Meyers is not sure whether Trump is actually taking the drug, something that scientists are warning against, or is lying about do. But that is largely immaterial. The danger is not what the drug might do to Trump but that people who admire him might think that it is a good idea to follow suit simply because he is doing it.
As I mentioned before, somehow my name and email address have found their way on to the Trump campaign mailing list and every day I get emails from them asking for money, with each email trying to find a different way to entice me to contribute. I have not replied to any of these requests, even rejecting the offer to add my name to Melania Trump’s surprise birthday card. But that has not stopped them from telling me that I am held in very high esteem by Trump because of my steadfast support for him. The campaign seems to be somewhat masochistic, because the more I ignore them, the higher their esteem of me rises.
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The biggest problem facing many people during this pandemic is the loss of employment. About 30 million people have lost their jobs and as I have discussed before and Hasan Minhaj highlighted so well on his show, this has knock-on effects that spread all through society. Not having any income means they cannot pay their rent or buy food or other things and that hurts businesses. Not paying rent means that their landlords cannot pay their mortgages or utilities or property taxes, which means that state and local governments lose revenue and can’t provide services. And so on. Congress has passed various stimulus packages but these require people to jump through all manner of hoops to get aid, is insufficient, and does not cover everyone who has been affected.
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Sports have always been a peripheral part of my life and so I have not deeply missed the absence of big-time sports contests. But there seem to be many people who are suffering from sports withdrawal symptoms even if they were just viewers and not participants and they are yearning for its resumption. It was the abrupt canceling of the basketball season just before an NBA game began, that was soon followed by all the other major leagues canceling their seasons, that made everyone realize that this pandemic was serious stuff. It is one thing for public health officials to issue warnings. Those can be shrugged off. It is something else entirely to cancel a sports season. That gets people’s attention.
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Up until very recently, I have not been able to get any face masks and hence have not entered any public place such as a store. Last week, my daughter mailed me a few and so I was able to go to the local Asian grocery store and buy stuff that was running low. Some stores no longer allow you in without a face covering. Since I had a limited supply, I had wondered about the advisability of reusing face masks that were supposed to be disposable. While the recommendation is that one should not reuse them, it seemed wasteful since it would consume items that should be saved for people like health care workers who need them on a daily basis and need to shed them frequently
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I do not believe that I have ever used the phrase ‘just desserts’ myself but I have been familiar with it from adolescence. I had always believed that the word was spelled as ‘desserts’ and, as all of us tend to do with beliefs, had created a theory to justify it. My theory was that ‘dessert’ referred to the treat one gets at the end of one’s meal, that parents often used to reward children for good behavior, such as eating all their vegetables. So ‘just desserts’ meant that one got a treat that was appropriate for what one did: a minor good act got a small treat while a major good act got a big treat.
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Hasan Minhaj has come back with new episodes of his excellent show Patriot Act. He was supposed to return a couple of months ago but the pandemic hit just at that time so they had to revamp the process without an audience and the glitzy stage effects. But it was a very good show nonetheless and this episode dealt with the housing crisis caused by the pandemic. With people losing their jobs and not being able to pay rent, they face evictions. This has led to rent strikes and Minhaj points out something that I said earlier, that the non-payment of rent even for a short time does not really solve the problem for many people and creates a cascade or domino effect all the way up the chain. But he goes much further and deeper into the issue.
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These days some of us are spending more time videochatting with friends and family using one of the many platforms that are available. While they come closer to a semblance of physical contact than a phone call, they are still deficient in one area as Christina Cauterucci, who has been growing increasingly disenchanted with video gatherings, explains.
My internal alien has identified the lack of normal eye contact as one central pitfall of the video-chat experience. Talk to someone over FaceTime or Zoom, and they’ll never quite meet your eyes. They’ll spend the call looking at their screen, a few inches below or to the side of their camera, giving you the perpetual feeling of trying to get the attention of someone who’s ever so slightly preoccupied. Once, on a Skype call many years ago, a friend looked directly into her camera to say something heartfelt to me with the approximation of true eye contact. The effect was jarring: I didn’t fully realize that we hadn’t been making eye contact until she was suddenly staring straight into my soul from inside my screen. She was gazing at her computer’s eye, not mine, and could actually see less of my face than when she was looking at her screen, yet I felt strangely, uncomfortably exposed. When I recently tried it on a video call with my niece and nephew in an attempt to make them laugh, it gave me the unsettling impression of carrying on a conversation with HAL 9000, who’d been watching me watch the kids throughout our call. (FaceTime, perhaps even more eerily, has a new feature that attempts “eye contact correction” to make it appear you’re looking directly at each other, even when you’re not.)
Fred Willard who died yesterday was one of those actors you see all over the place in comedies. He was always in supporting roles, never the star, and sometimes those roles were just cameos. There was something intrinsically funny about him, a kind of appealing goofiness without being slapstick, combined with an ‘aw, shucks’ obliviousness that always made me smile whenever he appeared on the screen. He had a vast number of film and TV credits to his name and the chances are that even if his name did not register in your consciousness, you have seen him. I just learned that he was born in Shaker Heights, OH the town I lived in for thirty years.
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We have been told the importance of washing our hands to prevent the spread of viruses. But how easily do viruses spread? An experiment done by the Japanese public broadcast TV station NHK looked at what happens in public places where people congregate, such as at a restaurant buffet. They put some invisible fluorescent paint on the hand of one person and after 30 minutes used black light to find out where it had ended up.
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