Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
Somewhat down to about 86K/day. We're heading down the home stretch of summer; ir won't be long until cooler air and more indoors time, with experts expecting an uptick in cases. The big news of the week: we got approval on the omicron-tweaked COVID-19 boosters. The reports I've seen don't give an estimate on when they'll be distributed, because it'll take some time to ramp up production. It'll be the first variant tweaked version since the initial vaccine approvals at the end of 2020.
Other Notes
August blog readership was a nice bounce off hitting the latest in a string of multi-year lows. It was still a couple of hundred pageviews off my long-term trend; we'll have to see if the bounce is sustainable. Probably most posts (eventually) hit double digits, but some of my hard-to-write essays have barely drawn that. I will say Blogger stats on the last day of the month were freaky. Maybe they were doing some end-of-month thing, but it looked like I only had one pageview over like 18 hours. I don't recall any precedent. By the next morning the statistics had been updated to reflect a more normal daily distribution.
Football season is back. I mostly follow my alma maters Texas (Longhorna) and Houston (Cougars). The latter was playing UTSA; my youngest sister and one of my nephews graduated from there. My youngest brother (re: nephew) attended the game in the San Antonio area. It wasn't on my cable, so I followed a play-by-play online which sucked. The game went into overtime (my God, I hate overtime gimmick rules in sports), and I got better updates from my brother's texts. My Cougars finally pulled it out...
The WWE Premium event Clash at the Castle in Wales (UK) rook place earlier today. I was mildly surprised they kept the belts on Reigns. They did tease a cash-in of the MITB from Theory but he got knocked out by boxer Tyson Fury. I thought they might use Theory to get one of the belts off Reigns, ruling the cash-in was good for one belt.. Karrion Kross was there, but other than distracting McIntyre at one point in the match, he wasn't a factor. They finally brought up Solo Sikoa from NXT, younger brother to the Reigns cousin Uso's, to help set up Reigns' victory.
We didn't see Flair or Rousey show up at women's champ Liv Morgan's successful defense. I was actually hoping they would put the title on Baszler, a legitimate badass heel, but I think they want to book a Morgan-Rousey rematch. Bailey's faction beat RAW champ Bianca Belair's trio, more importantly with Bailey pinning Belair, setting up a championship match between the two.
One of the unexpected developments was the reunion of the NXT Imperium faction before the Gunther-Sheamus match which I thought was the best one on the card.
The other major note was they finally turned Dominik Mysterio on his dad Rey. You could smell this a mile away: Rey teaming up with Hall of Famer Edge over Dominik to face Judgment Day. You saw some foreshadowing, with Rhea Ripley having a strange hold over Dominik. He didn't intervene to cost Edge and Rey the match, and he wasn't wearing a Judgment Day shirt or join Judgment Day after the swerve, but the story hasn't played out yet.
