4.15.2020

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts


  • The Board. New cases Monday: 26,641. New cases Tuesday: 26,945. 
    (That chart doesn't seem to line up with my numbers.)
  • Deaths: I'm going to skip it today because the numbers would look skewed because New York revised its number with some tricked up accounting yesterday
  • A good Texas chart was right under my nose the entire time:
     
  • Wise County cases: 7. (+2).
  • Tarrant County cases (which is probably what we should be watching now): 929 (+53 yesterday)
  • Barring a big uptick in numbers, I'd guess we'll "open up" no earlier than May 1st and no later than May 15th. I'd be stunned if schools open back up at all. 
  • He's a born showman. 
  • Speaking of, the IRS has set up a website where you can check on the status of your Trump 'rona Check. It's a bit overloaded at the moment.  I also want to warn you that they'll treat you like your trying to access the nuclear codes. 
  • President Obama endorsed Biden yesterday after Biden became the de facto nominee last week. And he took a shot at Fox News while he did it. 

  • The Raleigh Police Department in North Carolina stepped in it yesterday. The replies became a massive dog-pile. 
  • I told you from the start that the Rural Uprising would also be drawn along political lines. The right wingers in the Texas Legislature proved me right yesterday. 
  • There would seem to be lots of liability issues with employers in opening up their business too soon when you think about reasonable care to protect employees and customers. 
  • Why did we have the head of Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and Target standing on stage with Trump a month ago promising drive through testing that are still almost non existent? It's been a free advertising bonanza, and Trump did it again yesterday when he read off a list of companies for no real reason other than to make a press briefing look like NASCAR. It took over 10 minutes. 
  • Business news breaking this morning: 8.7% seems way, way too low to me. 
  • March was the first time we haven't had a school shooting since 2002.
  • Trump yesterday: "In sports, we want to get our sports back so importantly. . . . But we have to get our sports back. I'm tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old." Fourteen years is oddly specific. A Twitter sleuth found this photo from fourteen years ago when the New York Mets were eliminated from the playoffs. 
  • For district court criminal cases, the judges better be aware of Art. V, § 7 of the Texas Constitution which requires that a district court "conduct its proceedings at the county seat of the county in which the case is pending" unless there is a statute to the contrary. There is no statute to the contrary. And it means what it says. You can't even do it by agreement. 
  • Messenger: Above the Fold

at 8:33 AM

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. 

at 8:36 AM

4.13.2020

Random Monday Morning Thoughts


  • The Board: Cases Saturday: 30,003. Cases Sunday: 27,421. We are probably into the plateau but the weekend numbers are always under-reported. 
  • Deaths on Saturday: 1,830. Deaths on Sunday: 1,528. 
  • Wise County cases: 5.
  • Texas Deaths: 11 yesterday bringing the total to 278. (I can't find a death chart for Texas alone.)
  • The USS Theodore Roosevelt has turned out to be a disaster with 600 sailors testing positive and, this morning, we have reports of the first death.
  • I don't see Dallas or Tarrant County "opening up" by May 1st. Wise County? Man, that's a tough one. 
  • And I agree that the economy isn't a light switch you can just turn on. Say Wise County restaurants are allowed to open up on May 1st? Does the amount of business being conduted just magically go back to where it was? For restaurants, do the vast majority of people think, "I'll give it another month before I dine inside"?  Or what do we do it the converse is true: What if the line is around the block at Sweetie Pie's because people from Fort Worth and Denton will make the drive just for the chance to eat out? Are we comfortable with that? 
  • From the onset, I've been amazed how everyone just cowered down at a governmental mandate. I can't have a gathering of more than 10 in my own private home? Ok, sure. I cannot go to church? Yes, sir. I'll obey. You want to destroy my business? Fine. If America ever moves into a Totalitarian State, I think we've seen proof that the masses will go along with it with absolutely no opposition whatsoever.
  • There is some resistance to all of this: Some new federal judges who have a new style and a new attitude.
  • I am that guy. 
  • Trump was mad at Fox News this weekend.

