Another COVID Cancellation

· January 31, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

Some of my normal camping guys came up with a crazy idea last year, which was to go camping again.

Normally, this wouldn’t seem totally asinine, but in this, the International Year of the Covid, all bets are off.

The wrinkle to this particular camping trip was the date it was to take place. Late January. Snow camping! 

I’ve never done it before. Nor has the other guy who was gung ho about the idea. The third guy grew up on the western bank of the Sierra Nevadas, where it snows a bit but nothing major. It should be noted that the two other Camptathalon mainstays, who grew up in Idaho and Wisconsin, couldn’t say no fast enough. A wise man might note the discrepancies. But fuck it, I’m sure I can get gassy enough to keep that tent as humid as a summer’s eve.

We opted for Yosemite. For one thing, I don’t really know how many campsites are even open this time of year. Our usual haunts don’t open until six to eight weeks after the last snow. In the midwest, there’s snow everywhere, so you can pretty much camp anywhere. In California, to get to snow, you’ve got to go up to 4,000 feet elevation or so, and the roads to those spots are a wee bit pesky. But the roads to Yosemite are plowed regularly. Commerce, as Teddy Roosevelt intended. 

Our second reason for choosing Yosemite was that it’s about as far from “roughing it” as you can get while camping. They’ve got two well-stocked stores and a half-a-billion rangers per square mile. Shit, they’ve got 4G reception and an ice cream stand. Guessing we could get pizza delivered if necessary. Not exactly a spot I’d need to worry about getting lost in a blizzard and wandering off a cliff.

Speaking of which, the valley floor is only about 4,000 feet, so the Wisconsoner and Idahoan really didn’t need to whine about traveling uphill in the snow both directions. It wasn’t supposed to drop below the mid-twenties at any point during our visit. The high was scheduled to be above forty on Saturday.

But alas, my first sojourn into the camping where you don’t need to purchase ice each day did not happen. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow would shut Yosemite down. COVID, on the other hand…

Yep, Yosemite is closed to overnight reservations as part of California’s on-again, off-again flirtation with pretending we’re taking it seriously.

Because, you know, there’s no chance for us to socially distance when we’re camping in the fucking snow. Why, it’s got to be like Disneyland, right? I imagine thousands of people are all ass-to-elbow, because if we know one thing about Californians, it’s that they LOVE being out in the snow in the middle of the night.

To be sure, it’s ONLY the overnight stuff that’s closed in Yosemite. Visiting the park in the daytime is still totally legit. It’s only the campers who can’t be trusted to social distance. Is there some sort of midnight orgy I was unaware of? Maybe it’s a good thing they won’t let me in, as you never want to be the guy who shows up for the orgy wearing snow-camping gear.

When I first made the reservations, I already had to deal with a weird COVID restriction. They were only booking fifty-percent capacity. Fine. Whatever. Except either I didn’t read the fine print or it wasn’t clearly spelled out, because if I were to ask you how to ensure fifty-percent capacity in a campsite, how would you go about doing it? Close every other campsite, right? 

Nope! They booked the entire campground for a week, then went an entire week without accepting reservations. I guess so they could… sanitize the dirt. Besides, who wants to go to a half-filled orgy. 

Just remember this when you go into a restaurant that’s cordoned off every other table to allow for maximum spacing. Tell them they’re doing it wrong. It’s much better to go standing-room only on Tuesday and Thursday, while taking Wednesday off.

This missing week became an issue while reserving, because Yosemite releases an entire month’s worth of reservations at the exact same time. I wasn’t sure what the demand would be for winter camping, but in the summer, if you log in five minutes late, the entire month is taken. So at 7:00 am, I started refreshing like I was loading a pornographic picture back in the dial-up days. 

7:01, 7:02, and I’m still not seeing the dates in question available. I noticed that the previous weekend was available, but I thought maybe they were residuals from the previous month’s availability. At 7:04, I decided to see if the FOLLOWING weekend. The campsite was available. It’s at this point I realize their asinine definition of “fifty percent capacity.” Good news is by that time, there were still campsites available. Bad news was I had to drop down to our third choice.

As an aside, the weekend we originally wanted to go was this weekend, the one in between the AFC/NFC Championship games and the Super Bowl. What better time to go camping than when there are no sports? But Yosemite only made the weekends of major football games available for camping. Maybe this was to further depress demand. Make sure no casual fans come up for the non-socially-distanced camping that is somehow less safe than day visitors.

