're not even halfway there as Delta is speeding up. Augh.
This is so awful! Over here the space between doses was always 12 weeks for AZ and 8 weeks for Pfizer (we have a tiny handful of Moderna doses, and I don't think J&J was ever licensed here), because they prioritised getting as many first doses done as possible rather than getting people fully vaccinated. I didn't mind this when things were still reasonably locked down, but when they lifted all restrictions in England with only 50 per cent fully vaccinated I was less happy. However, as soon as that was announced, the NHS started speeding up vaccinations — my second dose was brought forward to 7.5 weeks instead of 8, and huge numbers of walk-in mass vaccination centres opened up. My feeling is we'll reach 80 per cent of adults fully vaccinated by the end of September if things continue as they have done. I'm assuming there will be about 10 per cent who never get vaccinated for various reasons, but 80 per cent seems pretty good to me.
I'm so sorry about the situation in Sweden. Not just the vaccines, but everything.
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Date: 2021-07-24 03:00 am (UTC)It seems so much a part and parcel of everything else. I marvel at the speed with which these vaccines were invented, and the scientific breakthrough they represent, and I am in despair at the rollouts. I am so grateful to see the greatest gymnast in the world do what she does best, and she'll be doing it in a nationalist farce that should never have gone ahead. It's like that Onion headline about climate change that goes around periodically -- we're ready to fix all this WHENEVER, if the people with power would just remove their heads from their colons.
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Date: 2021-07-25 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-24 10:16 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2021-07-25 01:53 pm (UTC)