1,000,000 Volunteers

But first:

Attention: A Love Story — “consistently interesting, beautifully written” — was published today.  This review is consistently interesting and beautifully written as well.

And speaking of good books:

Albert Camus’ The Plague — in 10 minutes.

I had never heard of The School of Life until Glenn sent me that (thanks, Glenn), but the very next clip after The Plague was Dostoyevsky in 14 minutes and now I can finally learn all the things I was supposed to learn more than half a century ago, when I was a “Slavic Languages and Literatures” major.

All I remember from The Brothers Karamazov was the epigraph . . . “Verily, verily, I say unto you!  Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.  But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (John, 12:24) . . . all but the verb for “bringeth forth” I can recite to you in the original.  Of the thousands of pages that followed, I remember only that many years later, at a Broadway matinee accompanied by two borrowed children, I handed The Flying Karamazov Brothers, who boast they can juggle anything, a large open tin of finely-ground chocolate protein powder.

But I digress.

If you know someone who would like to volunteer during this crisis, either on location or from the comfort of their homes, send them to Volunteer Surge, a project launched today to train 1,000,000 health care assistants.  The on-line courses are free . . . 10 hours for tele-volunteers, 30 for those who will be on site . . . and have the support of General George Casey (US Army, Ret.) who ran the United States Army, and Dr. Sten Vermund, Dean of the Yale School of Public Health.

As General Casey says in the video volunteers will see when they complete one of these courses: “Thank you for your service.”

Oh!  And wait!  Need a face mask but have no bandana handy?  (“Yes, we have no bandanas . . . “)

Use a yarmulke!