Too bad I’ll never find out. At least not until next year.

And really, I don’t know why, ten months into the pandemic, I should expect anything less than arbitrary rules that have as much effect on containing the spread of COVID as taking off our shoes prevents terrorism. Remember back when they said we’d have regular testing by the end of May? 

Back then, Hawaii told everybody to stay the fuck away on pain of execution. Now Hawaii’s begging people to come work remotely, but only if you’ve been tested in the past seven days. Unfortunately, desire to go to Hawaii isn’t one of the prerequisites for getting a test. Tests, like vaccines, can only be doled out piecemeal, to those deemed worthy of saving. You need to have licked the bunghole of somebody with all three strains of the virus who is currently in ICU. 

Or you can be friends with the Governor. I have a funny feeling that everybody who was at Herr Kommandant Newsom’s French Laundry soiree has already received their vaccine. And snow orgies.

Speaking of which, sorry if my forthcoming rants are a tad California-specific. But a) that’s where I live, and b) we are the poster child for FUBARing the whole COVID thing. If you live in a place that’s got its collective head out of its ass, then maybe this’ll only serve to make you feel fortunate.

It’s interesting how most of the media say we’re no longer following the rules because of “COVID Fatigue.” Instead, most of us are making constant judgement calls, weighing the trade-offs between having a life or being dead. There’s a sliding scale. Even if we all strictly followed the rules, we have to grocery shop at some point. And I don’t think that I’m out of line that camping in the snow, with the closest human being fifty feet away, is probably safer than going to the grocery store. I’m not being ignorant. I’m trying to follow the rules and guidelines that the government established.

Not that those rules and guidelines mean jack shit. We’re told to meet certain goalposts, then we’re told that, sorry, that’s not the goal we’ve been looking for. Or sometimes we DON’T meet that goal, and Herr Kommandant’s like, “Yeah, you know what? It’s cool. We didn’t really need those ICU beds anyway.”

Over the Christmas holiday, Canada set up space heaters at outdoor parks. The message was clear: You want to be able to see your family and friends, so please be safe about it. In the United States, we opted for the tried-and-true “You want to be able to see your family, so we will tsk-tsk and shame you and not help you do that safely. Abstinence only has worked so well over the decades in this country. Just ask the millions of Americans who had premarital sex or smoked pot.

The ironic thing is we simultaneously tell people to social distance while also banning them from it. I’m on the Board of Directors for my curling club, and we perused the sports rules for hours. They have all sorts of rules for how to do our sports. Limited capacity? We’ve accounted for that. Social distancing and masks? We’ve changed our rules to implement those. But then, at the tail end of the document, they give a list of which sports can operate in which tier. It’s like telling us how we’re supposed to shop safely, but then closing the stores anyway. 

In California, we’ve had at least three different classification systems over the past year. First it was a convoluted “phased reopening.” That was tied more to which companies could open, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t tied to any sort of caseload count. It was basically “Starbucks can open its drive-thrus, and if the shit doesn’t hit the fan, they can sell a couple Bacon Goudas, but not the bagel store in the same parking lot because Starbucks contributes a lot of money to politicians and fuck you, small businesses.”

Then we went to the color-coded, county-by-county system. Some people whine that the colors make no sense, but I think they’re fine. Yellow, orange, red, purple. It’s pretty standard “danger” stuff. The problem I have is that they set the classifications such that everyone will always be in purple. 

If you have more than 7 positive cases per 100,000 residents, you’re in purple. Seven! Currently, 54 of the 58 counties are in purple, which kinda makes the whole “purple” designation pointless. Sacramento County was at 55, while San Francisco County is at 38, and Los Angeles County was at 150. 

The red tier is set at 4 to 7 per 100,000. Orange at 1 to 4. Again, Los Angeles County is currently at 150, which is the same as 10. But 4 and 7 are hugely different numbers that drastically change what can open.

It seems to me that 150 cases per 100,000 residents is substantially worse than 38 per 100,000. But according to the state, they’re EXACTLY the same. It would be like maxing out the Richter Scale at 4. Or the hurricane classification at 2. “Boy, I wonder how big that natural disaster was?” “Exactly the same as every other natural disaster.”

