4.14.2020

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



  • The Board. New cases Sunday: 27,421. New cases Monday:26,641. Yep, the country as a whole is plateauing. I suppose it's time to start focusing on North Texas. 
  • Nationwide deaths Sunday: 1,528. Deaths on Monday: 1,535.
  • Wise County cases: Still 5. (The Update says a Chico ISD employee has tested positive, but it doesn't say that's a new case.)
  • Texas Deaths.  Sunday: 17. Monday: 26. (Those number are still bouncing up and down.) 
  • Wise County has conducted 587 tests with only 5 positive results so far (obviously less than 1%). I wonder what the threshold criteria is to get tested in the first place. 
  • Rural Uprising humor:
  • For all of you State's Rights and 10 Amendment folks out there, Trump yesterday declared himself a Federal King. He couldn't possibly be more wrong about this. If Obama had said that, the right wing would be in marching in the streets this morning.
  • This was a great moment from  Kaitlan Collins of CNN.  The question accurately implies he's not possibly smart enough to understand the constitutional authority of a president so he must have gotten the crazy idea from somewhere, yet Trump doesn't even pick up on that. 
  • The press conference was already weird when Trump replayed a video produced and previously  shown on Hannity thereby forcing the doctors in charge of fighting the coronavirus and the press corps to watch. (Once you get past the Joseph Goebbels propaganda feel to all of this, you then realize Trump even lied when he said his staff had "put it together in a couple of hours.") 
  • Trump's day got worse when his chosen candidate in Wisconsin, a critical swing state, was defeated by "liberal-leaning" Jill Karofsky.
  • Williamson County (again): "A lawyer has filed a complaint against Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell alleging that he violated the county’s shelter-in-place order by getting an off-duty sheriff’s deputy to drive him to a fire department, borrowing a firefighter’s outfit and wearing it to his grandson’s birthday party." The bigger problem might be using a sheriff's deputy as a personal chauffeur. But he certainly went all out in getting into character: 
  • The Dallas Morning News is trying to entice me this morning. The COBOL language wasn't that hard for me -- it was the logistical process of learning COBOL that made me want to jump out of a window. I had to learn the language by using punch cards. Yep, I had to type out every line of code by putting a blank punch card into a massive machine and typing that single line of code. If I made a typo (What? Me make a typo?), I wouldn't know it until I submitted the stack of cards to a guy behind a counter who would then, 10 minutes later if I was lucky, hand me a printout of the results of my program --  program which failed to run because of a typo on a card. And get this: The program would fail and stop the moment it got to the typo. So I'd go back and fix that offending card, submit the program again, and then learn there was yet another typo on another card further down. Now consider an assignment might have 500 to 1,000 lines of code.  Talk about a beating. 

  • And if you think that makes me sound old, image how I felt when I was in the Smithsonian Museum of American History last December and came across this display of a punch card next to some kind of COBOL storage tape. It stopped me down so much that I took a picture. (Although it was a little hard to explain to the Family Unit why I was excited to see a punch card next to the word "COBOL.")
  • Legal stuff: The Fifth Circuit has gone nuts. It issued this Order to the parties at 12:06 p.m. yesterday. I can't imagine the wild scramble that ensued. 
  • Zeke Elliott is no longer the highest paid running back in the NFL.  Flashback: You guys remember when everyone freaked out because McCaffrey skipped the Sun Bowl his final year of college to avoid a career ending injury? I think he might have been the first high profile player to ever do that. 
  • Cinemark laid off 17,500 employees. This shut down might outright kill movie theaters altogether.