(If you’ve already seen this piece my apologies, but for some reason Substack had a nervous breakdown and when I posted it the first time only sent it to a fraction of the people on my email list and keeps resisting my attempts to update and resend it, so I’m posting it again in hopes that it gets to all the people who didn’t get it the first time. Either way, I’ll have something new on Monday.)
Recently, the Kansas City Star published a front-page story about Joe Biden and the incentives being offered to convince Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Just in case you missed it, here they are:
Free beer
Sports tickets
Cash
Paid leave
Child care
Since the people in charge seem to be offering incentives that would appeal to Homer Simpson, I was going to write, “What…no free donuts?” and then remembered Krispy Kreme is in fact offering free donuts to anyone who’s been vaccinated.
And here in Kansas City (kind of…we’re sorta spread all over the place) if you get vaccinated you get to take two laps around the Kansas Speedway at what the newspaper described as “highway speed” which makes me wonder whose highway we’re talking about and whose car you’re driving because two laps around the Kansas Speedway at German autobahn speeds might cause the squirrel running on a treadmill that powers my POS Toyota Matrix to have a heart attack.
Also…
If you break the rule and go faster than “highway speed” do they have cops posted to pull you over and start the conversation by asking, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” which I’m pretty sure the cops hope you answer by confessing to some crime they have yet to discover, like:
“All that weed I’ve got hidden in the trunk?”
Piece of advice to those of you who smoke marijuana:
The smell of that stuff is strong and distinctive and more than once I’ve been driving down the highway and passed a car that was apparently surrounded by a cloud of marijuana smoke, so if I can smell it while driving at “highway speed” in the next lane, you’ve got no shot of a cop pulling you over and not noticing that you smell like you’re starring in a remake of Cheech & Chong’s “Up In Smoke.”
(Google it, kids. And if you haven’t seen it you should watch it because it’s hilarious, an opinion you should probably take with a grain of salt or a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos because as I recall I was smoking weed when I watched it.)
Semi-related story alert
As one of my highly-quotable sons pointed out, marijuana is not the gateway drug to harder drugs some people claim it is because the last thing some stoners are going to do is summon the energy to get up off the couch and go buy crack.
As my highly-quotable son said:
“Weed is not the gateway drug to harder drugs; weed is the gateway drug to Taco Bell.”
Which might explain those weird-ass Taco Bell commercials where the people appear to be attending some kind of “Eyes Wide Shut” sex-orgy-costume-ball that must have included smoking marijuana because they also appear to have the munchies and think a $1.19 taco that’s dripping orange grease that could be used to lube a Toyota Matrix is the best thing they’ve ever eaten.
Next time one of those commercials comes on, watch closely and tell me those people aren’t high.
Where were we?
Right; vaccination incentives that seem to be designed to appeal to Homer Simpson.
As the cartoon points out: not dying during a pandemic isn’t enough to get some people motivated, but free beer is?
Looking at the incentives offered, they seem to be aimed at some pretty low IQs which at first I found demeaning, but after giving it some thought, might be right on target.
At this point you have to wonder if the people who haven’t been vaccinated during a pandemic are dumb or lazy or paranoid, but if it’s that last one you might also wonder why someone is worried about Bill Gates putting tracking microchips in their vaccine when they’re walking around with a cell phone in their pocket.
Back before cell phones became a thing, if the government had announced we were all going to be required to carry a device that tracked our every movement and phone call and text and what we looked at online and what we purchased at the adult novelty shop we all would have lost our minds about Big Brother government intrusion, but if Apple announces it’s got a new iPhone, we line up to buy one.
We’re not only being spied on, we’re paying for it.
Timeout for paranoia
Science has the highly-inconvenient habit of continuing to progress and changing what we think we know which is probably why the Catholic Church got pissed off in 1616 and banned Nicolaus Copernicus’ book that laid out his theory that the earth went around the sun.
17 years later the Catholic Church was still grumpy and Galileo Galilei was put under house arrest for committing heresy because he said just maybe Copernicus was on to something.
Galileo faced the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and was convicted of “vehement suspicion of heresy” and under threat of torture, was forced to “express sorrow and curse his errors” which seems pretty damn ignorant and backward until you realize we do the same thing today whenever we discover someone stole two of their dad’s beers, got a buzz on and sent out a politically incorrect tweet back when they were in high school.
Science progresses, humans often don’t.
BTW: Since “heresy” is defined as “belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine” I’m guessing most of us are heretics, so remember to put that on your resume next time you apply for a job.
Anyway…
After writing that bit about vaccine paranoia, I read an article that said seven teenagers in the U.S. developed heart inflammation after being vaccinated, but the article also said a link between the two had not been proven, none were critically ill, the inflammation could be caused by a variety of infections, the heart changes were likely temporary, they’re still not sure the heart changes are happening more often than could normally be expected and COVID-19 is still far riskier than the vaccine.
So close to 300 million doses given and 597,000 COVID-19 deaths here in the US of A versus seven cases of what so far appears to be temporary and possibly unrelated heart inflammation in teenagers.
And if you still don’t know what to do I know some people who would like to play poker with you.
And now my paranoia
So just the other day I went to the grocery store and was kind of shocked to see people walking around without a mask inside, which I hope is OK, but the paranoid part of me worries about because I get the feeling we can still screw this up and I don’t want to go through another year of sitting on my couch watching Netflix.
And if we have screwed up by stopping on the five-yard line to celebrate our yet-to-be-scored touchdown, it wouldn’t be the first time.
According to Time magazine’s website, people thought the 1918 flu pandemic was over by the spring of 1919, but it spiked again in early 1920. Now here’s a lightly-edited paragraph from that story:
“(A study) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007, found that U.S. cities that implemented more than one of these aforementioned control measures earlier and kept them in place longer had better, less deadly outcomes than cities the implemented fewer of these control measures.”
Which is kind of worrisome because I don’t think we can count on public officials, worried about getting reelected by Homer Simpson, to do the right thing.
So maybe the government should expand their incentive program and offer free beer and donuts to anyone who continues to wear a mask inside until we’re 100 percent sure we’ve got this think licked.
And when that day comes I think I speak for all of us when I say: “Woo-Hoo!”
Appealing to the Homer Simpson in all of us
I got it both times and enjoyed it twice.