It's a pretty wet day, but luckily Lois had a much better night, and she had a normal breakfast and lunch. Yesterday it was me doing the meal-preparation, and I don't think she can face another day of my cordon bleu signature-dishes, so it's just as well she has started to recover, to put it mildly!!!
13:00 The big news today is the progress with the Pfizer BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. It's looking like it may be over 90% effective. Unfortunately we also hear at the same time that the flu jab we both got yesterday is only about 50% effective, which is disappointing - damn! And for the last two days we were feeling so protected! ...until now - damn (again) !!!!
We reckon, nonetheless, that if we continue avoiding people to keep ourselves safe from coronavirus, we'll also be cutting down the chances of getting the ordinary influenzas. That's what we think anyway!
14:00 Lois and I are also waiting to see if and how Trump will end his term as president - it's quite a cliff-hanger. Will he agree to go only after weeks of litigation and annoying rhetoric?
Or, as Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has predicted, could it be that Trump will just leave the White House for next month's Christmas break and never return?
Cohen doesn't believe that Trump plans to concede to President-elect Joe Biden. "I wouldn't be shocked if there's no concession speech at all," Cohen told MSNBC's Alex Witt on Sunday. "My theory is that at Christmastime he heads to Mar-a-Lago and I don't believe he'll come back to Washington. I think he'll stay at Mar-a-Lago all the way through the inauguration."
Cohen, who worked for Trump for years before turning against him in 2018, added that Trump was unlikely to attend the inauguration. "He cannot let the camera look at him and basically pull down the curtain and see the wizard that's standing beside," Cohen said. "That he's a loser, and it's killing him."
In a recent TV documentary Lois and I discovered that Trump had a strong personal relationship with Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power Of Positive Thinking" - Peale was a close friend of the whole Trump family.
Lois and I both agree that there's a lot of good sense in the power of positive thinking, but it seems that it can seduce people into thinking you don't have to do anything else, except think positive thoughts. In fact there's of course a limit to it - it doesn't necessarily stop you from contracting coronavirus for example, or from losing an election.
My late mother had all of Peale's books, and they probably helped her to reach, as she did, the impressive age of 91, But those books, plus the related Christian Science ambivalence towards medical treatment, also led her into setbacks in her health that could have been avoided, we think.
So follow Peale by all means, but keep a sense of proportion, would be our conclusion!
Nobody seems to know what the official label for Kamala Harris's husband will be. In the UK we don't have a tradition of calling a Prime Minister's spouse the "First Lady" or "First Gentleman" or whatever, so it doesn't arise as an issue here.
When Maggie Thatcher become Prime Minister in 1979, a lot of fun was had with Dennis Thatcher's imagined domestic life with Maggie, as in the Bond film "For Your Eyes Only". The couple are seen in their kitchen doing the washing up and drying up when the official Maggie-phone rings. The Prime Minister thinks she is speaking to Bond, who was on some sort of mission at the time. In fact she had been connected to a parrot, who asked her to give him a kiss. What madness!
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