“Tonight is our annual Flu Season Dance. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but if you have the flu, stay home. The Flu Season Dance is about awareness, not celebration. You don’t bring dead babies to Passover.” – Rick and Morty
If my COVID-19 test came back positive, I would say, “Doctor, you don’t understand, I have 3,000 rolls of toilet paper, that can’t be right!”
I try to plan these posts out in advance. It allows me time to think about the subject at hand, as well as do research. As of right now, the singular story is the Kung Flu. I’m skipping my previously selected subjects, and here are some random thoughts.
- Whether or not you believe that the Kung Flu (or Shanghai Shivers, Wu Ping Cough, Wu Flu, Flu-Manchu, Chopsick, Sweet and Sour Sicken, Mi Lung Flu Long Time, Boomer Entomber, Great Cough Forward, Communist Lung Herpes, General Tso’s Revenge, Ming’s Ko-Feng or whatever you call it) is real, the economic and cultural impacts are real. As Ayn Rand said, “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” But you can ignore about 87 straight pages of Atlas Shrugged, because that woman could not stop repeating herself.
If the plague Moses brought down upon Pharaoh didn’t bring down Keith Richards, neither will COVID-19.
- Aviation companies have entered a huge financial crisis because COVID-19 has stopped travel. My idea: Boeing® could exit the dying aviation business and enter the growing medical market. I bet that their COVID-19 vaccine would be 100% effective, what with anyone who took it exploding before they could catch COVID-19. (Inspired by Eaton Rapids Joe post here LINK).
- Social Isolation: The Mrs. can cancel appointments faster than I can make ’em, so we gave up on social events years ago – in her mind the best invention of Western Civilization is the Pizza Hut® app so she can order pizza hut and not have to talk with an actual human. The Boy? He disappears in the house for hours at a time. Pugsley is the needy one, but he and I like the same shows. As a family, we’re awfully good at ignoring each other. Plus all that maintenance I deferred going to The Boy and Pugsley’s practices and games and matches? Here’s the paintbrush . . . . (Inspired by Steve’s Dog Meeting Deer Poop Story here LINK)
The first rule of Introvert Club? There is no Introvert Club. And that makes them happy.
- Just read that 56% of the population in California is projected to be infected with COVID-19 in the next eight weeks. 56% of Internet streaming video users admit to sharing their login information. Coincidence? I thought so, too, until I realized that 56% of Netflix® movies feature Nic Cage. Are they secretly telling us California is a cage? Or that Nic Cage has a projector?
- In a panic, cheap calories disappear from the store first. The meat counter at Wal-Mart® was empty, except for $9+ per pound steaks. There were enough ribeyes to feed the Chicago Bears®. 25 pounds of sugar has 45,000 calories, but costs only about $8.98. 25 pounds of steak has about 30,000 calories, but costs about $200. Thus, sugar disappears faster than steak.
Being a vegetarian is a big missed steak.
- Will we as a nation be better prepared on the other side? I think rural America already is, and this lesson won’t be forgotten for a while. And I’ve heard some of the royal families in Europe have gotten it, which for some of them would be the first new DNA in their blood for several hundred years.
- When I go in to town to Wal-Mart® to buy a few items, I always run into two or three people (minimum) I know well. In general, we’re horribly polite in Modern Mayberry, because we all know each other and we know that we’re all in this together. Except at Harvest Festival, where we ritually sacrifice one of our own picked at random through a lottery.
- High prices are the cure for high prices. Low prices are the cure for low prices. High priced toilet paper will cure itself soon enough. Low priced gasoline will cure itself soon enough. Supply changes to meet demand if free market prices are charged. This is the one sentence that describes why even True Communism® (Never Been Tried!™) will never work. That’s why when ice was going for $20 a bag right after Hurricane Ike, I was happy for the people that really needed it. If ice is worth $20 to store medications, for instance, the $20 isn’t important – you need that ice. High prices meant there was enough ice for people who really needed it.
- Just because platinum is priced at $650 an ounce doesn’t mean there is any you can buy at that price. I tried to buy some, but all of the online stores are sold out. That means that the cure for low prices is already in progress. Same with silver. Always remember Olivia Newton-John’s investment advice when it comes to metals: let’s get physical.
I believe that in the 1980’s, there were no chairs, so everyone would sit just like that to talk. And everyone wore tights and leg warmers, because the Earth was covered in knee-deep snow, but was really hot, like 800°F, three feet above ground.
- There is risk in who you do business with. Many businesses are like most people – they only have enough money for a few weeks if money stops rolling in. One sign: if you see bread on the doorstep of a business, beware. The business is so poor that ducks are throwing bread at them.
