Visit to New York – Furries – Sightseeing – Awaiting developments on the omicron variant – Evening statistics
I’m in New York City now, visiting my relatives. I arrived yesterday afternoon. This trip presents quite a contrast to the previous one that I made. This time I was not obliged to drive all the way and I was able to leave my car at a train station in New Jersey and from there take the New Jersey transit system to the city. It is considerably easier to leave the car outside of the city and I felt no apprehension in using public transit. Everyone wore masks and people were sitting at a reasonable distance from one another. In New York restaurants one must not only use face masks to enter the dining area but must present proof of vaccination, which they validate by comparing the vaccination card or images thereof (I uploaded mine onto my cell phone) with official identification such as a driver’s license. Some New Yorkers go so far as to wear face masks outdoors as well as indoors. Masks are required to enter any store or public area such as the front desk area of an apartment building. I met my cousin-in-law, who had been traveling through the Midwest on business, at my aunt’s, and he told me that these practices were not being followed in any of the other cities he visited.
TK, my cousin-in-law, is a Chilean and now resides in Santiago, but although he has lived in the U.S. for some years there are some practices in this happy land of ours that are still able to take him by surprise. When he was in Chicago the hotel at which he was staying happened to be hosting a furry convention. This phenomenon is unknown in Chile, which perhaps should be a source of envy on our part. He found the experience of being surrounded by people dressed in anthropomorphic animal costumes unsettling, for which I can hardly blame him. The majority of furries, it is true, feel fully human and have no desire to become a non-human animal; they simply enjoy media that features animals who walk, talk, and do otherwise human things. But a significant number of them really appear to believe that they are not entirely human. It is not altogether a coincidence that a “furry” is seven times more likely to lay claim to transexuality than a non-furry, for transexuals are another group who wish to deny the limitations of their biological makeup. The furry fandom is much less objectionable of the two groups, to my mind; at least they do not impose on others the way transexuals do, invading the restrooms of people whose gender (biologically at least) differs from theirs and disrupting activities such as sports competitions with fallacious claims of being female while in fact possessing the additional muscle mass one would expect a man to have.
Today I visited Little Island, an artificial island park of about 2 1/2 acres supported by pot-shaped structures above the water. It contains three lawns, each rising to a different height to provide overlooks at the northwest, southwest, and southeast corners of the park. These provide views of the palisades and buildings along the western side of the Hudson River. Each lawn contains landscaping, which must possess considerable beauty during the spring and summer, and even at this time (autumn merging into winter) was not without interest. During the warmer months I have no doubt it will become very crowded, but at this season the number of visitors, though fairly large, was not cumbersome to the degree of restricting one’s movements.
Afterwards I returned by way of the High Line in Chelsea, a linear park about 1 1/2 miles in length, built on a disused southern viaduct section of the New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line. It is bordered by beds of various plants and has extensive views of the city buildings and of Hudson River beyond. It has the advantage, moreover, of enabling one to progress above the city blocks without waiting at the intersections for the lights to change.
It was after this walk that I met with my aunt and my cousin-in-law for lunch, at an excellent deli that has a curious history. Originally it was located in the East Village on Second Avenue (hence its name, Second Avenue Deli) and was something of prime gathering place for many stars of the Yiddish theatre. It closed briefly after its owner was murdered in 1996 during the course of a gun robbery, a crime that has never been solved. In 2006 the new owner moved the restaurant to its current location, not far from my aunt’s residence on the Upper East Side. The split pea soup was very refreshing after walking about for several hours on a brisk day in late autumn.
The omicorn variant has already affected international travel, both for Americans and for visitors to the U.S. As of December 6th, all travelers, whether vaccinated or not, must take a COVID test within one day of entering the U.S. (up to this point vaccinated travelers were given a timefrance of 72 hours). In addition, e federal mask mandate requiring travelers to wear masks in airports, on planes and on other modes of public transportation such as trains and buses has been extended through March 18th.
The variant is spreading rapidly, with cases now confirmed in California, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Hawaii. At this point the symptoms among the persons diagnosed with the omicron variant continue to be considerably milder than those who contracted the delta variant. So if the omicron variant crowds out the delta variant, it may actually prove to be a stepping stone towards reaching the end of the pandemic.
Today’s statistics as of 7:30 PM – # of cases worldwide: 265,131,303; # of deaths worldwide: 5,257,310; # of cases U.S.: 49,866,672; # of deaths; U.S.: 807,991.