Month: March 2020

Patty Mills for Prime Minister. In a statesman’s-style address, the San Antonio Spurs guard delivered a message to Olympians and to his fellow Australians who are dealing with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.With the NBA season suspended, and serious travel restrictions in play, Mills posted a video on social media from his home in Texas, “where we’ve been self isolated for the past almost two weeks,” to respond to the Australian Olympic Committee’s advice to its athletes to prepare for the Tokyo Games being delayed to 2021.Sitting on a comfortable chair, and wearing shorts and a sweat shirt with OZ printed on the front, the three-time Olympian commended the Australian committee for its “proactive approach in handling this unprecedented crisis.””This message is for everyone in Australia, fellow Australian athletes …. and of course, anyone else who’d like to listen,” Mills said. “I’m absolutely gutted that this crisis has affected the largest international sporting event in the world. But just like everyone, athlete or not, the health of all these people remain the top priority. We’re all in this together.”Mills was measured in his message, delivered with an Australian-themed backdrop including his gold Boomers No. 5 jersey draped over the corner of a canvas of the Olympic rings covered with hundreds of signatures. On a small table, there’s a boxing kangaroo and a doll draped with Australia’s indigenous flags.”To my teammates, do not be discouraged by this adversity. As an Olympic athlete, your goal remains the same: To represent our country the best way possible and strive to be your very best,” he said. “Your goal doesn’t change. Just regroup, regather and adjust your preparation plans. Stay positive.”The coronavirus has infected more than 382,000 people and killed more than 16,500 around the world. It started in China late last year and took a while to reach to Australia, where the death toll increased to eight on Tuesday.The government has shut down pubs, clubs, cinemas and restaurants, imposed travel restrictions and all but closed the borders. Officials are urging residents to stay at home, or close to home, and to keep a distance of 1.5 meters (5 feet) to other people.”Please, stay at home, and keep your distance,” Mills said. “The better we can control this virus, the better we can look after each other. And the better us athletes will be able to prepare to represent you once the Tokyo Olympics arrive.”His hands clasped together, he closed with a message of unity: “Tokyo together.”
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Renowned jazz man Manu Dibango, to many the beloved “Papy Groove” who served as an inspiration and pioneer in his art, died on Tuesday with the coronavirus, his official Facebook page announced. He was 86. The saxophonist who inspired what is known as “world music” was recently hospitalized with an illness “linked to COVID-19,” his official Facebook page said last Wednesday, adding that he was “resting well and calmly recovering.” The announcement did not say where he had been hospitalized, but Dibango, who was born in Cameroon, was known to live in France. “He can’t wait to meet you again,” the earlier message said. That was not to be. The artist inspired “world music” in the 1970s with the song “Soul Makossa.” Funeral services were to be “held in strict privacy” followed by a tribute “when possible,” Tuesday’s announcement said. Funerals in France have been limited to 20 people who are in the closest circle of the deceased because of a lockdown to try to slow the spread of COVID-19.  
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Lauren Beukes, a script and fiction writer, is drawn to narratives that allow her to probe themes of gender and power. For her upcoming novel, “Afterland,” she imagined a plot twist in which a disease wipes out virtually the entire male population.”I wanted to explore what a world without men would look like and how it wouldn’t necessarily be a better place with everyone making friendship bracelets and growing communal gardens and walking at night,” says Beukes, who began her book years before the current coronavirus pandemic.Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, says his new novel was inspired by a question the filmmaker Ridley Scott asked him years ago after reading Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian “The Road”: How could social order break down so completely when we’re struck by sudden disaster? His upcoming thriller “The End of October” describes, uncannily, a global pandemic originating in Asia. He had meant his new book as a cautionary tale.”Our society has grown blind about dealing with natural hazards because we were so worried about terrorism. Hurricane Harvey caused far more damage than a terrorist attack,” says Wright, known for his nonfiction book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”Plagues have been with us for at least as long as people have been able to record them. But among those who create art, their meaning has changed profoundly according to the time and the teller.  Once regarded as divine punishment, they have served as parables of greed, tyranny and scientific hubris. They have underscored narratives of escapism, vulnerability and save-the-world heroism. They have been treated as catalysts for what we never imagined becoming — and for confirmation of what we were all along.—For the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, the plague that devastated Athens affirmed his view that prayers were “useless” and his dire belief that laws and codes of honor were easily abandoned.  —Edgar Allan Poe condemned a heartless prince and his foolish belief that he was immune from disease in “The Masque of the Red Death.”—In Stephen King’s “The Stand,” biowarfare and a careless military are central villains.