Lifestyle

Thursday June 25, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 25, 2020

Students find new ways to celebrate graduations and prom

After months of remote learning due to COVID-19 the school year officially comes to end this week, but for many students there will be no graduation or prom to celebrate the milestone.

Life in a Pandemic

“Prom would have been tomorrow and commencement the day after, so there is really no sense of closure in a way,” said Nelson Lee, who is graduating from Marc Garneau Collegiate .

Nelson is the student council president at his Toronto high school and had been planning the end-of-year celebrations long before the pandemic.

“It doesn’t feel as fulfilling,” he said about missing out on so many school events, graduation and other extracurricular opportunities.

He has been accepted to the University of Toronto’s Engineering program. He’s excited about the next chapter, but acknowledges it won’t be normal. 

“The university has sent out a lot of information about they will proceed in September, for the larger classes they will be online and smaller seminars will be in person,” he said. “I think it’s a great combination for the best of both worlds at this time.”

In the meantime, with limited options due to the pandemic, he’s taking courses offered by UofT to prepare him for his first semester. 

“Just to keep myself engage and push myself to learn new things during this time.”

Some schools are hosting virtual graduation ceremonies to celebrate their students achievements. 

Bayview Middle School is hoisting a virtual graduation Tuesday evening, giving staff and students one last opportunity to connect.

“It means a lot to me because I will see my teachers talk one last time, just knowing I’m going to be present there with all my classmates and peers,” Grade 8 student Nadine Al-Junaidi said. 

Nadine’s classmate Pradyumn Jha is equally excited about the opportunity to see friends one last time before going their separate ways to different high schools.  (CTV) 

 

Saturday June 20, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 20, 2020

The end of the buffet as we know it?

December 4, 2013

The COVID-19 pandemic may be the end of the restaurant buffet as we know it. 

With concerns over the spread of the virus heightening concerns around food safety, the fill-your-plate dining concept is facing serious challenges.

Some Alberta restaurant operators believe that long after anxiety around the spread of the virus subsides, customers won’t have an appetite for self-serve eats. 

Some buffets shuttered by the pandemic may be gone forever, said Oscar Lopez, the founder of Pampa Brazilian Steakhouse, a chain of five Alberta restaurants. 

“That’s the $2-million question,” Lopez said. “This is part of a huge industry.

December 13, 2013

“We’ve been thinking about it a lot.” 

After months of public health messaging about virus prevention, customers may have become permanently put off by sneeze guards and shared spoons, Lopez said. 

He wonders how long the world-famous buffets of the Las Vegas strip will remain closed, or if now-docked cruise ships will ever serve their food in the same way again. 

Even when Alberta health restrictions prohibiting buffets are lifted, his chain of restaurants may never operate them again. 

June 11, 2014

“An emotional scar has been left on people,” he said. “I’m skeptical. I don’t know. 

“When Alberta Health Services allows us to reopen our salad bar operation, I’m not quite sure that we will. I think that will have to do a lot with what the public’s reaction is, what their memory of this whole situation is.

“We may just keep doing what we’re doing.”

Pampa is known for its rodizio-style service. Customers sample from shared plates and meat skewers served by waiters circulating from table to table. The salad bar is also a huge draw, Lopez said.

Coronavirus cartoons

Since reopening, the restaurant is now plating its food individually in the kitchen. Tables are carefully spaced two metres apart. The salad bar is closed indefinitely. 

Lopez considered having an attendant for the buffets but said he was advised by health inspectors that it would be too difficult to keep customers a safe distance apart from each other. 

“Almost overnight we had to reinvent ourselves and sort of reteach our team on our new style of service, so we’re kind of learning as we go.” 

Most customers have been accommodating, he said, but some reservations have been cancelled.

“It looks empty. It looks sad. We have lost a lot of the ambience in the restaurant.” (CBC)

Letter to the Editor, Wednesday June 24, 2020

June 20 cartoon missing racialized customers

I want to thank The Spectator for giving us a great example of systemic racism: A cartoon with seven people at the buffet table and not one racialized person. I guess only white people in Hamilton go to buffet restaurants. Despite the fact that systemic barriers exist everywhere, people continue to be blind to them.