- Eggs disappeared first from the store, along with ramen here in Modern Mayberry. If you own chickens, you have eggs. But you still have to own chickens, and I don’t like chickens because the only music they like to listen to is Bach. Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach. If you have a problem with that, well eggs-cuse me.
- Saying the flu came from China isn’t anti-Chinese. Lots of diseases come from China, including the Black Death®. And they’re at least China is better than Canada, which inflicted a far worse horror on the world: Jim Carrey.
Is it just me, or does he look a lot like Miley Cyrus?
- I was right about the risks that Just-In-Time inventory management pose to the economy (How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.). Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. Nature gives us two of many organs because they’re important. Two eyes. Two lungs. Two kidneys. Two hearts. See?
- You never know what the bottlenecks are in a system and how it will react to a disturbance until you disturb it. Resilience comes from inefficiency, so the Soviets at least had that going for them. They had stores that specialized in not having meat, and stores that specialized in not having bread.
- Nic Cage is an awful actor nowadays. I saw him in three movies in the last week and, though he might have been good back in the Raising Arizona and Leaving Los Vegas days, he was horrible. Maybe his only good movies involve geographic references? On the plus side, he’s owned a dinosaur skull that was stolen from Mongolia, which I guess is pretty cool. But then again, he named one of his sons after Superman’s© birth name, Kal-El™, which is not cool.
If Nic Cage can still get work, you, my friend, can do anything.
- When The Boy was still new, we were sitting around the table eating. The Boy had milk to drink. I said, “It’s amazing how good this tastes, what with coming out of a cow.” He was udderly (sorry, couldn’t resist) stunned. He had been convinced that milk was manufactured by a machine in a factory. There may be some adults under a similar decision today.
- Life is sometimes numbers: the number of calories you have divided by 2000 divided by the number of people you want to feed is the number of days. Advanced math realizes that 3600 calories per pound of body fat is available to the owner. I mean, that’s why my body makes it, right? That and all of the cheeseburgers.
- Taking notes in the hot tub in the backyard under the canopy of blue skies and budding trees is awesome. There is no better vantage point to contemplate the fate of civilization.
The last time Cage showed up at my house, all he did was try to convince me to steal the Declaration of Independence with him, drink all of my booze, and then he shaved the terrier.
Were I to ‘social distance’ any more than I normally do, I would exist as a quantum singularity. No one needed to tell me to put two meters between me and the next slob, which conveniently places me out of the kill zone of his wayward spittle. And him out of reach of my savage backhand. I don’t merely ‘practice’ social distancing. I wrote the book, the screenplay, the CliffsNotes and the Marvel comics adaptation.
Does this new isolation phenomenon remind anyone else of Demolition Man, and the most disappointing romantic scene in modern cinema, featuring Sandra Bullock, fully dressed, engaging in the safest of sex with Sylvester Stallone? Not that I would wish to catch Sly with his pants down, but Sandra is (or at least was) another matter altogether. Coulda been worse, I suppose. Coulda been Nic Cage and Lena (“hyena”) Dunham.
Good point about the TP stockpiling. If WaHu flu does turn out to be a nothing-burger* I expect to see a whole lot of mummy costumes at Halloween this year, and houses festooned with the surplus. How we will dispose of palletloads of uneaten Spam is a real question, though.
(*Note: Deprecated, to be replaced by the more socially ‘woke’ [i]nada-enchilada[/i].)
“I don’t merely ‘practice’ social distancing. I wrote the book, the screenplay, the CliffsNotes and the Marvel comics adaptation.”
Classic.
I do sense that we’ve worked into some future that was from an early 1990’s movie. Good heavens – I hope Philip K. Dick wasn’t involved! Dick and Dunham would be Lovecraftian.
Spam isn’t bad. I kind of like it. Even though I haven’t had any since . . . umm, I was ten? Pop Wilder liked it fried with eggs.
In Nic’s defense, the terrier had it coming.
Well, of course. But what he did in the pantry afterward . . .
Two things will emerge from this pandemic:
– People will learn to carefully fold their toilet paper to increase the yield per wipe.
– People will be careless with the multiple rolls of toilet paper stacked in the living room, after it’s all over.
Somewhere during his career, Nicholas Cage lost the brain cells necessary to be a good actor. Many things probably contributed to this, but I have a feeling his ego destroyed them after all the accolades.
We have TP for a while, since we subscribe from Amazon. But I have noticed the rolls last a LOT longer now.
I bought his last movie, because it looked like something I’d like. It was . . . awful. Then, I decided I would watch everything free since 2014 or so of his that I could. It’s weird watching him act in ever worse movies.
