Historically, IRS initiates audits against far more poor people for small sums of money, simply because they can collect those. (In part because poor people can’t afford to put up a fight against some of the more draconian measures IRS can bring to bear, such as wage garnishment or impounding a house.) Paul Kiel -…

. . . clawing money away from widows is a bad look.

How to Return a Deceased Relative’s Stimulus Check

Crow, crow, raven, crow, red-tailed hawk, crow, buzzard, crow, crow, crow, bluebird, bluebird mobbed by ravens, raven, crow, crow. . .

(At least one gardening website claims that the acid in the beer will kill pests, and the yeast and carbohydrates will help with growing. It’s also great bait for slugs. Others, however, say that alcohol is bad for plants.)

Way ahead of you. A 60" square of organza (I used this—price is right, too) pinned to the center of a hat works okay, although it tends to blow in the wind. If I cared, I’d hem it with something heavy. Be prepared to be addressed as “Beekeeper”.

For the privileged, a face mask is an expression of individual identity, essentially rendering its primary function meaningless.

You baked sourdough bread from a viral tweet and it hasn’t killed you yet.

It was a retrospective study—looking at patients whose doctors had decided to give it a shot, on-label or no.

However, an alternate hypothesis is everyone yelling “FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T DO THAT, THESE THINGS ARE POISON” led to a larger number of people who used the product for ordinary cleaning and felt sick afterwards calling a poison center, rather than blowing it off. It’d take real study to sort out which of those two, if…

If you could only change one thing about your kitchen—whether it’s something actually fixable or more of a pie-in-the-sky daydream—what would it be?

The text that comes before the recipe is not mindless filler—it’s

Page 12 is the acknowledgements section, at least in the copy I just downloaded from here. Page eight is where they bring up population density and then say their supplemental materials contain justifications it isn’t important: “Visual inspection suggests that COVID-19 death rates are higher in the Mid-Atlantic,…

Aw, don’t you want to try to explain to him that Muhammad read 1 Corinthians fourteen centuries before he did? (Almost certainly in several more languages, too.)

Unfortunately, they didn’t correct for population density—for a disease that spreads person-to-person via direct or close contact—and they accepted reports of “no” deaths from rural counties without the resources to spare for public health issues. So their deaths-per-million map looks like a population density map…

The hard part is scheduling the time of the USDA Jesus Inspector.

President Trump is a fool. The researchers who identified hydroxychloroquine (perhaps with azithromycin to help hold down the secondary infections) as a promising thing to investigate are not fools. And there were early indications that it worked, notably Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19:…

It wasn’t completely random. SARS-CoV-2 gets into the cells by inducing them to form a vacuole and dump acid in. Chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine prevent the acidification bit; the hope was that would shut down the entry pathway. It worked in the test tubes: Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, is…

I did not know this, because my brain pushed out everything I learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy in favor of memorizing every single bad rom-com from the early aughts, but soap literally repels dirt, germs, and apparently, black pepper.

It’s a nice idea. But unfortunately, you can’t sew a surgical mask out of a common fabric stash—because even of us folk who do have sewing machines, very few keep melt-blown polypropylene around.