Jorge Lasso, Hamilton

Saturday May 9, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday May 9, 2020

Ontario to reopen some retail stores within days, moving with ‘cautious optimism’ amid COVID-19

Ontario will relax some of its coronavirus restrictions in the days ahead, moving with “cautious optimism” to allow garden centres, nurseries, hardware stores and safety supply stores to reopen so long as they adhere to the same public health measures currently in place at grocery stores, Premier Doug Ford says.

The public will be allowed to shop in these stores as long as physical distancing, contact-less payment and sanitization measures are in place, Ford said at his daily briefing Wednesday.

Select retailers can reopen according to this schedule:

• Friday: Nurseries and garden centres 

• Saturday: Hardware stores and safety supply stores

• Monday: Retail stores with street entrances will be permitted to reopen for curbside pickup.

The province will also expand what counts as essential construction with work allowed on condominiums and apartments, Ford said.

June 26, 2009

“We have seen in other jurisdictions that moving too fast, ignoring the advice given on this virus and even giving it an inch can set us back,” Ford said. “So we will move cautiously.”

Asked about when restaurants might reopen, Ford said his hope is that they can do so “sooner than later,” but provided no benchmark on how low Ontario’s daily new case count would have to go before that happens. 

Although the government is allowing some businesses to reopen, the province is not yet technically in the first stage of its reopening framework, and on Wednesday extended its emergency orders until May 19.

Life in a Pandemic

Stage one of the reopening framework would allow workplaces that can modify operations to open their doors, the opening of parks, allowing for more people at certain events such as funerals, and having hospitals resume some non-urgent surgeries.

But before all that can happen, the chief medical officer of health is looking for a consistent, two-to-four week decrease in the number of new cases. So far, the province is in day four of a downward slope. (CBC)


 

Saturday April 25, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday April 25, 2020

Georgia Hairdessers Weigh the Order to Reopen During a Pandemic

On Monday, within hours of Governor Brian Kemp’s announcement that many Georgia businesses could reopen on Friday, Maureen, a sixty-nine-year-old retired schoolteacher, texted her hairdresser, who owns a salon in Atlanta, about an hour from Maureen’s home, in Athens. “The Gov says you can open! 🙂 My appointment is on Friday of this week. What’s your plan?” Maureen, who voted for Kemp, made the appointment eight weeks earlier, before the coronavirus pandemichad shut down much of the country, and she was hoping to keep it. Her hairdresser, a man in his early sixties who asked that I not use his name, did not vote for Kemp. He told her that he would not be reopening until the following Monday—and only in a limited way. Maureen could try one of his other hairdressers, he said, but he wouldn’t be seeing clients himself until May 12th at the earliest. And, the hairdresser told me a few days later, if “Kemp’s science project goes as expected”—by which he meant badly—“then I have no idea when.”

July 23, 2009

Nearly a thousand people in Georgia have died, so far, of complications from the coronavirus, according to the numbers that have been reported. (The actual number may be higher.) Like the Central Georgia health board and many others in the state and around the country, the hairdresser did not think it was time to shift pandemic protocols in order to reopen businesses, even with precautions like masks, gloves, and disinfectant. “I thought it was the most asinine decision any governor could have ever made,” he said, “given the science we’re presented with, what Fauci and the other guys are saying.” The hairdresser checks the daily case counts regularly, he said. “Atlanta has been spiking up and down,” he noted. “I think yesterday we had maybe twelve hundred new cases. Today, maybe seven hundred or so—but it’s not midnight yet, I don’t know.” There are more than twenty thousand confirmed cases in the state. He went on, “It’s pretty damn silly, insisting on a haircut right now. But, you have to understand, my clientele is very privileged. To them, this is a very big sacrifice, to go without a haircut. I’ve had people offer me money to come to their houses—what’s the difference that’s gonna make? I don’t know. It’s a very entitled world.”

September 11, 2007

The hairdresser’s employees are contractors, who rent booths from him at the salon. Shortly after the announcement, he sent them the Georgia State Board of Cosmetologists and Barbers’ guidelines on reopening, which he called “the craziest thing—social distancing while giving a haircut is hard.” The board recommends that barbers wear a face shield and gloves, as a start. “You need to be in a smock, too,” the salon owner went on, “and change your smock after every haircut, into another clean, sanitized smock. The client is in sanitized cape and smock and neck wrap. Then you have to sanitize your whole station and chair.” Taking each client’s temperature and having them answer a health questionnaire is also recommended. “If I were getting paid the salary of a surgeon,” the hairdresser said, “it might be worth all the scrubbing.”