  • You want to know how bad OANN is? When they reported that the coronavirus was possibly designed in a lab in South Carolina based upon the investigation of a “a monitored source amongst a certain set in the D.C. intelligence community", they used this picture of that source  in their report because he had used it on his Twitter profile. OANN didn't realize that it was a still from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 
  • Mark Cuban wouldn't rule out running for President this year. The filing deadline in almost all states has already passed, and he knows that. And four years ago he complained that even when was within the deadline to file as an Independent in Texas, the hurdles make it impossible to pull off. Like Trump, he's got a lot of conman in him. And why anyone thinks he's worthy of time on any Sunday news show is beyond me. 
  • I need more "Not Robert Jeffress" in my life. (The actual gif is even better.)
  • Pete Delkus missed the forecast completely on Saturday as he was predicting 100% chance of rain across the metroplex. He whined that night claiming he was technically right and all the rest of us just aren't smart enough to understand him. 
  • Bud Kennedy posted the image below over the weekend with a link to this story about Bonnie and Clyde. That occurred right off 114. Last year the Tarrant County District Clerk found the indictment in the case. The image of it is here.
  • I stumbled upon this late night movie on network TV over the weekend. Anyone ever heard of Undrafted which was executively produced by Tony Romo and starring his brother-in-law Chace Crawford? It was horrible. 
  • Messenger: Above the Fold

at 8:30 AM

4.10.2020

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here.







at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts



  • The Board. Wednesday's new cases: 31,935. Yesterday's new cases: 33,536. 
  • Deaths. Wednesday's deaths: 1,940. Yesterday's deaths: 1,900.
  • Wise County confirmed cases: Still at 4.  (Some guy finally officially got counted.) Side note: If I got the coronavirus, I wouldn't keep it a secret. I'd tell everybody. 
  • Texas Deaths on Wednesday: 28. Texas deaths yesterday: 27
  • If we are entering the peak of the curve and you feel pretty good, this footage will be a bit disturbing. (I even initially thought it might be fake. It's not.)
  • Let's pause for a moment of silence.
  • TCU has announced it will conduct online classes only for the summer semester. That may be the first definitive plans I've heard about summer changes. 
  • Trump has completely abandoned calling it the "Chinese virus." I wonder who got to him? 
  • If you listen to any right wing radio, it takes only about 30 seconds to realize the vast majority of its callers absolutely believe the coronavirus pandemic is completely overblown. Most of the hosts won't go there, but they are having a hard time controlling what is normally an echo chamber. (But, man, the nutcases and conspiracy theorists on the coronavirus are out there big time. Death counts are fake. Dr. Fauci is a Hillary plant. There was even a "have you noticed that gold fringe on  the American flag in our courtrooms?" caller on Dennis Prager yesterday.)
  • If Trump does want to "open the country" on a particular day for some type of glorious event, he needs to absolutely have a MAGA rally in a packed house on that on date. No masks. No social distancing. 
  • "Wreckless"
  • Mrs. LL found an authentic mask and told me, "I know you probably won't wear it, but I want you to promise me you'll take it with you tomorrow."  I think that's a "hey, if you die it ain't on me" sort of thing, but I'm not sure. 
  • There's something not right about this mask worn by Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) this morning. It's like something out of the old West during a bank robbery yet made out of panty hose. 
  • Both New Jersey and Kansas are looking for programmers who know the old language of COBOL. You know who has in storage in Bridgeport a massive binder of computer programs he wrote in COBOL in the 1980s? That's right. The hardest working man in show business: Me.
  • I saw this picture of people lining up for food from a food bank in San Antonio, and I've got a lot of questions regarding the organization of the distribution here. And if you look closely, those lines go from neatly organized to chaos. I also wonder how the human phenomenon of being willing to wait forever for anything free, regardless of need, comes into play here. 

  • Yesterday, the Fort Worth Court of Appeals allowed a lawsuit in Wise County to continue. It's not remarkable other than you learned a family who owned an oil field service trucking company in Paradise sold it for $11 million a few years back. Here's a brief in the case that outlines the facts. (And, regarding the sale, that looks like perfect timing in retrospect.)

at 8:28 AM
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