Yay, My Immune System!

A few days ago I thought both Hawk and I had colds. It turns out it's not a pair of colds, just one. While I had a few cold symptoms on Wednesday morning that I thought would get worse, they instead essentially disappeared during day. I still enjoyed taking the day off from work even for what turned out to be a head-fake of a cold.

Hawk, meanwhile, has continued to suffer a real cold. She was able to work from home Wed-Fri so as not to need to take time off. (I took time off because with my "unlimited" time off policy, it's like "Why not?" Plus, my work is sloooow right now.)

I'm impressed that with her coughing, runny nose, and hoarse voice the past 3 days I haven't caught it. Our home isn't big enough for one of us to meaningfully isolate from the other. We decided a few years ago at the start of the Coronavirus pandemic that if one of us gets it, we have to assume we'll both get it. Well, I didn't get Covid when Hawk did in June, and now I've resisted this cold virus, too. Yay, my immune system!

Christmas Not Over The Top This Year

It's almost Christmas time. That's got a lot of people busy with anticipation, frustration, and occasionally holiday cheer. For me, though, it's a non-factor. I've considered myself a member of The Bah, Humbug Club for many years now.

It's not always easy being on the outs with Christmas. Some years the assault on the senses begins months in advance. Like in 2018 when Christmas decorations went up in stores right after Labor Day. That was the worst in recent memory. Most years, though, Santa leapfrogs Thanksgiving.



This year has been relatively tame. While I saw people who go all-out with Christmas decorations around their homes getting prepped a few days before Thanksgiving, they thankfully didn't light up all the lights and inflate the parade floats until one day after Thanksgiving.

Christmas music also hasn't been too prevalent in stores and restaurants. Most years it's been like retailers took the one dang CD of holiday music they had and put it on repeat day-in-day-out for at least 6 weeks. One restaurant I visit once or twice a month routinely plays their DVD of A Christmas Story— yes, the 1983 movie set in the 1960s where young Ralphie wants a BB gun more than anything else— on repeat. The same damn movie, over and over each day, for weeks in a row.

This year, not so much. With the songs, anyway. Stores thankfully aren't blasting Christmas tunes so obnoxiously. In the stores I've shopped at and restaurants I've dined at in the past week I don't recall any of them playing Christmas music on repeat. Though that one restaurant has bee doing their 500 reps of A Christmas Story again. At least they were when I last dined there... before Thanksgiving! I consider that a second piece of evidence that one of the owners has borderline personality disorder or some other antisocial psychosis.

"Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind": Liquidators

The fourth episode of HBO's five-part miniseries Chernobyl introduces us to liquidators. That's the name used for the half-million-plus soldiers and conscripts who were sent to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to clean up the area after the nuclear fire at the exploded reactor was mostly put out. (The material in and around the open reactor was still highly radioactive, though.) I'm told the word has a less-sinister connotation in Russian, where it means something more like "clean up crew", versus the modern English euphemism for contract killers.

One narrative thread about the liquidators' work is told from the viewpoint Pavel, a young conscript (center in the picture below). Pavel's story comes from a real-life account in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.



Pavel arrives at a squalid camp near the exclusion zone with no idea what he'll be doing other than being a Chernobyl liquidator— whatever that means. When he finds his assigned group tent he meets Bacho (left, above), a tough soldier who served in the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Bacho takes Pavel under his wing and quickly explains their crew's assignment. They comb through empty villages in the exclusion zone to kill all the abandoned pets. The animals are abandoned because when people were evacuated they were told to leave all pets behind. Now the animals are poisoned with radiation and must be killed for humanitarian reasons— and to prevent irradiated animals from spreading beyond the zone.

Bacho explains the tactics to Pavel with ruthless efficiency. Pets see humans as providers of food, so the liquidators don't need to go door-to-door looking for them in every single apartment. All they have to do it walk down the streets making noise, and the pets will come to them. Shoot them when they get close. Once animals hear gunshots, though, they may run in fright back to their homes. Then the liquidators follow them inside.



Pavel struggles with the morality of doing this. He's an 18 year old kid from the city, freshly conscripted. Bacho is a grizzled veteran of the brutal Soviet-Afghan war so he's not troubled by it. He does have a strong moral code, though: Don't let the animals suffer. Shoot to kill, when they're close. If one's not killed right away, shoot it again. He doesn't want anyone to let an animal to suffer. He threatens to shoot anyone who does.

Even so, Pavel struggles with the assignment. And as if shooting the animals weren't bad enough, these liquidators must also gather the bodies for burial. They have to chase the animals if they run, throw the corpses into the back of their truck, take them to a mass burial site, and dump them in. The pile of dead pets is then covered over with concrete.



Pavel discusses how to find peace with this assignment when the crew sits down for a field lunch at an abandoned civic center. The banner still hanging from the building proclaims, "Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind." This scene is created directly from accounts in Alexievich's book and helps frame the absurdity of the whole situation.

Next blog about Chernobyl: Liquidators, Robots, and Bio-Robots