Some of the contractors are willing to take risks to pay their bills. “We could wait,” the owner said, referring to reopening. “But I feel like these hairdressers chomping at the bit—if they’re willing to do it and really take it seriously, and I’m there to monitor it—I can’t say no to them. But,” he added, “I’m kind of a wimp.”

Life in a Pandemic

One of these contractors, Brittany, who’s thirty-five, has been at the salon for four years. “If Home Depot can be open and people can shop because they’re bored and want to buy houseplants, and Target can be open for people to buy yoga pants,” she told me, “I don’t see the harm in me—carefully and safely—doing a client.” Brittany said that she is a Republican but did not vote for Kemp. She charges around two hundred dollars per session. “Twelve hundred doesn’t even pay half my booth rent,” she said, referring to the stimulus check she received from the federal government. (The salon owner did not charge booth rent while the store was closed.) “So you don’t want to be unsafe, but you also don’t want to lose clients or income. It’s a rock and a hard place, you know?” (The New Yorker) 



 

Wednesday April 8, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 8, 2020

Self-appointed pandemic police should think before they default to public shaming

The pandemic disaster is bringing out both the best and worst in people. And some behaviours are just annoying.

Coronavirus cartoons

One of the most annoying trends is the emergence of busybodies who are eager to pass judgment on others before they have all the facts. They’re the “pandemic police” — self-appointed vigilantes who are calling out people for not strictly adhering to social isolation protocols.

A mom in Sooke, B.C., was a recent victim of this overzealous reign of terror when she was repeatedly verbally assaulted for taking her two kids, ages two and six, out with her for errands.

Janene Walker says she was stopped in a Lowe’s parking lot changing her daughter’s diaper in her van when a passing man in a truck yelled out at her, “Keep your kids in the house, for Christ’s sake!”

Then, during a visit to a local grocery store, her daughter was strapped in the shopping cart and her son was close to her side when a man called her a “shitty mom” for taking her kids out with her. That confrontation turned into a shouting match that left her in tears.

November 14, 2019

Now, no question it would have been far better if this mom didn’t have her children with her while she bought necessary supplies. But sometimes we find ourselves in difficult circumstances. In her case, she’s managing her kids on her own while her husband is deployed with the military and, with no family nearby, she says he has no one to help her with babysitting.

Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health, recently spoke up to condemn such public shaming. Community harassment, especially online, is “inappropriate,” he said.

What’s more appropriate is cracking down on people who are obviously flouting common sense — and, increasingly, the law in many provinces and states. 

And then there are the COVID-19 skeptics — yes, believe it or not, they’re still out there. They think all of this is being overblown or even a left-wing conspiracy. They also seem to think they can carry on as before without any consequences. To them, the answer may be not only public shaming, but also the full force of the law.

But what about people like Janene Walker, who just find themselves in a bind and don’t know what to do?

Strang says that rather than harass or shame individuals, people need to offer help and support so the person in question feels able to self-isolate and has the support to see them through the period of isolation.

Walker agrees, arguing that compassion should extend to any single parent who’s struggling to keep their household afloat while maintaining physical distancing and isolation.

“All these people just … think that they know better. And they’re shaming people publicly when they don’t know their situation. We should be helping each other and lifting each other up and showing compassion.”

I suspect that all of us have at some point in our lives felt the sting of being judged by people who seem to be lurking in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to pounce.

I don’t want to dive too deeply into the psychology behind that, but I suspect a lot of these people grew up in very judgmental households. Their tendency to gossip and look down their noses at others apparently gives their egos a boost.

It’s time for those people to show consideration and find out the full story before passing judgment.

I’m left to wonder what might have happened if one of those people who were so quick to denounce Walker had stopped and asked her why she was out with her kids. A little understanding and problem-solving might have made the connection she needed to find some babysitting or discover someone who could bring supplies to her.

Except for a handful for ignorant scofflaws, the vast majority of us fully understand the urgency of maintaining safe social distance. With each passing day, the grim news reminds us what’s at stake.

Rather than assuming the worst, when we see someone who’s breaking the rules, it’s worth asking whether we can help them comply.

We’re in this together — let’s all try to remember that some people just need a helping hand. (Hamilton Spectator)