So again, if they’re going to make their classification for the purposes of scolding us, then we’re going to try to make sense of it ourselves. At one of my staff meetings, my principal was running through the numbers and, at 93 per 100,000, referred to us being in “Deep Purple.” He talked about what preparations we might make if we get into “light purple,” but it was too late. I was already humming, “Smoke on the Water.”

At my curling club, we’re talking about reassessing opening when we get down in the 20 per 100,000 range. Although truthfully, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad number, because it’s all arbitrary. If there’s no difference between 20 and 150, then is there really a difference between 7 and 20?

Then again, the numbers I’ve been quoting aren’t the real numbers, they’re adjusted for the number of tests. I have no idea what that means, but earlier this week, the New York Times showed Sacramento County with a rate of 23 per 100,000, while the California website claimed Sacramento County was still at 42. That’s a pretty large discrepancy and, unfortunately, the New York Times ain’t the ones who get to put us into red. 

And don’t get me started on the ethnic breakdown of the positive cases.

Yes, the state that claims to “follow the science” says that they get to make up the numbers. Counties aren’t allowed out of purple tier unless all of the ethnicities in the county are catching COVID at the same rate. And before you get started, yes, I know that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to catch it. But most of that discrepancy stems from issues of poverty.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to work in the service and retail industries, which have remained open. Maybe if we want fewer Blacks and Latinos to catch the virus we could, I don’t know, try to make those activities safer. Like Canada did at the holidays, focus on HOW we do these activities instead of just telling people not to do them. I remember being a sexually-active teenager who had difficulties getting condoms.

Or we could look at fixing poverty and the reasons minorities are stuck in it, but ha ha, just kidding. Why would we try to fix poverty when we can just condescend people from behind the French Laundry barricade. “If you were taking this we were taking this more seriously, you would avoid the grocery store. Honestly, who has to buy fruits and vegetables more than once a year, anyway?”

So after the phases and the tiers failed to not only curb the surge, but actually seemed to make things worse, Herr Kommandant came up with a new metric, which was ICU capacity. So now if you’re in purple, everything is closed, but if you’re in purple and your ICU capacity drops, then… everything is still closed. But maybe they chain up the door now?

A recent article I read posited that closing everything down might’ve actually driven the latest surge. Before the shut down, people could eat outdoors. After the shutdown, they had to go indoors, where they’re much more likely to catch it.

Don’t get me wrong. ICU capacity is hugely important. It might even be something we should’ve been tracking all along. But we weren’t, and because the state couldn’t distinguish between nine sick people and two hundred sick people, they decided to change the playbook again. 

But once again, the ICU capacity numbers appear to be a heaping pile of bovine excrement. The Sacramento region (not county this time) sunk below the 15% availability in early December. We were put on Saint Gavin’s naughty list for a minimum of three weeks, after which it would be reassessed. I kept checking the ICU capacity over that three week span, and it usually oscillated between 14-17%. So I was shocked when Jan. 2 rolled around, and our region was suddenly at 4% capacity!

Four percent? How the fuck did we drop ten percent in two fucking days?

Well, you see, that 4% number wasn’t our actual ICU capacity. It was Herr Kommondant’s PREDICTION about what he thought our ICU capacity WOULD BE four weeks later. So, you know, sorry y’all worked so hard to reach that milestone I told you would get you off probation, but now I’m making up a new milestone that is literally impossible to reach.

Of course, the reason they were predicting our ICU rates would plummet was because they didn’t think we were following their rules over the holidays. In other words, “we don’t think you’re following our rules, so we’re going to keep the same rules.” Wonderful.

Then he reversed gear. A week later, he claimed that the ICU rates weren’t spiking as expected and he was going to reopen Sacramento only, because now his magical eight ball says that four weeks later, we’d be at 17%. I’m sure this decision had nothing to do with the fact Herr Kommandant currently lives and works in the Sacramento region.

And no, if you’re wondering, the French Laundry is not in the Sacramento region.

The irony of the naughty-list/nice-list switcheroo was the actual numbers. When we were told we couldn’t reopen because we hadn’t cupped his balls correctly, the actual ICU availability was around 14%, but when we got the all-clear, we were just under 10%. So why exactly did we set the 15% threshold?