I was jotting down some random stuff this morning and it seems we are going to be in an interesting race. Can the government whip up some magically faerie bucks and get them out to people faster than people who are out of work can run out of money? California and Pennsylvania are mostly shutting down and that will have a ripple effect on the rest of the businesses in America. Small Amish businesses are already seeing orders slow down and while this time of year the roads in the early morning are usually full of vans and trucks hauling Amish construction crews to jobs, the traffic now is almost non-existent. If it is happening to these small businesses, I am sure it is happening up the food chain. We can’t all work for Wal-Mart.
Yeah – The Mrs. observed that soon that will be the job of choice – first pick of the food.
National Treasure is my secret guilty pleasure…I make no apologies.
I am a closet ‘Gone In 60 Seconds’ fan.
Us, as well. Even threw in a small homage in the comic.
Yup. I agree. I also like Lord of War.
Also, I’m going to slowly slide this over to you…..No! Not the bees!
I saw the original, too. Just awful. I was thinking . . . why, why did they make . . . this.
I believe the possibility of a total travel ban grows by the minute. I predict the two week “voluntary” isolation will be extended to four and then six weeks. That is because two weeks voluntary is too short to have much of an effect after so long a delay to actually act when we knew what was coming our way.
And with that extended isolation will come The Greatest Depression, to be officially declared next winter….. Already we are seeing Europe shut down and the destruction of travel, hotel and hospitality tourism oriented businesses, like Las Vegas. Mom & Pop businesses have thin margins and will shut down permanently bankrupting and pulling smaller banks into receivership… People are conserving funds and restricting all non essential purchases. I expect Boeing, car industry and other large production concerns to lay off half staffing temporarily then permanently.
The real problem is the second round of infection which will arise next Fall after we quell this first onslaught. It isn’t the number the disease takes out, it is the number the destroyed economy takes out that will be a problem. Herd immunity will take a year to develop and by then the economic carnage will be so bad that it will take a generation or a war to bring the economy back.
I don’t see any silver linings in what the CDC or national leaders are doing. Right now they are mitigating and saying that they are hoping voluntary actions will work. All the while they know what they are proposing will not work and that their only possibly feasible plan is a nationwide travel ban and lockdown of hot spot cities/regions.
Call me cautiously paranoid because I think we must always plan for the worst and when it does not happen, we are still in a good place. If the worst hits, we work the plan and adapt as best we can. That is how the strongest and brightest have always survived throughout millenia…..
Observe, Orient, Decide Act/Adapt……
I don’t trust that they will get any of it right. Return to normal? I discuss the phases we’ll go through on Wednesday.
My wife has been all on-board with building up the pantry over the last two months, but now I need to get her to understand that it’s OK to take from the pantry and let the stock go down a little. We shouldn’t be going out to re-stock after every day’s consumption, so we’ll be ready when the crisis comes. The crisis is not next week, or a month from now. The crisis is here.
Yup. We topped up in a trip or two. The Boy gets it.
“But you still have to own chickens, and I don’t like chickens because the only music they like to listen to is Bach. Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach. If you have a problem with that, well eggs-cuse me.”
Umm…John…do…do you have any hobbies? You really need to find something to do with all that free time you have besides punning around the house in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Just sayin’.
I do have fuzzy slippers, but I only wear them when I write. The basement is chilly.
I actually do have other hobbies, but have been super lazy recently, plus spending every spare moment on Pugsley’s sport.
Bathrobe in public. I like it. Has sort of a Nick Nolte feel . . .
If quarantines were the answer, they would need to last 3-6 months. The virus has a 45 day life cycle, and you need at least two cycles to break it. And we still have invaders crossing from Mexico and the Chinese subject territory formerly known as Canada.
But hey, mass panic and economic destruction do serve somebody’s interests in an election year, right?
Yes. We take serious things frivolously and frivolous things as if they were the very trump of doom.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and the legacy media (redundant, I know) seize on every event as if it will be the long-anticipated Doom of Trump.
Yup. As they have. Every day since January 20, 2017.
So, we’ve reached the Habsburg level of leadership. “Situation is critical, but not serious.”
You’ve just stated The Mrs.’ position. How much of this is political? I’m waiting for more data on that.
Sitting here trying to think of a good “Raising Arizona” quote. It’s one of my favorites, but another favorite is IPA and I’m on my third pint at the moment (our Governer having told us it’s ‘OKAY’ to buy beer to-go from bars – I went out and filled a growler today), so I can’t manage a steady thought. I predict by the fourth pint I’ll be on Amazon buying all the shoelaces so I can corner the market when the SHTF. “People gonna need shoes! And shoes gonna need laces!” That’s some 3D chess thinking right there, I tell you what…
Thanks for the link, by the way. My traffic spiked yesterday. Now I’m under real pressure to produce content – especially since everyone has so much time on their hands.
Here’s to TEOTWAWKI!
Yay, beer! My pleasure on the link!
Here’s to TEOTWAKI! And I feel wine.