Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from Washpo:
From CDC:
There's not much to say beyond the fact this Delta wave hasn't peaked yet, at an average of 160Kcases per day more recently. The vaccination rate edged upward, but just under 1% newly vaccinated adults per week, up around 3 points this month.
Probably the biggest news is that the FDA is rumored (by the Gray Lady) to be granting Pfizer full (vs. just emergency use) approval. Whether this will convince any vaccine skeptics remains to be seen.
I recently went on a shopping trip to my nearest Sam's Club, inside of Baltimore County (somewhat of a misnomer; it's actually a collar county of the City of Baltimore, a collar county. I mean, at least 90% of the patrons were wearing facemasks. I began wondering if Baltimore County had resumed a mask mandate; I think the City had. There was a greeter at the entrance with a box of disposable masks, but she didn't harass me over being unmasked. I was used to a significant percentage of people still wearing masks at my local Lidl's grocery store but it was quire some time before I saw another patron (also a white older male) who was unmasked.
The politics of COVID-19 annoy me. The lieutenant governor of Texas was trying to blame unvaccinated blacks for the state's COVID-19 problem. But national statistics show that both whites and black are slightly below their relative proportion in vaccination statistics, and blacks make up under 12% of the Texas population.
Miscellaneous Notes
My car recently had its second anniversary. I may have slightly more miles on it than the Little Old Lady from Pasadena's car, not even 3000 miles. (I didn't have new car fever; my nearly 20-year old car didn't pass a Maryland exhaust inspection, and my mechanic couldn't diagnose the issue; the Olds had already just barely passed a couple of repairs where parts had become almost impossible to find when the brand went out of business while I was still making car payments.) A lot of it, of course, is reduced driving during the pandemic, including stretches of remote work. After all, the grocery store is just a couple of miles away, and the barber shop and my doctor's office are just somewhat longer. The nice thing is my hybrid averages about 53-54 mpg and my full tank can go up to 500-odd miles between fill-ups. At least I'm about 40% through my car payments.
My blog readership is still struggling especially over the past 6 weeks or so.. Barring an unusual burst of pageviews like last month's closing 2-day 800 or so, I will likely see somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700 pageviews, maybe less, which would be the lowest in at least 6 or more months. Most of my posts are still hitting double-digits but it's become more hit or miss lately. The essays will do reasonably well, but the journal and social media digest posts aren't a lock. It's not for a lack of trying; I'm up already over 350 posts on the year; whether or not I can match last year's record of nearly 200 more is more of a stretch, because that was an election year.
On Twitter I'm back to a stretch of averaging over 1K impressions daily, but that's mainly the effect of 12K and 3K impression tweets over the past couple of weeks. A lot depends on the trends. Some days it's slim-pickings. Tonight for instance there was a trend on Trump2024, and it was a battle between Trump Derangement Syndrome folks and Trumpkins. I have issues with each side.
I may have mentioned that I had bought a bundle of disposable N95 masks from Amazon. I guess I mustn't have looked closely enough to in-stock or delivery time, I think it takes about 2 weeks; I'm not really in a hurry because my county hasn't reverted to mask policy yet, and I do have cloth masks I've been using over the past year-plus. And I recall in the early weeks in the pandemic, Amazon had a backlog for several weeks of several products, including ordinary facemasks
Entertainment
SummerSlam has come and gone. Surprisingly, the show was better than I expected, but there were some questionable calls. On the one hand, the return of Becky Lynch (from pregnancy leave) had been anticipated for months--but not the way I expected. The long promoted rematch of Sasha Banks for her Smackdown women's belt lost to Bianca Belair at Wrestlemania didn't happen. It looked like Carmella instead was going to get her umpteenth fruitless challenge to Belair when Becky suddenly appeared to a monstrous pop from the crowd. This was a puzzling development; as I recall, Lynch last held the Raw title which she relinquished to Asuka. It's not clear why the babyface didn't involve herself in the Flair-Ripley-Nikki Cross ASH battle for her title, with 2 heels involved. Instead WWE booked her in something like a 12-second squash match led by a (heel turn?) sucker punch to Belair. (There have been squash belt matches before; two that come to mind were Diesel's win over Backlund; and Sheamus over Daniel Bryan)
The two men's championships were surprisingly good. It was clear Cena couldn't be booked as a champion because of his acting schedule, but the match had multiple credible near-falls. Brock Lesnar finally made his long-awaited return to confront Reigns at the end of the main event. It makes sense to send fans home happy, but I had thought they were going in the direction of a dream match with Bobby Lashley. As for the Lashley match, Goldberg gave a more serious challenge than expected, which Lashley won by presumably injuring Goldberg's leg to the point he couldn't compete. Now one thing that had puzzled me was why they were working Goldberg's teen son into the storyline. In hindsight, it is clear when the son jumped on Lashley's back post-match as Lashley looked intent on extending Bill's injuries. So Lashley takes out the minor Goldberg, with a full-nelson throwing him around like a rag doll; at the end, they show "how dare you touch my son" Goldberg glaring at Lashley's exit. So it seems we are going to have a Daddy's revenge rematch, not unlike Rey Mysterio's similar challenge to Reigns.
The rest of the card was okay although I have no clue why they booked the Alexa Bliss-Eva Marie match Eva is probably the worst lady grappler I've ever seen. At least they had Charlotte regain her RAW women's title.
I watched NXT Takeover, and I wasn't happy to see Adam Cole lose or Karrion Cross lose his championship, but Cross has been transitioning to RAW now for a few weeks. I did notice Scarlett, his blond escort, was missing. There has been a rumor that Scarlett's presence is part of the storyline of his success. Some rumors Cole has been offered a 7-figure contract by WWE, but no word if he's signed.
I'm watching "The Black Stallion" on PosiTV as I write this; I'm sure I watched it years back. I read the original series in my youth; I loved the books. It brings back to mind other juvenile series like Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins. I think the middle two had some TV projects, although I never followed them.