Then a few days ago, he waved his magic wand and reopened the entire state. Poof. Our long, national ICU crisis is over! Even though not a single region (aside from Northern California, where nobody lives) had even come close to sniffing 15%. But now the magical four-week prediction says all is honkey-dorey. The outlook was almost comical. Sacramento is still predicting 17%, the exact number that was predicted two weeks ago, so I guess not a damn thing has changed. But all of the other regions, who were below Sacramento, are predicted to be higher. Bay Area is supposed to be well over 20% ICU availability, but the true kicker is Southern California, which is predicted as having 33% of their ICU beds free in just four weeks! This is the same Southern California that has had 0% capacity for six straight weeks! What the fuck? Are there only three ICU beds in Southern California and Bob is starting to look a little ripe?

I teach social science, so I’m totally comfortable with trends and projected statistics. For instance, Gamestop’s stock is predicted to drop by ten percent, but instead it increased by… what the holy hell? Okay, maybe ICU beds can jump from 0 to 33%. Gavin just needs to get reddit dorks on board.

The latest completely arbitrary shift came with the vaccines. They very clearly laid out the first five groups, confusingly named Tier 1A, phases 1, 2, and 3, followed by Tier 1B, phases 1 and 2. Not sure why they couldn’t just name them one through five, but I guess everybody’s gotta feel special. In the end it really doesn’t matter, because they changed up the order. The first two groups were an amalgamation of front-line workers. Then it was supposed to by those 75 and over in that third group. I know this because I was in the next group, 1B part 1, along with those between 65 to 75. Not sure how teachers and baby boomers were included together, but whatever. How many 75 year olds can there be? I assume teachers will be up any day now.

Except then they decided that those 65-year-olds get to jump ahead of teachers. No real reason. Just because. And I don’t know if you’re aware of age demographics, but there’s a lot of fucking baby boomers. So when it was teachers and boomers together, I was looking at a late March vaccination. Now that it’s boomers, THEN teachers, I just got pushed back to July. JULY! And I’m still in a “special” category. There’s still going to be a group behind me, which I think includes a large swath of retail workers, before getting anywhere close to the general population. So if you’re 50 years old and work a normal office job, you’re probably waiting till 2022.

Remember back in November when people were saying there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and this might be our final lockdown? And Biden promised 100 million vaccinations in 100 days? Well, I hope his math wasn’t dependent on the most populous state in the nation getting its head out of its ass.

I’m pretty sure the real number Lord High Protector Gavin was looking at had nothing to do with positivity rates or hospital beds or millions of vaccines he has in his own personal batcave. It’s the number of signatures on the recall petition. Here’s how I think this went down. The president of the California Restaurant Workers Association called him up and said if he didn’t open the entire state, she was going to tell every restaurant employee to sign the petition. And voila!, state is open. 

I should note that the reason I know that person is a she is because it was her, not the governor, who announced the reopening. He followed a few hours later. Ironic, considering many of the legislators and health officials were angry at Newsom not telling them when big announcements were coming, so they weren’t prepared for the slew of phone calls, making Newsom look large and in charge. But if he outranks them, we now know who outranks him. Be sure to tip your server.

So huzzah! Restaurants are open! Hair salons are open! Swimming pools are open! Unvaccinated teacher coming soon to a recently-opened ICU near you! Just in time for a newly-mutated strain that requires two masks!

But don’t worry, we’re all still safe.

Snow camping is still closed.

Thoughts on that Mandalorian Finale

· January 19, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · No Comments

Everybody’s been gushing about the second season finale for The Mandalorian.  After all, it’s got CGI! Behold, a tick to make Hollywood actors more attractive than they are in real life! What more could one want as a going-away present to get us through the long, dark offseason that before it is filled with WandaVision and seven other temporary fulfillments of the vacant holes in our souls. Character agency? Pshaw.

So, y’know, spoiler warnings and whatnot. But you clicked through on something that clearly referenced what I was reviewing. If you didn’t want to know about the menage-a-trois between Mando and Captain Kirk and Harry Potter, it’s kinda your own fault now.

And honestly, I’m at least a year behind the times on this, but Mando the Mandalorian? Really? Maybe it’s a good thing they waited a year and a half to name Baby Yoda. It gave us time to name it Baby Yoda instead of, I don’t know, Bob, which is probably the name they would’ve given it if they’d been forced to come up with one. Fighting alongside Humo the Human.

