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In an effort to find accentuate the positive, this pandemic came at a time in history in which humans can handle it best.

• Medical science is at its peak, even if we can’t fix a horse’s bone (Ticket reference).
• We all have plumbing. (TMI Alert: We have a bidet, we don’t need any TP.”
• Hello, electricity.
• There’s an infrastructure to deliver everything. Roads are already built, as are railroads, airports, as well as shipping ports.
• We have broadband internet which allows for fast data communications which not only allows us to communicate across the world in less than a second, and allows for businesses to track and manage inventories with complex algorithms, but websites like Amazon exist which allows us to order anything and have it delivered to our front door. If this happened in the mid-Nineties, imagine trying to do this on a 14.4 or even a 56k modem.
  • “Modem” is actually short for “modulator-demodulator”. Thank you, Dr. Livsey. (That’s a joke intended for an audience of one.)
• Grocery stores and places like Wal-Mart and Target have had a chance to establish curbside pickup. Imagine if curbside pickup wasn’t an option at Wal-Mart and just how much more crowded it would be inside. You can place an order and have an expectation of what’s in stock and not. Then, you can pick it up at a scheduled time and you don’t even have to leave your car – and, it’s free.
• Boredom can easily be conquered, though we will still complain about it. You can read any book in the world which has ever been printed just by ordering it online to an e-reader. You don’t have to download movies or television shows, you simply can stream any show or movie ever created. If that’s not enough, we entertain ourselves with our own created content using Tik Tok and YouTube.
• Mobile phones, yo, anything you need to find out or anyone you need to contact is literally at your fingertips.
• We have mobile banking.
• Waste management.
• We learned our lesson from the Ice Capades.
• Godzilla humidifiers exist.
  

One thing I try to instill in my children is that it’s not what happens in life, it’s how you choose to react respond to it.

I bet since a lot of schools are going to some sort of online content, a lot of parents are going to find out that the teacher is not the problem.

I’m guessing it would be a good time to own a drive-in theater?

Is Australia still on fire?

Malaysia Flight 370 has been missing since March 8, 2014.

Armchair Political Consultant – President Trump has been hard on China as of late, perhaps deflecting blame. I’d caution that approach, the Chinese don’t take kindly to being insulted, but more importantly, because most drug ingredients come from China. If China wanted to, they could jack up prices and kill our economy even more, if they wanted to utilize that leverage. I’d advise the president to go hard against the Middle East counties who have ramped up oil production causing job losses in U.S. oil fields.

Hang in there, Italy.

Italian Army Transports Dozens of Coffins Out of City After Crematorium Overwhelmed With Coronavirus Deaths

• The city’s crematorium has resorted to operating 24 hours a day in order to deal with the number of deaths amid the outbreak. As reported by L’Eco di Bergamo, army vehicles have now been used to take the coffins away to neighboring areas.
• The Washington Post previously reported the dead in Bergamo are being buried with no ceremonies as family members remain under quarantine or too sick to attend themselves.
• The obituary pages in the local newspaper can also stretch up to 10 pages and feature around 150 names as it lists all of the COVID-19 victims.

Another heartbreaking image from #Italy fighting #coronavirus #covid19

Lines of military trucks deployed to transport corpses from Bergamo – one of the most plagued towns – to Modena and other regions.

They are too many to be buried, therefore they are going to be cremated. pic.twitter.com/9CxSMZw01w

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) March 19, 2020

Here are scenes from inside an Italian hospital. The quietness is haunting.

Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded – Government exercises, including one last year, made clear that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus. But little was done.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

To quote from President Trump’s inauguration speech, ” The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs.”

Senator Dumped Up to $1.6 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness – Intelligence Chair Richard Burr’s selloff came around the time he was receiving daily briefings on the health threat.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since.

On Thursday, Burr came under fire after NPR obtained a secret recording from Feb. 27, in which the lawmaker gave a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus than what he had told the public.

Coronavirus Diaries: I’m a Flight Attendant. Boy, My Passengers Are Weird Now.

