Shutdown Diary
The latest according to Washpo:
A few comments: the aggregate daily cases are currently stalling at 11K+. The vaccination rate sharply declined over the past week, with Biden's July 4 goal of 70% of adults partially vaccinated is clearly out of reach, 9 days away, with total vaccinations now roughly 1.5% of the population/week. The latest projection I've heard is we might achieve that objective in August.
Things continue to show improvement. Maryland announced it's ending its COVID-19 state of emergency next week. A local government facility moved to HPCON Alpha, basically the lowest level short of 0/routine; in essence, even white-collar knowledge workers (like me) who can work remotely are expected to work most of the week onsite.
Life's Little Problems
Well, I have to walk back a claim in a recent post that as a contractor I expected, like in the case of inclement weather or government shutdowns, I was resigned with having to eat the first Juneteenth national holiday (i.e., charge it to PTO/paid vacation/leave). In fact, we were told to do that last week on our timecards. It looks like contractor management (at least for my company) reversed the decision I don't think the feds are going to reimburse the companies for the loss of billing, but most contractors observe national holidays (I can recall an employer around 2004-5 not doing it for one or 2 days, like MLK Day, so we had to work at company facilities) So I had to resubmit last week's timesheet; I'm of course happy not losing one of my precious PTO days. I'm thinking of a Texas visit over the weeks ahead.
On a related note, I featured an Amash video with Reason earlier this week. I follow Amash on Twitter (and Facebook), but he doesn't return the courtesy (not that I do the same for others necessarily). But one topic he raised was criticizing libertarians who, like me, took exception to yet another federal holiday. (This didn't mean we disagreed with the idea of an emancipation holiday, but wanted to lose an alternative, maybe a President's Day, MLK Day, Columbus Day, or Veteran's Day). I thought it was an annoying point for him to make as a libertarian. It's not exactly like government employees are in a free market labor force. I don't necessarily know he was singling me out but I didn't really check the opinions of other libertarians. It wouldn't surprise me if others shared that opinion. But in fact I approved of the holiday as a whole. More importantly, I pointed out that slavery still existed in at least 2 Union states until the thirteenth amendment passed in December 1865. In fact, Brion McClanahan pointed out a slave auction just weeks before ratification. The Emancipation Proclamation was rationalized on Lincoln's role as Commander-in-Chief, not as if the Confederate states were part of the Union. It would be like me refusing to recognize Russian debts. I don't have any authority over Russian lenders. Lincoln was trying to stoke slave rebellions and crash the Southern economy. If you read what happened to slaves encountered by Union forces, you find out things like they were assigned duties for rations, etc., basically one form of slavery for another. But I don't mind that Juneteenth serves as a surrogate for true national emancipation, just like Jesus almost certainly wasn't born on Dec. 25. I think conservatives had an issue with the naming, like a true national independence day. I think McClanahan's opinion that the racial identity crowd's dissing celebration of the 13th amendment as a failed liberation of sorts is interesting.
My newest techie annoyance is with VLC on Android. I looked for a replacement for my Youtube Music app, which I thought was running off my SD card tracks but was constantly timing out over some Internet access issues. So I figured out how to build up a playlist of around 200 tracks in VLC. And then one day I open up VLC to find it say "no playlists". Say what? So I could to my VLC music track browser go to a familiar track--go to add it to a playlist, and there is my old playlist.. At that point, VLC seems to be able to see and use the playlist. But every time I start up VLC de novo, it doesn't seem to find a playlist and I have to repeat my trick to retrieve it. This is counterintuitive as hell. I hope they fix it.
Entertainment
Positiv.TV continues to be my go-to television channel, but that might change over the coming 3 or 4 weeks as /Hallmark starts its annual Christmas in July, first on Movies & Mysteries (in-process) for 2 weeks, followed by the signature Hallmark Channel cycle. I have a few favorites I hope to see, but to be honest most of the movie storylines are mediocre and/or predictable; I do multi-task, but I'll often zone into blogging or other activities unless the story is compelling. I've described some of the ones I've liked in the past, which I'll describe here by summary than title:
- A bachelor uncle has custody of his orphaned young niece who hasn't spoken since her mother died; he befriends the new female owner of a struggling toy store on the island
- A late wife/mother makes a special Christmas with two grown daughters who don't get along, as the older unmarried ex-alcoholic sister has taken responsibility for their dad who had suffered some recent health setback like a heart attack or stroke
- An embittered widowed journalist is assigned to cover the golden anniversary of a man who has been playing the town Santa in honor of his late wife's love for Christmas but has contemplated retirement as the lines of children to visit him telling him what they want for Christmas have largely disappeared with the arrival of toy superstores, malls, etc.; she meets the local hotel owner/handyman who sought a career change after becoming a too successful divorce attorney.