And yeah, I know Baby Yoda has a real name now. But sorry, producers, ya done waited too long and he’s forever gonna be Baby Yoda now.

I’m probably not the best person to review the second season finale of The Mandalorian, considering I’ve been a whole lotta meh on the series as a whole. One of the reasons this is coming a month after the series ended is because I wasn’t planning to watch season two at all, until I heard about the ending. 

Some of my friends incessantly gush about the show. They’ll note that the red hat in the background of one scene was an homage to an outtake from Episode II wherein Jar Jar Binks shoved a red hat up his hoo-ha only to find out that he was color blind. Meanwhile I fixated on asinine things like there’s no way the little kid Boba Fett in Episode II could grow up to be the old dude Bob Fett in this show. I feel like he switched ethnicities. Maybe being pooped out by the Sarlacc changes your accent. Or maybe he’s a character that never shoulda taken the helmet off. Or, you know, returned at all. 

Cue Poe Dameron. Somehow, Boba Fett returned. If the answers disappoint you, perhaps you should stop asking questions. About anything.

“It’s like a Western,” my friends say. “Like Kung Fu.”

People called the Han Solo movie a western, too. Amazing how many westerns take place in space. Ironically, I really liked the Han Solo movie. I don’t know if it was because of any Outlaw Josie Wales motifs. The best part of the movie was Donald Glover doing a spot-on impression of Billy Dee Williams, circa 1979.

I’m not a huge Western fan, but I’ve seen my fair share of Bonanza episodes. I even visited the Ponderosa up at Lake Tahoe when it was a kinda, sorta amusement park/homage to the show. You could get there early and have a pancake – sorry “flapjack” – breakfast, complete with whiskey in your coffee and I was only 22 and shit, howdy, while I loved me some Baileys and coffee, I don’t know that I was quite ready for whatever rotgut they were throwing in there.

Regardless, I never once say the Mandalorian call for Hop Sing, nor ride his horse into Carson City, so I don’t quite think it’s a western.

But fine, let’s pretend that both Solo and The Mandalorian are westerns. Let’s pretend they’re both Kung Fu. You know what was great about Kung Fu? You didn’t have to watch every episode.

Back in the 1970s, we didn’t have every Disney movie and show, except for Song of the South, available whenever we wanted. Your options for “children’s programming” were Saturday mornings or afternoon syndications or PBS mid-mornings. 

And if you wanted Star Wars content on TV, good fucking luck. Far too valuable of a commodity to sell TV rights for. Your only option was the now infamous Holiday Special with Bea Arthur, who played a hideous tentacled alien species who reside with their Sicilian mothers in Miami retirement communities.

What’s that? Bea Arthur’s character was a human bartender? If you say so. 

But we can all agree that Golden Girls was thinly-veiled tentacle porn, right?

We also didn’t have Netflix dropping an entire season of a new tv show all at once in the 1970s. “Binge Watching” meant not getting our asses off the couch to change to one of the other five channels. Because we had no remote control, so might as well keep the TV tuned to this station and see what’s on next. The Jeffersons? Sold!

Heck, most homes didn’t even have VCRs until well into the 1980s. So if you weren’t going to be home for your favorite show, you were more or less fucked. There was a chance said episode might rerun during the summer, but not every episode did. A typical season might have 20-some episodes, but only about ten weeks of reruns. And really, who wants to be inside during summer evenings? Nobody. That’s why TV networks ran reruns.

The first serials, like Dynasty and Dallas, didn’t hit the market until after VCRs were around. So if, say, wife was going into labor, they didn’t have to decide between calling in a midwife or never finding out who shot J.R.

Then again, waiting till your wife is in labor to figure out how to set the clock on the VCR was a really bad idea.

Obviously, TV has come a long way since then. Most shows are designed to be watched back-to-back. Season-long storylines are now the norm. There’s no reason to ever “miss” an episode. Even more so with subscription services. 

So I was a little disappointed with the utter lack of continuity in the first season of The Mandalorian. I spent the first few episodes trying to follow every little plot thread, keeping track of all of the hints at what had happened in the five years between Return of the Jedi and the start of this show. But I was hard pressed to find any through-lines. 

