There are three of us planning to go to Europe in December. Last night we got an email from our travel agent starting “Please read **URGENT**” and that is never good.

Vaccinations provide powerful, but invisible, protection, but masks have become the outward and visible sign of how we feel about the pandemic, individually and collectively. Sometimes wearing one is a question of legality, sometimes an assessment of the risks, and sometimes we depend on an incipient, but fuzzy, mask etiquette.

Scott Gottlieb made a startling announcement last Friday. The new OSHA vaccine mandates that take effect on Jan. 4 “are coming on the tail end of this pandemic,” he said. “By Jan. 4 this pandemic may well be over, at least as it relates to the United States,”

“Are certain words creeping into his conversation?” asks Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” “Words like swell? And so’s your old man?” As the people of River City gasp and lean forward to hear more, out there in the audience we laugh . Because they’re so quaint. But the joke is on us

We headed off to Minnesota last Wednesday to explore another new place and see how Minneapolis is handling the latest phase of the pandemic. The transitory phase, as I see it, is somewhere between the daily briefings, lockdowns, and masking of March 2020 and the under appreciated freedom of March 2019.

A record 4.3 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in August, according to number of “quits” reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). News media are calling it “The Great Resignation.” But there are actually even more than 4.3 million,

Do you like to watch the credits after a movie? I do. I especially like to see which locations were used and the list of songs in the soundtrack. But, except for wondering what the “best boy” did, I’ve never thought much about the jobs listed. Then my daughter sent me this: