The Daily Dose/July 21, 2020
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
Notes from around the human experience.
USA! USA! A friend and I were chatting recently when he posed the following question:
Do you think the November election is going to happen?
Fly In The Ointment: Not an unreasonable question nowadays. The coronavirus, plus the severe divides and the generally unprecedented, momentous times we are living in right now puts this question on the table.
I mentally shrugged and said yes, I think it will. President Trump is a lot of things, but he is not evil. He’s a man-child whose only real goal is to draw attention to himself and who believes the moon is part of Mars. He as overseen a delayed and utterly incompetent response to the coronavirus that has seen tens of thousands more people die than really should have. His government has blood on its hands. Not that he cares. Trump lives on such a fourth-dimensional plane of unaccustomedness he constantly tells himself he’s doing a good job.
America Has Been Reduced To This: Then we saw an article this week whose headline announced Trump hasn’t yet decided if he’ll accept November’s election results.
Ladies And Gentlemen Of The Jury: What idiot reporters are asking this? President Trump is not omnipotent. True, he is a billionaire bully accustomed to getting his way and draws commensurate loyalty, but he is not king, he is president.
The choice of whether or not to accept the election’s results does not rest with him!!!
Dry, Technical Matter: And we are taking this. Instead of calling an orange an orange and saying Trump is selfish and ignorant and incompetent, we’re treating it as if it’s normal for a president of the United States to consider whether or not he will accept the results of an election.
The Bottom Line: We are the worse for it. America, once dominant and influential, is reaping the harvest of citizens who stopped paying attention to their government. We are now halfway to oblivion, set to join the Greeks, Romans and Soviets on History’s scrapheap.
Today At The Site
Writing worth reading. Usually.
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow has the latest news from the coffee room. Today’s Diary.
The big news is the sacks of coffee from the new box have notches in them…Recall yesterday we discussed the fact the sacks from the previous did NOT have notches at the top, meaning you had to cut a corner of the sack with scissors in order to open it without spilling ground coffee everywhere.
I don’t know what happened at the home office that an entire case of coffee packets got shipped out without satisfactory notches…It hasn’t happened before, so maybe it was a notch-putter-inner trainee left on his own or something…
Backstairs at the Monte Carlo: Jeremy and Gaylon share a scary moment.
Jeremy and I did have a scary moment when we responded to a runaway alarm clock. We knock and get no answer so we make entry and we see a wheelchair and the room has that old person odor and lying in the bed is an elderly lady with white hair.
Crap, we both thought, the alarm is still going off because she’s dead, but I go and check and you can hear her breathing so we both shrugged, turned off the alarm, and left.
$2.99, a steal! Friends, this special won’t last forever, it only seems like it will, so click on the button and get these two American classics for one low price.
On This Date
History’s long march to today.
In 1983 – The coldest air temperature ever recorded is measured at Vostock Station in Antarctica at minus-128.6 degrees F. It broke the record of minus-126.9 recorded at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole in 1960. Vostock Station is a Russian research facility founded in 1957 about 800 miles east of the South Pole and the temperature remains the coldest directly observed temperature in an inhabited location in human history.
In 1975 – Joe Torre of the New York Mets ties the major league record for most double plays grounded into in a game in a 6-2 loss to the Houston Astros. Torre grounded into four double plays, all following singles by Felix Mantilla. The record had been established in 1934 by Goose Goslin of the Detroit Tigers and tied in 1939 by Mike Kreevich of the Chicago White Sox. The record still stands.
In 1984 – Prince is at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the third of five consecutive weeks with When Doves Cry. It was the fifth of 31 Top 40 hits for Prince, his third of 19 Top 10 hits and his first of five #1 songs. The song was also in its fourth of eight weeks at #1 on Billboard’s soul chart, was Billboard’s biggest song of the year and ranked 123rd on its 60th Anniversary Hot 100. The song also went to #1 in Canada and Belgium and peaked at #4 in Great Britain.
Quotebook
The wisdom of the ages. Whatever.
If you are extraordinary, be extraordinary. People only err when they try to be who they are not. – Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
It’s not who you know, but what you know.
Billboard’s #1 song for 1963 was Sugar Shack by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, which spent five weeks at #1.
Today’s Stumper
Cheaper than Trivia Night at the bar.
What is the highest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole? – Answer next time!
