We've only just begun
It's not just a Carpenters song...
According to the Bolsheviks that are employed at the Washington Post, we just set a new record for COVID cases, averaging 265,000 per day, so as the above cartoon suggests, we may be finishing the COVID-19 Classic phase of the pandemic and starting a new Omicron Variant marathon.
So by at least one measurement, things are worse than ever.
Which is just a tiny, teensy bit frustrating because WE HAVE A CURE FOR THIS which some people are refusing to take because they don’t know for sure what’s in it, which, as I’ve pointed out before, doesn’t stop us from ingesting things like McRib sandwiches and chicken nuggets and not long ago I looked up chicken nugget ingredients and one of them was an “anti-foaming agent” which is also used in Silly Putty.
So apparently we’re eating God Only Knows What Parts of a Chicken that need a chemical agent to keep them from foaming like a dog with rabies and we’re perfectly OK with that, but some of us don’t want to take a vaccine which 204 million Americans have already taken with very few side effects and you can’t say the same for the fat asses who eat a lot of chicken nuggets.
Down the Internet Rabbit Hole
OK, so I just said chicken nuggets will make you fat and unlike some people I could name and eventually will, I do a minimal amount of research to back up whatever claim I make, so I Googled “are chicken nuggets healthy” and according to the Food Network the answer is a highly-qualified “yes” but then the FN website goes on to describe all the reasons you might not want to eat the nuggets sold at fast food restaurants and suggests you make your own and then hold a “Southern plantation-style” wedding...a completely irrelevant and unnecessary Paula Deen joke which a lot of you might not get, so you better Google it while I wait here.
Anyway, here’s that Food Network link:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/healthyeats/2012/10/chicken-nuggets-are-they-healthy
Meanwhile the following website is more negative (which sounds and probably is a contradiction in terms) and says eating chicken nuggets on a regular basis will make you fat:
All of which reminds me that I have a couple of conservative friends who will throw out “facts” they learned on the internet like: the pandemic is fake, Michelle Obama is a man and a woman is suing Samsung because she stuck one of their phones up her vagina set to “vibrate” and couldn’t get it out and obviously Samsung is responsible for her predicament because they didn’t put “DO NOT STICK UP VAGINA BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO GODDAMN CHEAP TO BUY A VIBRATOR” on the warning label.
Which sounds like a pretty good story about people being morons…except it isn’t true.
(The vagina-phone part, the morons part is irrefutable.)
Google “did a woman sue Samsung for getting a phone stuck in her vagina” and the first article that comes up is one from Snopes, a website that does fact-checking, and according to them the story is false and comes from World News Daily Report which turns out to be a “satirical fake news website” (putting them in direct competition with Fox) and they have a history of making up stories and they seem to really like making up stories about people putting odd items inside body cavities, including one about a McDonald’s employee stealing 80 pounds of frozen chicken McNuggets by hiding them in his butt, which sounds completely implausible.
I mean 72-and-a-half pounds I might buy, but 80?
Now here’s the link about the fake Samsung phone/vagina story:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/samsung-cellphone-stuck/
Natural Selection is still at work
Google “what are the Darwin Awards” and you’ll eventually find your way to a website that salutes people who did something really stupid and removed themselves from the gene pool (either by death or losing the ability to reproduce) like the two 2021 Award Winners who got in an accident on what sounds like a very busy Interstate 80 in California and then got out of their cars to argue about who hit who which quickly became less of an issue after both of them got hit and killed by other cars.
Turns out, the Darwin Awards might have their hands full after this year because if you Google “people who denied COVID exists and then died from it” and you’ll have no shortage of examples to choose from including one about former presidential candidate Herman Cain refusing to wear a mask and then getting a COVID diagnosis nine days after attending a Trump rally.
And now it turns out unvaccinated people are dying at a rate 20 times higher than vaccinated and boosted people which you’d think would be a pretty good incentive to get vaccinated and boosted, but seems to be less effective than Burger King offers to let you buy one Whopper and get another one free and if the people who refuse to get vaccinated die in sufficient numbers the problem may solve itself.
