A UK man from Stevenage, Herts was spotted making his way around his neighborhood dressed as a bush. The couple next door caught the man on video and assumed that he was trying to avoid lockdown in a most ridiculous fashion.
Turns out, it was all just a prank, the man trying to bring a laugh to neighbors stuck indoors. It's unclear whether the next door neighbors were in on the gag.
Later he returned with his two kids disguised as garbage bags.
[H/t Kaine Delay]
Image: Screengrab Read the rest
For 50 years, Billy Barr has been the only resident of Gothic, Colorado, an abandoned silver mining town. He's not a hermit though. According to NPR, Barr says he "occasionally interacts with skiers who pass through, he talks to his sister on the phone, and he works for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory nearby, which gets flooded with scientists in the summer." Below are a few of Bill Barr's tips on social distancing. You should read the rest though because Barr is very funny. From NPR:
"Tips From Someone With Nearly 50 Years Of Social Distancing Experience" by Rae Ellen Bichell (NPR)1. Keep track of something.
Each day, Barr tracks the weather for a number of groups including the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. He started measuring snow levels in the 1970s, mostly because he was bored [...]
2. Keep a routine.
Barr starts early. He wakes up around 3:30 a.m. or 4 a.m., and stays in bed until about 5 a.m.
"Up until a week or two ago, I would listen to the news every morning so that I could start every day either totally depressed or furious. That's always a good way to start the day," he said [...]
4. Embrace the grumpiness.
Sometimes, Barr said, it's kind of satisfying to be grumpy about something.
image: courtesy of Billy Barr Read the rest
Nova Scotia resident Glynis Mullen shared a simple, but brilliant, way that we can all employ to look out for our neighbors in real life, "Our neighbour is older and lives alone so I gave her three colour pieces of paper for her window which face our kitchen window. Green is for I’m OK, yellow (is) for need(ing) help with an errand, and red for emergency. I call it isolation communication."
She and her neighbour often communicate through her kitchen window and said the tri-colour paper system is a “really good visual comfort that everything is okay. When it’s yellow, I know I should call and we can arrange something.”
screengrab via Glynis Mullen/Facebook Read the rest
Ben of Questing Beast has begun reading all of Gary Gygax's 1979 roleplaying game masterwork, the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, on YouTube, After the first two videos, at around four hours in, it look like he's up to page 33. He estimates it'll take some 40 hours to read the entire book.
Of all of the D&D books, spanning four decades, the DM Guide had the most profound impact on me and will always hold a special place in my nerdy little heart. I'm sure many other RPGers of my generation (and beyond) feel the same way.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
Brian May, "your friendly neighbourhood rock star" (as he described himself in a post) is doing a series of "MicroConcertos" on his Instagram account. On them, he shows fans and fellow guitarists how he achieves some of his famous Queen licks.
Brian is also using his account to try and keep fans' spirits up and to encourage them to take self-isolation very seriously, observe sterile technique, and to make the most out of the time. "Keep calm and create" he summarizes.
View this post on Instagram
Image: Screengrab Read the rest
I had the privilege of interviewing Buzz Aldrin a few years ago. The second man to step foot on the moon (and first to pee on it) had just released a new book, and won his first ever March Madness bracket, and the first thing he told me over the phone was how he'd spent his 80th birthday scuba diving in the Galapagos with his son, but got in trouble when he broke away from the group and grabbed a whale shark by the dorsal fin just so he could ride it.
Buzz Aldrin is a god damn national treasure and a real American badass. (I'd also love to see the look on that scuba instructor's face if/when they realized that the old man they were scolding was in fact Buzz Aldrin.)
Now, Aldrin is 90 years old, which puts him at particularly high risk for infection by the novel coronavirus. But this national treasure has a solid plan to stay safe, as detailed to Eric Berger at Ars Technica: "Lying on my ass and locking the door."
Aldrin is a survivor — of outer space, of shitty jobs, and of alcoholism and depression — so I tend to trust his advice. But if you're looking for something more substantial, Forbes spoke with several other astronauts about their time in isolation, including NASA’s Human Research Program Director Bill Paloski, Ph.D.; John Grunsfeld PhD, a retired NASA astronaut and Hubble Space Telescope repairman who spent over 59 days in space; and Dr. Read the rest
Japanese artist Miyu Kojima's dayjob is cleaning up apartments whose occupants have died "lonely deaths" (kodokushi/孤独死), where someone socially isolated declines unnoticed for months or years; the scenes of their death are both sad and grisly, as often they lie dead behind closed doors for a long time before they are missed. Read the rest
