Face shields aren’t quite enough to fully protect you from COVID.
Two words: COVID penis. Make sure you get that vaccine when it’s available for you, OK?
“I get it. It’s a pandemic. If ever there was a time to give up, this is it. Don’t be pressured into half-assing your holiday lights. If you’re fortunate enough to be housed — in suburban Disneyland or anywhere else — you have done enough this year. I’d rather you give up before you murder the inflatable elves every morning or deaden your soul with projector lights at night.”
“U.S. government agencies were hit by a “global intrusion campaign” of cyber-attacks that exploited a flaw in the update of a software company, cyber-security firm FireEye said, which the Washington Post reported was a breach by Russian government hackers.”
RIP, John le Carré, master British spy novelist.
“Shortly before six o’clock Eastern Time, in Sacramento, California, fifty-five Democratic members of the Electoral College cast their votes for Biden, raising him above the threshold of two hundred and seventy. The 2020 election result was now official, pending only the formality of a ratification by the U.S. Congress, on January 6th.”
RIP, Ann Reinking, Tony Award-winning actor, dancer, and choreographer.
RIP, Ann Criswell, longtime food editor, writer, and evangelist in Houston.
How much Star Wars is too much Star Wars?
Lots of info about that SolarWinds hack.
“Let’s Talk About Simulated Sex: Intimacy Coordinators Two Years On”.
RIP, Catie Lazarus, writer, comedian, and creator of the talk show/podcast “Employee of the Month”.
“The City of Detroit wants attorney Sidney Powell to pay—literally—for her reality-adjacent dog and pony legal challenge to Michigan’s election results.”
“Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him. Saying that our democracy proved resilient against Republican attempts at subversion is like saying the fences at Jurassic Park proved resilient against raptors.”
“Joe Biden should use every legitimate power at his disposal as President to do everything at once. No sequencing or playing for buy-in. You win an election. You gain certain legitimate powers. You use them. Period. Should Biden be open to bipartisan compromise? Absolutely. The door should be open. But it would be a grave mistake to spend any time coaxing anyone to come through it. We’ve played that game enough. Biden should always be willing to talk but not to delay.”
“How fingerprint and firearm experts use misleading math to appear infallible.”
RIP, Jeremy Bulloch, actor and the original Boba Fett.
One of the more interesting election maps you’ll see.
“This means that the set of potential victims is not just (just!) the 18,000 SolarWinds customers who may have downloaded the compromised updates, but also all of those 18,000 organizations’ customers, and potentially the clients of those second-order organizations as well—and so on. So when I say the SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign will last years, I don’t just mean, as I usually do, that figuring out liability and settling costs and carrying out investigations will take years (though that is certainly true here). The actual, active theft of information from protected networks due to this breach will last years.”
RIP, Bear Dalton, wine expert, Rodeo fixture, general mensch and man about town.