After a few episodes, I saw someone refer to The Mandalorian as a video game. Each episode was a different level, with a boss fight at the end, after which he leveled up with a fancy new weapon. That explanation crystalized my nagging, unfulfilled feeling while watching it. 

During season two, I saw a much funnier explanation of the same thing.

Again, it wasn’t that I thought The Mandalorian was bad. It was fine. It just didn’t give me a reason to want to tune in. It’s Kung Fu and I’ve got a whole slew of Falcon Crests on my plate. I’m talking The Boys  and Witcher. WandaVision was on the horizon and I still hadn’t finished Daredevil. Hell, even sitcoms like The Good Place and Schitt’s Creek have continuing plotlines now. How can a Star Wars property be so episodic?

I resolved not to watch season two. Maybe “resolved” is a bad word. It wasn’t a boycott. It was asking myself if I cared enough to tune in. and answering with a resounding. “meh.”

I heard about Boba Fett. I shrugged. Never cared too much for a character with a whopping ten minutes of screen time in the first trilogy. The Mos Eisley saxophone player showing up wouldn’t have me running either.

Then came the announcement about the finale.

God damn it. 

Fine.

So again, if you haven’t heard about the ending now, approach with caution.

A de-aged Mark Hamill shows up.

Which ruined everything.

Let me back up.

I’m not opposed to the idea. We were all hoodwinked into thinking there was no way any of the original characters would show up, other than those in masks, although we probably shoulda seen it coming. After all, they had already done that with Carrie Fisher in Rogue One. Then, to one up themselves, they put her in Rise of Skywalker after she was dead. 

My problem with the Luke Skywalker cameo wasn’t the obvious “gotcha” quality of it, nor that I was duped into watching the entire second season for it. And yeah, it was dramatic as hell. Impressive. Even knowing what to expect, my heart raced when that lone X-Wing came out of hyperspace to board the ship.

But from a storytelling motif, it’s totally bullshit. Deus ex machina, anyone?

The second half of season two was actually fixing a lot of the problems I had with season one. There was a cohesive plot, a through-line of getting Baby Yoda to “the jedi.” And after Baby Yoda got kidnapped by Gus the Los Pollos Hermanos dude, there was actually momentum building toward the finale. Even a wee bit of character development, if I dare say.

Seriously though, Giancarlo Esposito has been sorely underused in this show. Anybody who can steal scenes in a show like Breaking Bad should be running circles around an MMA fighter and a dude in a mask. Dude can play cold-blooded sociopath, and y’all got him playing Dr. Evil.

Unfortunately, Gus the Chicke Dude and the MMA fighter and the dude in a mask who the fucking show is named after, those characters I finally got to know over the episodes leading up to the finale, were thrown to the sideline  in the culminating scenes, so Luke could come in with his fancy lightsaber. Like whoever the old Tampa Bay quarterback was when Tom Brady decided he wanted to move south for the winter. Maybe they need to change the title of The Mandalorian to include the character we’re actually supposed to care about. Season three’s working title: Hey maybe they can get a Han Solo cameo, too.

Okay, so they set the scene in the finale by showing us the Terminator. They called them Dark Troopers or Storm Shadows or something, but they were basically the Terminator. Or Ultron. Basically, half storm trooper, half robot, so we shouldn’t worry about the moral qualms about murdering them. Not that we’ve ever had any issue of mass slaughter of bad guys before. Weren’t the stormtroopers understood to be clones, anyway? Although, let’s be honest, that wasn’t established until the fifth movie. We went at least the entire original trilogy assuming those were real people.

Speaking of which, why did they clone a guy that was such a shitty shot with a blaster?

In typical superhero stuff, they show us that one fight with one of these fuckers was almost too much for the hero. Mando the Madalorian used up all of his weapons to no avail. He was finally able to defeat dude using a one-time weapon that he wouldn’t be able to use again. And now they’re showing Mando and his friemds, trapped in the bridge of an imperial cruiser, about to face twenty of them. How ever shall our hero make it out of this quandary?

It’s a standard motif in the fantasy/sci-fi/superhero genres. Our hero is shown being totally outmatched by his opponent only to finally discover the way to beat them later. Sometimes said hero discovers a weakness and exploits it. The James Bond route. Other times, a la Rocky III, the hero realizes he wasn’t taking the fight seriously the first time. More often, it’s done lazily. I guess all Superman had to do to beat Zod was level half of Metropolis. Too bad he didn’t try that the first time.

