20 Comments

This is hilarious! Where would we be without our sense of humour?! Ridicule is one of the strongest weapons we have against the absurd narrative.

Expand full comment

What a riot. Unbelievable, it truly is. I know for many of these people they still believe they were doing the “right thing” and “it was a novel virus”. Uugghh you have to be kidding. I really wonder how those people make it through their days with zero critical thinking skills.

I appreciate the laughs, but I have to admit my head hurts from looking at all that stupidity all wrapped up together.

Expand full comment

Being a wind instrument practitioner myself, the orchestra photos always give me a tickle. Its ok to laugh at the end of the world isn't it?

Expand full comment

That, sir, is a very comprehensive list.

"One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- Genius.

Expand full comment

I am not sure whether to blame you or the BC CDC for introducing me to the "glory hole," but sometimes I am grateful for my lackluster hippocampus (due to PTSD but not the Taylor Lorenz kind, which I hear is really bad and also wipes out your prefrontal cortex and amygdala) because I hope and trust this will be one of those things I learn, despair over, and forget completely within the week.

Keep posting those crazy pictures though. Keep your tinfoil hat on standby. If we all go along with the collective amnesia (countermeasures were sensible and proportionate based upon available TheScience), it will happen again, but I'm afraid next time it'll be Shanghai-style (and I don't mean just for those living in Beijing).

Expand full comment

I apologise. As I mentioned in a previous post, the world of human sexuality can be very strange indeed. Sometimes ignorance is indeed bliss!!!

Expand full comment

This was a way different use of "the glory hole" than I've ever heard about, but whatever.

Expand full comment

Do I want to know?

Expand full comment

Thanks for the laughs, it is shared pain/frustration you know, makes it a bit easier to bear ....

Expand full comment

It's very frustrating. The covid data, and its correct interpretation, seems very clear to me. But I could be wrong - and that's OK. What is endlessly frustrating is the lack of ability to have a decent discussion and argument about it without tripping over some censorious bastard.

Expand full comment

Nuts. One of the guys at tennis the other day was still doing the tennis racket touch. I think it was gas-lighting as it was my first week back after being banned for 4 months due to telling them to get f'kd on their vaxx passport.

Expand full comment

A great anthology thanks. As for an explanation, do we have to face up to the fact that sometimes there isn’t one, and we ought not to expect one necessarily?

I mean, much of the discourse during and in the build up to the first world war looks in retrospect similar totally deranged. Same for the sweep of fascism over most of Europe in the 30s, which the United Kingdom only narrowly avoided. What I am basically saying is that perhaps there are periods when humanity collectively loses its mind and malign ideological forces move into the ascendancy for a period?

This of course cannot provide any comfort, in an age of nuclear weapons and the insane mission to vaccinate everybody with mRNA products, both of which can potentially do immeasurably more harm to humanity than the tools available to these psychopaths in the past.

Expand full comment

Your explanation is as good as any I've seen Jonathan - but you mention something that's been worrying me a lot. Loons and psychopaths, totalitarian control freaks and authoritarian codpieces have always been with us - but the *tools* they have at their disposal today are far greater than ever before. On the plus side, some of those tools can work against them too.

Expand full comment

Agreed, but the tools we can use against them, presume you mean the network effect of the Internet, rapid communications and the like, are not adequate to fight the harms caused - actually or potentially - by their “tools”.

This obviously underlines the need for sane rational people to get their act together and start using the tools available to them as quickly as possible, and mobilize popular opinion.

Expand full comment

Oh my gosh, thanks for the great laughs at all these pictures. 😅😅 I was out and about yesterday and some people still have all kinds of plastic coverings over themselves and their children. It's so sad and strange.

Yes I agree, none of policies instituted made sense. For some of them, the science was too incomplete to go full bore on the policy. But watching the branch covidians is not a bore, it can be hysterical. But also dangerous.

Expand full comment

I keep hoping they'll smother themselves.

Expand full comment

Great piece. I was completely unaware of the advice to use "glory holes." Look forward to additional installments.

Expand full comment

If anything 'good' can be said to have come from the whole sorry Covid pantomime, it's that is has provided a motherlode of material for a good comic to mine.

If we weren't able to laugh at it all, we really would cry.

Expand full comment

That is one good boi! My dogs would not have let me put all that absurd gear on them, let alone sat still for a pic with said gear on!

Expand full comment

You say you can't make any sense of it; if you're looking for rational reasons for what's happened, I'll guess you never will.

From the start, I felt that there was something going on in the collective unconscious and started my first post on the subject with the old phrase "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad", wondering whether the target was governments or the broader population. I was pleased to see Laura Dodsworth also looking at it from the collective unconscious angle in A State of Fear but I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with the concept.

Edit: Just saw this is a year old – one of the perils/pleasures of coming to a site via a search engine!

Expand full comment