PBS NewsHour asks 'What is Día de los Muertos?'

Halloween is over, but spooky season continues for one more day with Day of the Dead. Since Monstrum on PBS Storied hasn't created a third video on Mexican monsters since last year, I'm returning to news coverage of the holiday, which I last did in 2022. Watch PBS NewsHour asking What is Día de los Muertos? An expert explains the holiday celebrating loved ones who have died.

Día de los Muertos is a celebration honoring the deceased that takes place in Mexico and other parts of Latin America on Nov. 1 and 2. The holiday is celebrated through ritual observations like constructing altars, ofrendas, filled with offerings to the dead and decorating family gravesites to commune with the dead. It is also commemorated through fiestas in which communities gather to celebrate by dancing, playing music, feasting, drinking and masquerading as death.

"The beautiful thing about Día de los Muertos is that it allows the pain and difficulty [of death] to be transformed through joyous celebration so that it's not about just sitting in the difficulty of death," Arizona State University researcher Mathew Sandoval told the PBS NewsHour's Casey Kuhn.

That's an explanation of the holiday like I last posted in 2021's Inside Edition and NBC News report on Day of the Dead. Of course, PBS covered it in a more intellectual way than Inside Edition, which is not the hardest news source.

PBS's story included clips of a Day of the Dead parade. Global News covered one of those in Day of the Dead: Skeletons parade through Mexico City in annual Catrinas march.

Hundreds of people dressed as “La Catrina,” the iconic skeletal figure associated with Day of the Dead, paraded through the streets of Mexico City on Sunday evening.

The parade is one of numerous celebrations held throughout Mexico City for Day of the Dead, or “Dia de Muertos” in Spanish. It is a day when families in Mexico honour their loved ones.

Day of the Dead is celebrated this year on Nov. 2.

It's also celebrated on November 1st, which is when National Day Calendar lists it, so I'm sticking with November 1st.

Watching these two videos reminds me of my experience celebrating Day of the Dead in Oaxaca.

I spent the week of Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico during October and November, 2011. It was an eye-opening experience. I'll just concentrate on the public celebrations I observed.

First, I toured a cemetery during the night of Halloween. In the U.S., only the thrillseekers and vandals would be there. In Oaxaca, entire families were having picnics on the family plots. The atmosphere was festive with the local orchestra playing, fireworks, and vendors just outside the gates of the cemetery. Kids were trick-or-treating inside the cemetery, just as mentioned in the article. While they were wearing costumes, like American kids, they weren't going door to door asking for candy. Instead, they were begging strangers for coins. That's certainly an adaptation of an American tradition that makes it distinct.

The next night, I joined a grownup version of trick-or-treating. My hostess and her friend invited me to a parade of sorts. A bunch of revelers, most in costume, lined up in an alley behind a brass band. We then strolled down the street, stopped at a house, and asked for treats. We got tortas, Mexican sandwiches, which were passed out on a platter the size of a small door. I managed to get one of them. It was delicious. Also, plastic shot glasses of mezcal were being passed around. That made for a very entertaining evening, and is the reason I often describe the holiday as a combination of Halloween and Mardi Gras.

While waiting for that parade to form up, I watched another pass by. It was led by three young men in costume, a devil, a grim reaper, and a Mesoamerican death god. That image perfectly summed up the Mexican heritage of being a fusion of European and native elements. I wish Americans could be as comfortable with our hybrid origins.

Since I have gained many new readers during the past eleven years, I decided it was worth sharing my story again.

I close with WGN News presenting Tequila Cocktails for Day of the Dead.

Day of the Dead is a cherished Mexican tradition honoring the lives of loved ones.

Brand Ambassador Ricardo Rodriguez joined us to share how Mijenta Tequila is celebrating this long-standing tradition.

Drink responsibly. This includes the anchors of the local morning shows, which engage in more day drinking while on the clock than I knew about before I started writing this blog.

That's a wrap for today's post and spooky season, unless tonight's Saturday Night Live has Halloween content, in which case I'll share it as part of tomorrow's Sunday entertainment feature. Stay tuned.

The authors of 'The Big Fail' interviewed, a pandemic post-mortem and update

I haven't written an entry focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic since Mehdi Hasan takes a deep dive into 'The truth about DeSantis’ awful record on covid', a pandemic and primary election update last May, although I've mentioned it it passing since. That means it's time to return to the topic, especially since a book on the subject just came out. Watch Midday Fix - THE BIG FAIL: What the Pandemic Revealed about Who America Saves and Who It Leaves Behind from WGN News, an interview of Bethany McLean, who wrote the book along with Joe Nocera.


That's just a brief taste of the issues the authors raise in the book. MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle explored some of them as she interviewed both McLean and Nocera on 'The 11th Hour' in Authors of 'The Big Fail' on what the U.S. learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearly four years after the start of the pandemic, the U.S. is still learning about what went wrong. Stephanie Ruhle sits down with Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean to talk about their book on the virus, our response, and whether the U.S. can do better in the future.

McLean and Nocera are probably the best people to write this book from an economic perspective, since McLean co-wrote Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and got writing credit for the documentary, and she and Nocera co-wrote All the Devils Are Here about the 2008 Financial Crisis. From a scientific perspective, I'm not so sure. McLean and Nocera are very critical of school lockdowns, which weren't good for K-12 students' educations. I'm still dealing with all the effects of them on my students as a community college instructor. However, while the students didn't need them as protection, their teachers certainly did. I glad I was able to conduct classes over Zoom and built up the ability to run lectures and "labs" remotely. As I half-jokingly tell my students, that was probably the last new trick this old dog will learn in his teaching career.

