“We’re not here to start no trouble,
We’re just here to do the Coronavirus Shuffle.”---WTK
The first confirmed Coronavirus infectee in the U.S.A. returned from Wuhan, China to Washington state on January 15, 2020. Covid Karl (or Karla) has not yet had his or her name etched into a granite pillar at the Hall of Infamy like, say Typhoid Mary, but there’s plenty of time for that. As of late Wednesday, April 15, there have been 624,048 confirmed cases of the virus in this country, resulting in 27,787 deaths. This is far more than the average number of annual fatalities caused by autoerotic asphyxiation, serial killers, lawnmowers, gun-toting toddlers and unbalanced vending machines all put together, thus not unreasonable for a fellow to be preoccupied with the matter. And he is.
A mere six weeks ago, nobody around here (except the Lone Ranger, of course) was wearing masks, gloves or other virus-deflecting paraphernalia. Last Saturday at Publix, the customers bustled about in home-made face masks and neoprene gloves with silver kitchen colanders on their heads, carrying wolfbane and large crucifixes. All the aisles had been converted into one-way cartpaths so there would be no head-on collisions, though the distinct possibility of a drive-by sneezer still existed. Large taped people-dividers were stuck on the floor in the checkout lines so customers would keep a proper coughing distance from their neighbors. People eyed one another suspiciously, just waiting for someone to clear his throat. We were grateful that Florida was not an open-carry gun-law state like Texas, where shoppers can be gunned down merely for reaching for their handkerchiefs. Where is Mr. Rogers when we really need him? The neighborhood has gone to hell in a shopping basket.
Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch….
Not that anyone would notice, but near-normalcy reigns in several areas. They’re still slapping plugs on leaks at Bill’s Tire Repair in Williston. The unmasked and smiling tellers at the Drummond Bank’s drive-up windows continue to take deposits and cash paychecks, though Line #1 is uncommonly long. The other lines require inserting your paraphernalia into a filthy virus-ridden plastic receptacle, then getting it back for seconds. I mean, how much Purell can a person use before coming down with a nasty case of hyperhidrosis?
The African-American contingent which gathers daily over by the BP station is still solving the problems of the world, though their numbers have thinned and all the sofas are no longer filled. The mini-marts ramble on, dispensing undiminished six-packs of Bud Lite and cartons of cigarettes, albeit from behind giant plastic barriers with holes cut out at the cash register. The drive-thru lanes at McDonald’s, never abbreviated, are wrapped twice around the building. The smirking plant nurseries, unaffected in the open air, are oases of sanity in this new Land of the Bizarre, customers meandering through the aisles well apart, mothers happy to show their children what life was like before the Monster walked.
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| (1) "No Soup for you!" "GOOD!" (2) Your friendly neighborhood pangolin. |
“Break Off A Piece Of That Kitty Kat Bar!”
So now our vocabularies have been introduced to “wet markets,” a gentle term for roiling open-air slimefests where any and all animals wild or domestic may be served up in semi-liquid form, intestines and all, a wide variety of diseases included at no extra charge. Imagine the olfactory delights as you browse the slippery aisles in your thigh-high wading boots and matching rain slickers. Vexing questions abound: should I, perchance, avail myself of the pate de salamander, or perhaps some scrumptious raccoon-dog-under-glass, a modest side of bat bellies, a pot of honest-to-god snake eyes? You don’t even want to think about what a Slushie means to these people.
Oh, and now, just in from exotic ports-of-call, we have the new taste treat---pangolins. Say what? If you gave me one guess, I would have to say a pangolin must be some sort of musical instrument utilized by an Appalachian jug band. That would be wrong. In truth, a pangolin is a chummy little scaly anteater, a mammal of the order Pholidota, and so well-regarded by the Chinese as to be voted the official mascot of the National Chi Nan University. Not that the distinction precludes his participation in the wet markets. Matter of fact, the jolly pangolin may be the missing link in the transmission of the wonderful Coronavirus from bats to humans. Oh, for shame!
Here’s the reasoning. Since January, the consensus among the scientific community is that the virus originated in horseshoe bats. It’s unlikely, however, that the bats gave the virus directly to humans based on what’s known about transmission of earlier zoonotic coronaviruses. Instead, scientists suspected that the bat virus infected another animal, an intermediate host which subsequently transmitted the virus to humans. People always like to blame the snake for everything so the first suspects were the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra. Honk! Scratch that one because there exists no previous evidence that coronaviruses can jump from a cold-blooded animal to human beings. An eventual study found that the genetic sequence of a coronavirus discovered in lung samples of Malayan pangolins was highly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The two viruses shared 91% of their genetic sequence. There is a particularly strong similarity between the spike proteins of these two viruses. The spike protein, which is on the surface of a coronavirus, is used by a virus to get into an animal cell. The bat coronavirus, which was the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, has 19 amino acids on the spike protein that are different from SARS-CoV-2; the pangolin coronavirus only has five that are different.
It’s only circumstantial evidence, the pangolin fans protest. What about the raccoon dogs? What about the ferret badgers? What about the goddam civets? All possibilities, but none with the convincing stats of the little scaly anteater, who will skulk about in infamy until a more likely culprit is unmasked. Bad news for the National Chi Nan University Diseasemongers.
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| Darth Vader lives. Just not well. |
“Who WAS That Masked Man?” “Oh, That Was Just Ernie.”