—Stephen Soderbergh rejected any political interpretation of his film “Contagion,” saying that the virus in it “was just a virus.” Yet he told The Guardian in 2011 that he did want to “convey the feeling” he sensed worldwide “that the fabric of society really is stretched thin.”In some eras, little imagination was needed to picture the worst — and hope for the best. Tony Kushner’s epic play “Angels in America” was a defining chronicle of the wreckage of AIDS. The Black Plague of the Middle Ages inspired both terrifying art of ravaged bodies and dancing skeletons and images of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch intended to console.”Saint Sebastian had survived being shot with arrows, and Saint Roch was believed to have survived an episode of the plague, so you often see them appearing in art,” says C. Griffith Mann, who curates the Department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.A classic work of literature from the Middle Ages, Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” reads in some ways as a guide to social distancing and self-isolation. Seven young women and three young men escape from the plague in Florence and live together in a villa, where they entertain each other by telling stories.”I think Boccaccio anticipated what we would/could do in the time of the plague: We need to escape from our ‘real’ world in which our misery has no explicable cause, no identifiable beginning, and no end in sight,” says Wayne A. Rebhorn, who chairs the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.  “Many of the stories include stories within them — stories used by characters to get out of jams, persuade others to do their bidding, and, at the simplest level, entertain those who read or listen to them. If the plague shows just how desperate and fragile human life can be, stories offer a way to cope with that desperation.”Plague books can be a way of tracking other changes in society. The 1665 plague in London was the basis for Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which was published decades later and was noted for its detailed account of the city’s ordeal. Defoe scholar and Auburn University professor Paula Backscheider notes that his book came out at a time when the Renaissance had challenged religious beliefs, and that for the author the London plague was a way of looking beyond religious reasons for human suffering.”He is grippingly driven to try to decide if the plague is the will of God,” Backscheider says, “or if there are scientific explanations that would explain how it started and spread, how people could protect themselves from it, and how it might be treated humanely and effectively.”In the 20th century, Albert Camus’ “The Plague” was widely seen as a parable for the Nazi occupation of France and the eventual liberation — and as a statement on the randomness of fate. Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” was inspired by the flu epidemic of 1918-1919 that killed millions at the same time that World War I, which killed millions more, was ending. She published the short novel in 1939, as a new world war began.”Her illness is grounded in a real influenza pandemic, but because her illness is associated with the war (it ends with the Armistice), it symbolizes the spiritual malaise of the 20th century,” says Dorothy Unrue, a Porter scholar who edited a volume of her work for the Library of America.Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, “The Red Lotus,” has just been published. The author looks for stories about “heartbreak and dread” and thought of a pandemic — an idea he developed after reading an article about mice carrying viruses resistant to treatment. In his book, rats are the carriers of diseases, although people are the real villains.”I don’t view the possible pandemic in the novel as a metaphor,” he says. “(But) a pathogen doesn’t attack a human with conscious malice. But humans? We are all too conscious of the carnage we can inflict on one another.”
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Taylor Swift may have ended her feud with Katy Perry but the one with Kanye West seems simply not to want to die.New leaked video clip of the entire four-year-old phone call between the rapper and pop superstar about his controversial song “Famous” have been posted online and further complicate the picture of what happened.In “Famous,” West raps: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous.” Upon its release in 2016, West was condemned by many for the line. He insisted Swift had given her blessing to the lyric. But she denied ever hearing the lyric “I made that bitch famous.”The new clips seem to corroborate Swift’s claims that West didn’t tell her the full lyrics of the song. But they also show West repeatedly asking Taylor for her approval of the sex lyric and she does tell him she thinks it’s funny, just as the rapper said when it the song first was released.”I never would have expected you to tell me about a line in one of your songs,” Swift tells him. “That’s really nice that you did.”This new footage was posted online from an unknown source late Friday night (20 MARCH 2020) and rapidly spread across social media. Unlike other videos previously posted of the call, it shows all 25 minutes, albeit chopped up.Representative for either artists did not immediately reply to a request for comment Saturday.FILE – Rapper Kanye West watches during the second half of an NBA basketball game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, in Los Angeles.The release of the new footage has added a new twist to the drama: While West was heavily criticized when it was initially released and Swift made it clear she was unhappy with it, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, seemed to vindicate her husband months later by releasing snippets of the call where Swift appeared to approve the lyrics.That led to a major backlash for Swift, who has described that time as low point in her life and career.In the newly released video clips, West tells Swift he’s working on a song and wants to use the lyric: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex.” But he hasn’t ever been captured telling her the line, “I made that bitch famous.”In response, Swift is heard saying: “I’m glad it’s not mean though. It doesn’t feel mean, but like, oh my God, the build-up you gave it. I thought it was gonna be like that stupid dumb bitch, like, but it’s not.”The two have had a contentious past. West famously interrupted Swift’s speech during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when she won for best female video. But the two apparently put differences aside and she introduced him when he won the video vanguard award at the 2015 VMAs. Then came the infamous phone call about “Famous.”  
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Actress Debi Mazar has joined the growing number of celebrities who have tested positive for coronavirus.
The actress, best-known for roles in the movie “Goodfellas” and TV shows “Entourage” and “Younger,” announced the news on  social media.bShe says she is healing at home and her family is under quarantine for 14 days.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever or coughing. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. Some 93,800 people have recovered, mostly in China.
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