Random Notes from a Crank

Throughout this whole Covid-19 disaster, I've unfollowed a number of fools on Facebook because of their moronic posts. 

We know of a number of people who vacationed during the start of this whole pandemic. 

Idiots. 

And some of the people who went around galavanting around the country were 60 and older. 

People can talk all they want about how the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus problem, but Moscow Don cut funding for the Pandemic Response Team in 2018, which there is a video that confirms that act, and as The Washington Post recounted in a well-researched story, "US Intelligence Reports from January and February Warned about a Likely Pandemic," Moscow Don was informed by multiple people about the like likelihood of this virus becoming the major problem it is. 

Because of the administration's lack of planning and response, the impact of Covid-19 is a catastrophe. 

Here's the lede from the article: "U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting."

And there's this: “'Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,'” this official said. “'The system was blinking red.'”

Of course, in a press conference two days ago, Moscow Don implied that he inherited a defunct system to respond to this disaster. He's blaming Obama. However, Moscow Don cut the funding for the response team for dealing with pandemics. 

And courtesy of knowledgeable friend from FB, here is a chronological list of his idiotic comments:
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9: “This blindsided the world.”
March 13: Declares state of emergency and says “I do not take responsibility for anything”

The time home has let me watch season 6 and the start of the new season of Clone Wars. As Star Wars franchises go, Clone Wars has to rank in the top five best. The Empire Strikes Back is number one, but the Clone Wars series might rank as number two for me. 

After watching two documentaries on jazz artists, I purchased some albums I have on CD but not on iTunes. The Birth of the Cool is about Miles Davis, which was quite interesting. Chasing Trane is about the meteoric rise of John Coltrane and his fascinating music. I highly recommend both. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I know the ingredients of hot dogs are notoriously sketchy, but every once in a while a good old hot dog just hits the spot. The other day I just had a hankering for a hot dog, so I got myself a chili dog. 

I actually prefer Chicago-style hot dogs sans the raw onions. 

When my siblings and I cleaned out my dad's apartment after he died, no one else wanted a number of my parents' cooking utensils, so I snapped them up. One of those that I inherited is a serrated knife for cutting into grapefruit. I've been eating the hell out of grapefruit lately.

The whole deal makes me think about the nutritional qualities of grapefruit. Check out the stats on grapefruit. Mash the links if you're interested. 

I was also thinking the other day why some scientist hasn't crossbred an orange with a grapefruit, so you could have the grapefruit taste, but you could peel it like an orange.  

I am re-watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Vietnam War. 

One of the books I'm reading right now is the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the book that inspired Hamilton the Musical. I first reader Chernow's biography of Grant, which I absolutely loved. The Hamilton biography is quite good, but because my store of knowledge about the Revolutionary War period is pretty strong, I'm not as smitten with the Hamilton biography as I was with the Grant one. 

I'm having my daughter read Gaiman's American Gods. It's a gateway to his other works. 

There is a certain art of not saying what you really want to say in email.

Random Notes from a Crank

I'm trying to invent a new word. This word needs to concisely sum up this feeling: a professor who has taught for many years sees freshmen making bad decisions that he or she has seen year after year, but he or she has a sense of futility that whatever advice he or she might give is not going to be heeded. 

If you have any ideas for the new word that exemplifies that feeling, please post in the comments. 

Here are some intriguing data points from September's "Harper's Index":

• Amount that Carrier promised to invest in an Indiana plan in a deal with Donald Trump to save domestic jobs: $16,000,000
• Percentage of that money that will be used for automation: 100
• Amount taxpayers spent in 2013 on food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance for Walmart employees: $6,200,000,000

This evening I watched the final episode of the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's documentary The Vietnam War. The ten-episode film is one of the most poignant and powerful documentaries I've ever watched. When they talked about the Vietnam Memorial tonight, I choked up and then started crying. 

Stay Positive: James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub Party

Earlier this week I watched the HBO documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. It's quite a good one if you're interested in music documentaries. 

But since I grew up watching SNL, anything about James Brown reminds me of Eddie Murphy's great skit, James Brown's Celebrity Hot Tub Party. It's below for your viewing pleasure. 


James brown celebrity hottub by codordog

Random Notes from a Crank

As I was driving home after picking up the kids the other day, I noticed a house for sale sign that I had never seen before. Often when realtors put their signs on the front lawns around here, marking their marketing territory, they'll often place an additional sign at the top that provides a positive feature of the property, such as "basement," "sunroom," and "family room." This house, however, offered this enticement: "investment." From the looks of the home, that word needs an adjective before it, such as "long-term" or "bad."

Wednesday night the Alabama softball team won the World Series. That's the Capstone's first National Championship in softball, and the Crimson Tide's win is the first time an SEC team has won the national championship in softball. It's been a great year for Crimson Tide athletics. The football team demolished LSU in the BCS national championship. The ladies gymnastics team won its sixth national championship. The ladies golf team won a national championship. Unfortunately, the men's golf team got second after losing to Texas on the last hole of match play. But now softball got theirs. Roll Tide.

I stumbled across the fact that we have the Documentary Channel via DirectTV. I've already watched documentaries on Levon Helm, Yogi Berra, and The Secret to a Happy Ending, the 2009 documentary about the Drive-By Truckers. And I have five or six taped in my DVR queue. Hello Documentary Channel -- Goodbye productivity.

My neighbor told me this morning that she scared two raccoons out of her year at about 4:30 a.m. One, she said, was quite big. We've had opossums in the neighborhood before, but this is the first incident with raccoons I know of. Those critters are smart and everywhere as evidenced by the Raccoon Nation documentary my son and I watched a while back. The Nature documentary tracked the movements of urban raccoons in Toronto and observed their behavior, tactics, and strategies. Impressive mammals.