• A lot more passengers have been bringing their own sanitary supplies, wiping down their seats, wearing face masks, wearing gloves. I’ve also noticed people declining drinks and snacks altogether, just not wanting to interact with us at all.
• One thing that I took note of on my last trip: A lot of passengers who come on the airplane and feel sick for unrelated reasons have become defensive about it. They’ve started to give me too much information about the reason for their illnesses. So I’ve had passengers go into great detail about how they had too much to drink last night.
• Some of our service standards have changed. We’re no longer handing out blankets and pillows. We no longer serve glassware on board. Any time there’s a basket of communal snacks or something, we’re handing them out instead of having people reaching in.

Microsoft can filter out the sound of you eating potato chips on a conference call – The software giant’s trained artificial intelligence software to identify background noise that isn’t your voice. Snackers, rejoice.

Time is undefeated.

Gosh, this week is dragging on. I’m not sure if it’s mainly because my kids are home for spring break, the pandemic, cancellation of baseball and softball practice, and having housework done and not having any furniture downstairs. It’s probably a combination of things, and you can add to it the uncertainty of knowing how long the kids will be forced to stay at home. I love my family and all, but I like having them gone during the day. You know, that whole absence makes the heart grow fonder kinda things.

Yesterday, Kellyanne Conway stated her husband, George Conway, is a half-Asian. So, now WifeGeeding and she have something in common. And, now I’m contemplating if I should add George to my highly out-dated BagOfNothing Half-Asian Hall of Fame.

The federal agency I work at asked us to limit our Skype video sharing because the increase of users working from home is stressing our capabilities.

The latest Star Wars movie has a great John Williams’ cameo and Easter egg tribute. Williams plays a bartender outside a droid shop. Every piece of seemingly random stuff that populates the area where Williams’ character is standing represents one of the 51 films for which he’s been Oscar-nominated. Examples include Indiana Jones’ whip from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the barrels from Jaws, and the iron from Home Alone. You can read more about it here.

Mark Cuban says bailed out companies should never be allowed to buy back their stocks ever again

“No buybacks. Not now. Not a year from now. Not 20 years from now. Not ever,” Cuban said on “Squawk Box.” “Because effectively you’re spending taxpayer money to buyback stock and to me that’s just the wrong way to do that.”

He also said, “Whatever we do in a bailout, make sure that every worker is compensated and treated equally — in that the executives don’t get rewarded extra to stick around because they got nowhere else to go.”

I have a few ideas I’d like to see happen for any company which takes a federal bailout.  And I’ll be honest, I haven’t given these hardly any thought, I’m coming up with these on a whim.

• For the next five years, the highest salary can be no more than fifty times that of the lowest-paid full-time employee. So if the lowest-paid full-time employee makes $35,000, then the top salary at the business could only be $1,750,000 (50 x 35,000).
• Executive bonuses would be eliminated for this time period.
• For all airline travel, no chartered jets, no business or first-class seating.

Kevin Bacon Encourages Social Distancing With Sweet ‘6 Degrees’ Campaign

On Wednesday, the “Footloose” actor took to Instagram to share his new #IStayHomeFor initiative to promote social distancing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Inspired by the pop culture phenomenon “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” Bacon encouraged his followers to share who they’re staying home for to prevent the spread of the virus.

What Will ESPN Do Without Sports?

From March Madness to Major League Baseball, auto racing to international soccer, leagues and events have been suspended, postponed, and outright canceled, all in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The result for the sports world is an abrupt and unplanned hiatus — an indefinite, all-encompassing athletic shutdown that has left ESPN, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports,” facing a vast programming void. In March and April alone, ESPN will have to replace 60 lost NBA regular season and playoff games, 28 MLS matches, the entire NCAA women’s basketball tournament, and a number of other games and events

Here’s an interesting art installation in Marfa, TX by Marc Thorpe called Citizens of Earth.

I think it’s really cool how some grocery stores are opening with “Senior Hours”, a time set aside only for senior citizens. Finally, it’s acceptable to segregate. The arc of the moral universe is long, but look at it bend.  (Just trying to add a little humor, folks.)

I have a feeling that Vote By Mail is going to have some record numbers in the November election.

Serious question. With Biden and Bernie at a higher risk for being infected with COVID-19, what would happen if both of them died before the convention? I guess it will be like old times and party delegates would pick one out at the convention.

