Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Aren't you glad Spring has arrived? Prospects are we'll have the opportunity to be vaccinated sooner rather than later. Things are looking brighter.

Zoom Escaper: a free web widget that lets you add an array of fake audio effects to your next Zoom call in case you need an escape route.

Advance Notice: Archives Association of Ontario East - Virtual Tour: Ingenium Archives, the
Port Hope Archives, and the City of Ottawa Archives
Thursday 9 April.

White Slavery: the Scottish slaves of England and Americas

BIFHSGO Conference Update. The first week of conference registration has been very successful with triple-digit registrants from as far away as Australia and the UK. Registrations have come in from across Canada and the United States, with five provinces (BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec) and 11 states represented.

How the West Lost COVID
A long article from The Intelligencer. This extract particularly struck me and the parallels to addressing climate change.

On March 13, 2020, Mike Ryan, WHO’s executive director of health emergencies, took the podium at a Geneva press conference and delivered in just a minute what is, to me, probably the most chilling and illuminating speech of the entire pandemic. Asked what lessons from a career fighting outbreaks of Ebola were called to mind by the arrival of COVID-19, Ryan replied with terse, cinematic force. “What we’ve learned through the Ebola outbreaks is you need to react quickly. You need to go after the virus. You need to stop the chains of transmission. You need to engage with communities very deeply — community acceptance is hugely important. You need to be coordinated, you need to be coherent.”

When it came to this pandemic, he said, speaking in a clipped Irish lilt, the lessons were the same: “Be fast. Have no regrets. You must be the first mover. The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly.” He continued, “If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection. And the problem in society we have at the moment is everyone is afraid of making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error. But the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralyzed by the fear of failure.”

Thanks to this week's contributors: Alison-Vancouver, Anonymous, Bob H, BT, Btyclk, Celia Lewis, Chris Paton, Dibry, Ed Chadwick, Gail B, Jean, Jean A. P., Joyce M Butcher, Kenneth R Marks, Linda Stufflebean, Lynn, Nancy, Norm Prince, Paul Milner, Peggy Homans Chapman, reflective thoughts by Barbara, romaine, Unknown