- A chance childhood encounter between a middle school girl, the only one of her friends without a boyfriend, and a guy who can't seem to get his scared little sister to visit the mall Santa leads to her own visit to Santa where she tentatively wishes for a boyfriend for Christmas. Christmas morning she find a snow globe promising her a special boyfriend in 20 (!) years. Time goes by, and the girl has become a social worker; the boy has become a promising lawyer on the verge of making partner. He is also doing some pro-bono work, helping one of the woman's clients, a mother hoping to regain custody of her young children, but he arrived late to the woman's hearing, embittering the social worker.. Santa convinces the lawyer to pose as the vaguely familiar social worker's Christmas present; the social worker decides to use him to deflect the attention of her mom, who wants her to settle down and get married.
- An engaged woman wins a radio contest for a Mexican vacation; her fiancé breaks the engagement when she balks at moving to Pittsburgh for his career interests. Her mother, who wants to see her eldest daughter married, had been anxious to meet Jason at the upcoming holiday. The young woman reluctantly goes along with her girlfriend's idea to hire s substitute Jason in exchange for her trip tickets and ends up choosing a struggling actor who they originally met when he was wearing a hot dog costume on one of his acting gigs. They almost pull it off when the real Jason shows up, after his Pittsburgh assignment falls through
There are other movies I also like. I don't necessary dislike romantic comedies, which is a typical Hallmark genre, but in many cases, other than holiday settings, etc., it's little more than window dressing for one of their more secular romantic comedy storylines. I'm also more of a skeptic of storylines where people meet and get married over a brief holiday season.
In terms of WWE, there were controversies over the recent Hell in the Cell, where for some reason they decided to pull the championship match between Reigns and Mysterio, based on a revenge story after Reigns had attacked Rey's tag team son partner, and put it on the preceding Smackdown. Heel Reigns is arguably the most popular wrestler right now; the WWE had failed for years to book him as a babyface/"good guy". It's still not clear why they took their arguably biggest draw off the PPV, but the storyline was Rey didn't want to wait 2 more days to get his vengeance. Nobody seriously thought they would have Reign's drop the title to Rey, despite the David v Goliath storyline. To give the WWE credit, they did try to make it more competitive by letting Rey use all sorts of weapons, legal in this context,
They had filler replacements, like yet another rematch between Owens and Zahn and between Cesaro and Rollins. On a related note in last night's Smackdown, Rollins teased a challenge to former Shield team member Reigns; you sometimes do have heel/heel matchups, but it would be more likely to turn Rollins babyface. Still, all the rumors have John Cena challenging Reigns on the first live crowd Smackdown in about 3 weeks. In the meanwhile, they finally had long-rumored Edge return last night to confront Reign for the next PPV.
There were 2 particularly stupid matches, both of them female wrestling matches:
- Bianca Belair v. Bayley. I'm not referring to the match itself, but any viewer knows that Belair has this absurdly long ponytail that probably extends beyond her butt. It's been used as a weapon and also as a vulnerability I saw the latter because in 2 spots Bayley tied Bianca's hair to objects, like a folded metal chair. Now what if Biana had issues disentangling her hair? Have the babyface win the match bashing Bayley with the chair? Now I'm sure that Bayley hadn't practiced her Boy Scout knots, but still you had to have dead spots in the match as Bianca got out of the knots.
- Alexa Bliss v. Shayna Baszler. Now, at first appearance, this shouldn't have been close. Baszler is a 5'7" former MMA fighter while Alexa is s petite 5'1" with a limited repertoire of wrestling moves. The storyline involves Alexa's more demonic persona as the Fiend Bray Wyatt's protégé. So Alexa was upset at Shayna's dissing her Lili doll (and there have been lots of rumors about female wrestlers emerging as a Lili character), setting up a match. . And several times during the match Alexa is seen practicing her hypnosis gimmick, getting Baszler's tag partner Nia Jax, mimic her body movements. And somehow Alexa makes short work of Baszler. I'm not sure what I expected. Wyatt has been off TV since Wrestlemania, and during that match, Alexa had turned on Wyatt, leading to Orton's easy victory. So I had imagined maybe Wyatt would return the favor. Nope. The issue I have is this match damaged Shayna's "tough girl" street cred.
Probably one of the most interesting storylines is newly rich heel Cameron Grimes (Gamestop short squeeze wealth) This brings up an obvious reference to WWE Hall of Famer "Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase. So the unsanctioned Million Dollar Championship came up in a contest between Grimes and LA Knight, both heelish characters. Knight wins the belt, and in a later celebration, DiBiase formally presents him with the belt. Knight starts obsequiously praising DiBiase's legacy--and the whole time I'm literally saying out loud "He's going to turn on DiBiase...He's going to turn on DiBiase..." Sure enough, LA Knight starts beating down the 67-year-old DiBiase. I really didn't understand the point, unless they were just trying to cement his heel persona. Incidentally, my first memories of DiBiase were in his pre-WWE days, when he was part of the heel tag team champs with Dr. Death Steve Williams. Jake the Snake Roberts had formed a super heel tag team with The "full-nelson" Barbarian. I don't think DiBiase/Williams ever dropped the titles to Roberts/Barbarian, but I was rooting for the latter. I recall DiBiase arguing the other team had had their shot and wouldn't get another, but I don't think I ever saw that match or knew how it had ended, e.g., by a count out or other cheap win/loss.