Which I’d rather didn’t happen because some of them are friends.
The above cartoon was inspired by all the NFL teams that recently had to play short-handed because they had players who tested positive for COVID and the first team that comes to mind is the New Orleans Saints who played their last game without 16 players, including the first, second and third-string quarterbacks which meant Ian Book – a former Norte Dame QB who had never taken a single snap in an NFL game – got his chance.
Like pretty much everybody else I love underdog stories where some guy comes off the bench and saves the day and becomes a huge star (which didn’t happen to Ian because he was too busy running for his life and got sacked eight times) or a frumpy girl takes off her glasses and everybody realizes she’s actually smoking hot, because you wouldn’t look twice at Salma Hayek in a pair of horn rims.
See? She’s hideous.
And we know the “glasses disguising stunning beauty” phenomena is entirely possible because Superman’s apparently dim-witted coworkers were completely fooled by his masterful Clark Kent disguise which consisted entirely of putting on a pair of bifocals.
So it would appear not one of these people said, “Hey, where’s Clark? He should be in this group shot.”
It never seemed to occur to his co-workers at the Daily Planet that they never saw Clark and Superman at the same time and Clark was also the World’s Shittiest Reporter because every time something newsworthy happened he had a diarrhea attack or left his stove on or had to take a video back to the video store which is what Christian Bale said every time his serial-killer character needed an excuse to disappear in American Psycho.
Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White (and it’s frightening that I didn’t need to look those names up, but have to double-check my kids’ birthdays) must have had the collective IQ of 16-pound Brunswick bowling ball and if they were real people alive today they would no doubt refuse to be vaccinated.
In a vacuum, light travels at 186,282 miles per second (and the only thing that travels faster is some half-assed rumor on social media and I’d appreciate it if you spread the word) and some stars are so far away we’re seeing their light even though they no longer exist.
So when you wish upon a star, that star might not actually be there anymore which is the only logical explanation for the New Orleans Saints failing to give me a call and asking me to play quarterback against the Miami Dolphins.
Anyway…
The idea that we could look back in time and see things that no longer exist generated the comment that maybe we could look all the way back to when politicians of both parties would work together, which reminds me that Harry Reid – former Senate majority leader – just died and the Star’s headline called him a “dealmaker” and the obituary was filled with all kinds of interesting facts, but the one that made the biggest impression was Reid being blind in one eye after “an accident while exercising” but the article didn’t say what kind of accident so I think the safe thing to do is avoid exercising altogether.
I mean your vision is so important, why take a chance?
Which reminds me of the joke about a mother telling her son masturbating would make him go blind and him asking her if he could still do it until he needed glasses. (A joke which goes a long way in explaining my lifelong vision problems.)
That getting-hurt-while-exercising story reminds me of the times I’d come into the Kansas City Star with sports injuries (two broken hands, a broken wrist, and a torn ACL) and some overweight coworker would tell me I needed to quit playing sports because I was getting hurt and I’d think:
“Eat another donut, fat ass.”
Which I never said out loud because I don’t fight out of my weight class.
I figured my bones would heal in six weeks, but the damage they were doing to their arteries would require the help of a heart surgeon and a team of medical technicians who trained at Roto-Rooter, yet they were telling me to quit getting exercise because it was affecting my health.
No more cartoons this year
Once I finish a cartoon I send it to some people who send it on to client newspapers and just this past Thanksgiving I discovered they like to go home early on the day before a three-day weekend and want the cartoons at 11 AM their time which is 10 AM my time which would mean starting work at about 3 AM which definitely is not happening so that Omicron marathon cartoon is the last one for 2021.
Also…
The first bowl game starts at 10:30 and it turns out I’ll watch two colleges I never heard of play in a bowl game I don’t care about because the alternative is going outside and right now it’s 32 degrees in Kansas City, but feels like 27 so Meaningless Bowl Games it is.
And if I don’t talk to you before that: Happy New Year and let’s hope it’s better than the last two crappy ones.
Your columns make my day! Thank you!
You covered a lot of ground today. My favorite is the "fast food fight" against antivaxxers.
Did you ever know Shawn Russell?