The news from Feb 17, 2022
Harbor Seal Hero!
This short but sweet story is one I was so excited to share with my own children. A sea urchin diver fell off of his boat one night last month off the coast of California. After he landed in the water, he realized that the motor was still running on the boat as it started getting farther and farther away form him in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Wearing only a T-shirt and shorts and getting colder by the minute in the chilly waters, the thought of his family was what was keeping him going. While he couldn’t see the shore line which was miles away, he could see that there was an oil platform swimming distance away. Suddenly, a splash in the water alerted him to the seal that ended up saving his life. The seal swam over and kept nudging him in the right direction, eventually aiding in getting the man safely to the oil rig platform where he was taken aboard and transferred to a nearby hospital on the mainland.
Super Bowl Signals the End of the Mandates?
I have to admit, I didn’t watch the Super Bowl this year. I did, however, see the highlights from the crowd. Over 100,000 people were expected to be in and around the stadium on Sunday and many were caught maskless. According to the rules at the SoFi stadium, everyone in attendance needed to show proof of vaccination and then wear their mask. Every patron was gifted an N-95 mask upon arrival, so there was no reason why their noses and mouths shouldn’t have been covered.
Mayor Garcetti (who has been known for the past 2 years to have the harshest measures put in place for Covid-19) had been photographed without his mask a few days prior at the same stadium and gave the excuse that he was holding his breath while holding his mask in his hand in order to take each and every picture. I ask, then, was he able to hold his breath during the 8-12 hours of pregame, game, halftime show, etc… where he was photographed many many times throughout the day with a mask no where in site?
Mayor Garcetti was not the only one defying the mask mandate that had still been in place in LA County as of that Sunday. Many of the stars in attendance (Lebron James, Ellen Degeneres and her wife Portia DeRossi, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Ryan Reynolds, Sarah Jessica Parker… just to name a few— the count has reached almost 300 celebs) were maskless the entire time they were in the stadium. Many of these people have been extremely vocal over the last 2 years about how important it is to wear your mask, even being quoted in some cases as saying, “don’t be an a$$, wear your mask”.
The data over the last 2 years has shown iffy results in how effective masks really are. So, has the science really changed? Or rather is it, as some on the right have pointed out, “the political science is the thing that changed”?