Josh Gad and Amy Adams are reading children’s books on social media to support families who are home from school – These celebrities are sharing videos of themselves reading kids’ books to help families who are stuck at home due to the coronavirus

Sports cancellations leave vasectomy patients without planned March Madness binge options

Alcohol-free sanitizer given to prisoners to prevent them from making ‘moonshine’

Once we can all become social again, if you are looking for something different to so in the Dallas area, may I suggest armored combat at Warlord Combat Academy? They also offer a winged sabre historical fencing class.

Have fun learning Hungarian military sabre and fokos (long-hafted axe).  Learn what makes a curved sword different than a straight one, and how to maximize the advantages and limitations of both.  Cross-training with a variety of historical western weapons as appropriate

Learn how to fight with a Single Saber and graduate to Dual-wielding, Staves or Cross-guard Sabers from accredited instructors!

A friend of mine spotted a transaction on his credit card which he didn’t make to “eBay HK”. He called his credit card company and was routed to an overseas call center. When he informed the agent of this suspicious activity, the agent asked, “Sir, are you sure you didn’t go into eBay HK in Honk Kong and make a purchase.” My friend kindly stated he’s never been to Asia and has never set foot inside a single eBay store. A few days later or so he receives notification the dispute was denied. He called the credit card company again and again was routed to a call center overseas. The agent told him that the eBay HK company submitted undisputable evidence that it was he who made the purchase at the eBay store in Honk Kong. My friend then had a rather colorful discussion questioning what this indisputable evidence was.

A lot of folks are feeling a real Contagion or The Walking Dead kinda vibe as of late. Of all movies, I’m feeling a Bird Box vibe. We certainly aren’t experiencing mass suicides by simply looking outside, but I’m just feeling that sort of vibe when I first watched that Sandra Bullock Netflix movie.  But I also felt this way when I watched the Ice Capades.

There’s a simulation in this article, I think it’s the fifth one down, which I thought was pretty impressive on how the COVID-19 virus affects a population in terms of healthy, recovered, and sick people. I wish I knew how to embed it in this post.

Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”

Amazon wants to hire 100,000 new workers to meet coronavirus demand – It will also increase all warehouse workers’ hourly pay by $2

Liar In Chief – Video emerges showing Trump talking about cutting pandemic team in 2018, despite saying last week ‘I didn’t know about it’

A video has emerged of Donald Trump talking about cutting the US pandemic response team in 2018 – days after claiming that he knew nothing about the disbanded White House unit.

Mr Trump said of the pandemic team that “some of the people we’ve cut they haven’t been used for many, many years and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather then spending the money”.

“I’m a business person, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them,” he added.

Of course, I don’t blame Trump for COVID-19, but I do hold him accountable for not having the country adequately prepared for a potential pandemic. This program was already in place for him, all he had to do was take the wheel. There’s nothing wrong with him modifying it to meet certain needs, but disposing of it doesn’t keep America great. I also hear folks complain that government is too big and full of waste, this is my argument against it. Can some government fat be trimmed? Of course, and it’s good to have thoughtful discourse about it. But it’s like having insurance, you pray you don’t have to use it, but it’s there if you need it. A pandemic team is like having the best military in the world. You hope you don’t need it, but it’s there just in case to protect the citizenry. Fake news? Bullshit. Shove it up your ass, Mr. President.

I’ve noticed a lot of men on television wearing button-up dress shirts without collars as of late. I fear this is a new fashion trend.

American Teenagers Are Declaring ‘Virginity Rocks’ – A clothing item inspired by a YouTube star has found its way into malls and schools, stumping adults along the way.

But whatever their motivation, teenagers across the country have been going wild for shirts that bear a chaste declaration: “Virginity Rocks.”

The clothing items became popular online thanks to a social media influencer and are now stocked by a major retail chain with a presence in malls across the United States. The trend has puzzled some school administrators, who have banned the shirts only to face criticism, and other adults, who have wondered if youth abstinence is on the rise.

It can be traced to Danny Duncan, a 27-year-old YouTube personality and prankster, who said he started wearing “Virginity Rocks” shirts in his videos as something of a joke in 2017. Mr. Duncan said that his use of the phrase was “tongue in cheek,” and that most people wore it humorously. But, he added, he is proud to have seen it catch on with young people who champion abstinence.