“Masked, I advance.”---Rene Descartes
Every cloud has a silver lining and so does the cumulonimbus Coronavirus. The Covid-19 plague has revealed to the nation the ugly truth that it is unforgivably deficient in face masks, with the possible exception of New Orleans. Even if the Mask Police were to raid the closets of every known superhero and bank robber, we would come up pathetically short. If not for generous loans by the families of The Phantom of the Opera and Zorro, we’d be in deep trouble. And there’s no excuse for it. Doesn’t anybody remember what their mothers once told them? “Always save up for a rainy day.” Mothers know about these things. If we all just listened to our mothers, there’d be face masks piled up to the ceiling.
At first, of course, the wise men advised us we didn’t need face masks. Just carry on, business as usual. Shortly, it became apparent there was a dire shortage of the things---even the hospitals were deficient. Doctors were nursing their masks the way grandma did her last few sips of gingerbread cream liqueur. Entrepreneurs were scouring the far reaches of the Earth for product. “Hey, we found six more in Bangladesh! Ralph’s on the phone now with a hoarder in Swaziland.”
Ah, but just leave it to the enterprising citizens of the U.S.A., who remember once hearing the good advice: find a need and fill it. A cottage industry has arisen across the land. Go-getter grannies in Galveston, unemployed uncles in Utah, senescent stitchers in Saugerties are camped out in attics and basements and unused bomb shelters from sea to shining sea, cranking out the valuable face coverings, delivering them on bicycles, pulling them through their neighborhoods in Radio Flyer wagons, dropping them from the tops of church towers, tossing bundles on the stagecoach. Good thing, too. Now those confused government dumbheads tell us everybody needs one.
Before the surge, customers at the Publix were showing up in Tom Mix bandanas, inverted jockstraps and gathered Lawrence Welk t-shirts, as if they’d just traversed the Sahara on their way to Ocala. A few even found honest-to-god medical paraphernalia. Being cutting-edge products, of course, most of the customers couldn’t sort out the tops from the bottoms, the inside from the out, the backs from the fronts. They put them on, turned them around and upside-down, wandering the store aisles in a frazzle. Occasionally, the elastic would rupture, masks bouncing to the suspect floor, requiring unseemly retying. Can’t we just put the damn things in vending machines, sorted by color and size, replete with illustrated instructions that Barney Fife could understand?
As time has gone by, of course, the great majority of masked shoppers, who three weeks ago scoffed at the troupe of early maskees, have now become very huffy about their unmasked brethren. “Well, I never!” declared one offended dowager, “Sure you did,” reminded her dutiful husband, “just a couple weeks ago.”
We here at The Flying Pie can see some potential problems with this strange new masked world. In the past, for instance, bank robbers would not be able to put their masks on before actually going into the bank without alerting bystanders with cell phones. Now, everyone has a mask so nobody knows who the bandits are until they get to the teller windows. And what about the hospitals? How do you know who the real doctors are? Everybody looks the same. What if Bernie the maniac escapes from the nuthouse, sneaks into the operating room and tries to take your pancreas out? Scary business. And you can’t even have O.R. security check the doctors’ fingerprints because everybody’s wearing gloves. It’s a muddle. Injury lawyers are licking their lips and dreaming of trips to Glocca Mora.
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| Overkill, thy name is "paranoid shopper." |
The Bare Essentials
Governor Goober, alias Ron DeSantis, Florida’s current Court Jester, has decided that professional wrestling is an “essential service” which may remain open during the Coronavirus blight along with gun shops and liquor stores. This has led to a great kerfuffle among women’s groups who have suffered the loss of hair salons, beauty shops and spas. "My roots are comin’ in!” says Adele Dubinsky of Yeehaw Junction. “I need help. Would someone please tell me why two guys huggin' and gruntin’ in a wrestling ring is more important than that?”
Sorry, says Governor Goober, but nobody in the beauty business plunked $18.5 million on the table like WWE chief Vince McMahon’s wife did. On April 1, DeSantis issued an executive order allowing so-called “essential services” to continue to operate. On April 9, the Gov altered the order to include professional sporting events and media productions. Also on April 9th, Linda McMahon announced that her Presidential Super PAC would spend $18.5 mil in Florida, though she didn’t say on what. And you thought we were done with all that quid pro quo business. Money continues to talk; the rest of us continue to walk.
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| This is her once-a-year day! |
The Pajama Game
Alas, friends, today is the day you’ve been waiting for all year, and now this! That’s right, it’s National Wear Your Pajamas To Work Day once again. I notified Siobhan of this important fact just before she changed into her business garb this morning. “Good thing you’re not going,” she observed, noting my lack of sleepwear-of-the-day. It doesn’t seem fair that nude sleepers actually have to buy PJs to participate but I suppose we can’t have people reporting in naked. Talk about aesthetically unpleasing.
Nobody much is reporting in at all, of course, unless they work for Vince McMahon. And all this sheltering-in-place is making folks frosty. Yesterday, in Lansing, Michigan, an unruly mob of protesters converged on the Capitol building to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, their reasoning being it’s only marginally better not to be dead than to be alive and broke with three children, two dogs and a ferret to feed. Easy for those of us who are comfortable and unencumbered to hoot derisively, we’re not pushing that boulder uphill. A $1200 government band-aid lasts about a minute and they don’t accept ferrets at the pound.
Major League Baseball, already three weeks into what would be its regular season, is now discussing playing all its games in Florida and Arizona, where Grapefruit and Cactus League facilities already exist. No fans allowed, of course. Doesn’t sound too appetizing to us. Noone to sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame before the bottom of the seventh or Sweet Caroline in the eighth, nobody to rush out onto the field to offer the umpire a pair of glasses. Not to mention, the Fenway Franks don’t taste as good at home and it’s almost impossible to hear the organ. On the other hand, it might be fun to see all those managers in their pajamas.
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| Courtesy of Barbara (the maskmaker) Gordon. |
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
neighbors.