I close with Forbes interviewing Nocera in 'The Big Fail': How America Failed To Manage The COVID Pandemic.

Joe Nocerra, co-author of "The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind," speaks to "Forbes Talks" about his new book, what the U.S. did wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Trump's role in the failures, and more.

All this talk about fraud, inflation, supply chain issues, and labor shortages and activism reminds me of my analysis in Vox asks 'Why is everything getting so expensive?'

The traditional explanation for inflation is "too much money chasing too few goods." The people who give this answer, like Larry Summers, are usually arguing for less money. Summers thought the U.S. and other industrial democracies were pumping too much money into the economy to keep it on life support during the pandemic. While I think that money could have been better targeted to consumers and workers and not so much to business owners — I should write at least one entry about business owners being prosecuted for fraudulent use of these funds — that money helped end that recession almost as soon as it began. The alternative would have been much worse, especially since peak unemployment was the highest since the Great Depression. As much as it could be an example of "everything is connected to everything else and there is no free lunch," I'll take a temporary surge in inflation as the price to pay for preventing more suffering while people were staying safe at home.

In addition to being callous, the advocates of "too much money chasing too few goods" usually aren't as vocal about making more goods, which leads directly to supply shocks, the second explanation for inflation. I've written about supply shocks to explain the causes and effects of the chip shortage, baby formula shortage, and gas prices. That works very well as an explanation for why specific goods increase in price, but other than energy prices, which affect the prices of everything else, it doesn't work as a general explanation.

By the way, it's not just goods that are in short supply relative to demand; services and labor are in short supply as well. That means that the full version of the first explanation should be "too much money chasing too few goods, services, and employees." Increasing interest rates, which is inverting the yield curve, would be counterproductive on the supply side of the equation. Instead, it works by reducing demand. I'm an environmentalist who thinks over-consumption is a problem, but deliberately increasing suffering to destroy demand is not the way I want to do this. I'd prefer greater efficiency to reduce waste and a more educated populace who will choose to consume more responsibly and sustainably. Inflation while keeping people employed might actually help that goal.

Companies investing in their factories or other facilities and hiring more employees and paying them better would also help with increasing supply of goods and services, as well as induce more people to join the labor force.

As the MSNBC interview pointed out, a lot of companies have returned to their pre-pandemic ways. They haven't really learned anything. Sigh.

Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature, which probably won't be highlights of tonight's Saturday Night Live. Instead, I'm thinking of covering awards shows.

Happy Year of the Water Tiger!

Happy Lunar New Year! So long, Year of the Metal Ox! Welcome, Year of the Water Tiger!

2022 is the Year of the Water Tiger. Those born this year are said to have great interpersonal relationships, and be very family oriented. The last Water Tiger year was 1962.

CNN explains how the pandemic is affecting this year's celebrations.

Though the pandemic continues to overshadow the occasion, with public festivities once again pared down or canceled in many cities, millions of families around the world will still be celebrating at home.
...
Though the spread of Omicron has impacted the way people are celebrating this year, don't despair and remember the unofficial #1 tip from the Lunar New Year rule book: Focus on the positive and only use auspicious language.

WGN News in Chicago has more in How to Celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year.

2022 IS THE YEAR OF THE TIGER WHICH IS ASSOCIATED WITH BRAVERY, CONFIDENCE AND STRENGTH.

It's not quite as lively as the Inside Edition video I embedded in Happy Year of the Metal Rat!, but I found it enjoyable and informative just the same.

Speaking of the year before last's entry, I'm returning to the well of Disney's way of celebrating the holiday with Daps Magic's FIRST Lunar New Year Procession 2022 - Disney California Adventure to show the Mouse's idea of a Lunar New Year parade.

First Mulan's Lunar New Year Procession at Disney California Adventure on the opening day of the celebration.

Lunar New Year Returns to Disney California Adventure Park
Rejoin family and friends at this multicultural celebration filled with happy wishes for health, luck and prosperity throughout the Year of the Tiger!

From January 21 to February 13, 2022, Lunar New Year at Disney California Adventure Park ushers in a joyous tribute to Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean cultures.

I'm being a good environmentalist by recycling my reaction to 2020's version: "I don't know how authentically Chinese it is, but it is authentically Disney, which makes it authentically American." I didn't venture a guess about which Disney character would portray this year's animal, but I'm not surprised it's Tigger. The alternative would have been Sher Khan from "The Jungle Book." I like him, but he's a scary villain, so I'm not surprised I didn't find him in the parks.

As for next year, which will be the Year of the Rabbit, Disney has a number of choices and I won't pick one of them now.

Enough of this year's festivities. It's time to conclude this post with the generic greetings I've recycled many times over.

Mandarin: Gong Xi Fa Cai/Xin Nian Kuai Le

Cantonese: Kung Hei Fat Choi

Hokkien (Fujian/Taiwanese): Kiong Hee Huat Tsai/Sin Ni khòai lok

Simplified Chinese: 恭喜发财 新年快乐

Traditional Chinese: 恭喜發財 新年快樂

Stay tuned for Groundhog Day.