Cactus Corona Blossoms

Hi All,

My neighbor Steve has dedicated himself over the past few years to cultivate a great number of beautiful species, and he eagerly shares them with anyone he meets. Our yard has been graced with a couple of his plants. This is a cactus in blossom I photographed a couple of weeks ago in Steve's yard, careful to maintain proper social distancing from him. Like most of my macro shots these days I took it with my Panasonic Lumix GX7 and 3-D lens, using frame sides for phantogram processing.

Last week I asked for coronavirus anecdotes and among a few other got the following couple of replies.

From Tony: My youngest grandson, Braxton (a very old English name), is currently working at home as his school, like all others in the Uk, is closed due to the deadly virus. André - my oldest son and his father is standing in as proxy teacher and was helping him with a Religious Education paper. The first question was: "What did Jesus Christ say on the cross?" to which Braxton's written answer was:: "OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW!"

From Bruce: On a lighter note, I want to post this, but I’m worried it might go viral. One guy posted on the internet, “You might as well go ahead and pronounce the ‘L’ in ‘salmon.’ Nothing matters anymore.” We heard that one of our neighbors stocked up on so much toilet paper that they were unable to find their way to the bathroom. I haven’t washed my face for eight days because I heard reports that we shouldn’t touch our face. When I watch a video on YouTube, I sit six feet away from the screen. Even though I don’t go out, I’ve been washing my hands so often that now, when I watch TV, I just leave my hands in a bowl of soapy water. And since my wife and I won’t have any guests for a while, anytime one of us needs to sneeze, we run into the guest bathroom and sneeze there. That pretty much takes care of our exercise for the day.

Many to most people I talk to can't stand to watch the daily "Trump on the Coronavirus" show, heavy on misinformation, disgusting misplaced almost congratulatory self praise, and denials of his administration's responsibility. It's hard to really blame Trump for what's going on, he didn't create the novel coronavirus, and clearly didn't want it. The problem is that he values loyalty over competency, and so we're left with no cohesive national leadership to combat the disease, and a president who more than anything gets in the way of the needed hard work, hard decisions, and unity of response.

Our country now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases despite being vastly behind all industrialized countries in capably testing for it. We also now lead the world in deaths from the virus, and are barely at the start of what's to be expected on that statistic. By abdicating direction and responsibility for fighting the disease to state's govornors and city's mayors, this piecemeal approach all but guarantees the carnage and continuing presence of COVID-19, and the long term damage in its wake. In short, our country is getting what it deserves for electing to highest office a TV celebrity, con man, failed businessman, and international money launderer. USA! USA! USA!

Barry Rothstein

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