How to make your own cloth face covering (without sewing!).

The official American presentation (with rubber bands):



The dreamier Japanese presentation (with hair elastics):



I think hair elastics would be more comfortable. I'm thinking that the cloth would feel heavy hooked over your ears like that and would prefer something that left the ears alone. The instructions I'm seeing for masks that tie around the back of your head all seem to require sewing.

And yet, it is obviously possible to take a long scarf, put it over your face, and wrap it around and do some tying to hold it in place. That's something we do in the North in the winter when the temperatures drop below zero. But there are summer scarves, and how to tie them to cover the face for sun protection seems to be well worked out, at least for women. I like this, which strikes me as stylish, but perhaps not much of a virus defense:



I'm seeing some videos showing bandannas tied in back in the classic Western armed-robber style. Is that approach good enough? Well, no one was ever claiming that a mask was a perfect shield, only that it might help to some degree. What degree? Who knows?!

And there's the whole dimension of mental wellbeing and social signaling: Do you feel better? And: Do other people see that you're being caring and thoughtful? The "bad guy" bandanna might not be so good at social signaling:



Now, the masks are voluntary, so you could just go without them (or go without them except when doing something dangerous, like venturing into a grocery store or a polling place). Are you going to wear a face covering? I took a poll, here, yesterday. Results:



Do you see that I gave you pairs of options? There were 3 answers — yes, maybe, and no — and for each of the 3, there were 2 choices. The first choice for each had you reacting to a message from the outside— reacting one way or another to being told you should do something. The second one in each case had to do with thinking for yourself in doing what's rational. For each of the answers — yes, maybe, and no — the internal decisionmaking approach was much more popular. In fact, all of the thinking-for-yourself answers —the second, fourth, and sixth — were much more popular than any of the answers that were based on the reception of messages about what you ought to do.

The least popular answer was the one where you do what's recommended. I wonder if doing what you're told would become more popular if mask-wearing were not voluntary. But taking my poll would never be mandatory, and there'd be no consequence to lying on my poll, so I don't think I'd get a lot of check marks on the option: Yes, I'll do what I'm told.