DEAD COLLECTOR (Eric Idle): Bring out your dead! / CUSTOMER (John Cleese): Here’s one. / DEAD COLLECTOR: Nine pence. / DEAD PERSON (John Young): I’m not dead! DEAD COLLECTOR: What? / CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here’s your nine pence. / DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead! / DEAD COLLECTOR: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead! / CUSTOMER: Yes, he is. / DEAD PERSON: I’m not! / DEAD COLLECTOR: He isn’t? / CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill. / DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better! / CUSTOMER: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment. • Monty Python and The Holy Grail, 1975, written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Sir Thomas Malory
What… too soon?
I really did not want to write about The Plague. Or Donald Trump, a.k.a. The Other Plague. I wrestled with this while reading texts from my younger friends about waiting outside of Costco for 45 minutes only to be stuck in a 60-minute check-out line behind a plethora of people buying their daily limit of rolled corpses of dead trees. Yeah, no disease spread there, right?
There’s little we can do about stopping The Plague itself, and there’s nothing we can do about The Other Plague until November… assuming The Other Plague grows balls big enough to try to call off the election. My latter comment does not fit the textbook definition of paranoia.
There are other things going on. For example, Tulsi Gabbard just quit the Democratic Party presidential race. I’ll pause while you go Wiki her. Ah, Tulsi, we hardly knew ye. Then again, given her exceptional loathing of the LGBTQ community, we hardly want to. She tossed her massive support – she won two delegates in American Samoa – to Joe Biden, who responded: “Thank you. And you are…?”
Harvey Weinstein has changed his name to “20B0584.” Yesterday was his birthday, but I doubt they put candles on his cake. I’ll bet they checked it for imbedded weapons.
Greenland, a nation that is largely bereft of green, has reported their ice caps have melted 2.2mm in two months. Perhaps we’ve been focusing on the wrong menace?
White supremacist groups have grown 55% since Trump’s vacuum-packed inaugural. That’s all-white with me. I sure hope they haven’t cancelled their 2020 convention.
Princeton University economists noted “deaths of despair” (opioid overdoses, alcoholism and suicide) are claiming the lives of 158,000 Americans every year. Numbers being what they are – mathematics is only a theory, just like “global warming” and “gravity” – life expectancy in the US is heading south. And that is pre-COVID-19.
The vernal equinox happens late tonight, and we celebrate by committing ourselves to fight our biggest non-discriminatory foe. The Equinox is all about balancing the scales.
And, now, The Other Plague started blaming China. Yes, COVID-19 does seem to have started there. And the Chinese government did lie about it at first. They changed their tune, and now Wuhan, the city where the new coronavirus was first detected, yesterday reported no new cases. Hubei Province has reported no new infections for several days.
Meanwhile, The Other Plague, after dismantling our pandemic response team and sitting on his tie lying to his flock for three months, blames the spread of The Plague on the Chinese as well as the media, thereby jeopardizing the safety of all Asian-Americans once again. Maybe he’ll reopen the concentration camps, after he gets tired of blaming the press for “siding with China.”
Chanel Rion, the lying lunatic from the far right-wing One America News Network, uttered the following at yesterday’s press conference:
“The major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese communist party narratives, and they claim you are racist for making these claims about the Chinese virus. Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels, and they work right here in the White House with direct access to you and your team?”
Oh, and she still calls upon armed Americans to rise up angry and fight the Left. Ya just can’t separate the Fake News from the Fake Conservatives anymore.
For me, I’ve had to cancel plans to go to two conventions thus far, a third I probably wasn’t going to go to anyway, and maybe a fourth that isn’t supposed to happen until October. With luck, by then cosplayers will have chopped up their Baby Yoda gear and redeployed it as toilet paper. Except in Japan, of course, where “too cute” is normal.
O.K. Enough. I’m going downstairs to watch the Mae Questel film festival.
Get smart. Stay safe.