Even when it’s done poorly, though, there’s still some payoff. Some conclusion. Ultron could beat all of the Avengers with barely a thought, but once you’ve got a city flying in the air and the Avengers are simultaneously saving civilians AND fighting Ultron, well then, that’s how they win. Divided attention always makes us stronger. 

So how did Mando and his pals finally overcome this threat? One took everything he had, and now he’s facing an army! Perhaps the three episodes they’ve been together will culminate into working together as a team, each member intuiting the others movements. Perhaps the imminent threat on his only father figure will finally push Baby Yoda beyond the threshold, resulting in a focused blast of force power he’s never manifested before. Perhaps Mando goes all MacGyver and creates twenty of those spear things he used earlier.

Or maybe they’ll all just stand there and watch it play out on a fucking screen.

Really?

Look, I know Jon Favreau is a better plotter than I’ll ever be. He’s as much to credit as Robert Downey, Jr. for the entire MCU existing. But that was utter bullshit. Would we have been happy if, in the final battle against Obediah Stane in the first Iron Man movie, the Hulk randomly showed up and beat the shit out of the bad guy, with Tony Stark unconscious on the sidelines? 

But if it’s Luke Skywalker instead of Bruce Banner, all bets are off. As the “debate” over The Last Jedi proved, Skywalkers are the only beings in the entire Star Wars universe who are EVER allowed to resolve ANY conflict. Or maybe the Emperor.

There were ways to bring Luke back without being the deus ex machina, without stealing all agency from the main character. They could’ve gotten out of the situation then delivered Baby Yoda to Luke, similar to the Rogue One Princess Leia scene. I even would’ve been fine with Luke showing up to help Mando, who was already fighting back on his own. But the title fucking character should not be a fucking bystander for the ultimate battle. 

How’s season three gonna go? Is he just going to stop trying to get out of situations? I mean, the more dire the situation, the more likely Zeus will fly in to save the day, right? Just tell Baby Yoda (who we all know will still be prominently featured in season 3 despite “leaving” with Luke) to call for Papa. 

Or maybe they’ll just wait for Han Solo this time.

Man Grooming as Nature Intended

· January 13, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , · 2 Comments

Despite being a lifelong suburbanite, my wife has a few granola-crunchy tendencies. Her uncle isn’t quite aware the 1960s ever ended and splits his time between espousing the benefits of a government-based economy and deriding said government for controlling our minds through chemtrails or flouride or blah, blah, blah, because by this time I’m on my seventh glass of wine at Thanksgiving dinner (Thank you, 2020!). He also thinks cats are spying on us and reporting back to aliens keeping tabs on us. And I’m dead serious on that last one.

Wife doesn’t go that far. She’s way too consumerist. But for somebody who thinks camping is an abomination, you can certainly grab her attention by calling your product all-natural or organic or hormone free. So if you want her to buy your bacon, you might put on the packaging that it comes from pigs not treated with vaginal testosterone.  Even though there’s no such thing, so technically every pig in existence. But if you wanna get sold at Whole Foods, you gotta say every madeup bullshit thing isn’t in it.

I’m looking in your direction, rBST.

Occasionally, Wife gets stuck on conference calls at work and orders me some all-natural self-grooming shit. It’ll show up on our doorstep one day and she’ll kinda, sorta remember seeing something, like a Vietnam Vet trying to recall the fogs of war. Amazon told her that people who ordered Tom’s Toothpaste might also like toilet paper with the consistency of poison oak. 

But whatever. As long as she isn’t going paleo or anything, I guess I can splash some essential oils on my nether regions. It turns out I actually like some of them. Others are nothing more than snake oil.

So here are my reviews of products you might be pondering at the next Ren Faire.

Dr. Squatch Soap. 

Of the three products she bought me, this is the only one I’d heard of beforehand. It would seem to be a product custom made for me. Its name alludes to Bigfoot and they cuss in the commercials that my robot overlords at Google and Facebook show me. 

Maybe you’ve seen the ads. They tell guys that the soap you’ve been washing with is bullshit. Okay, you’ve got my attention. The commercials also imply that our junk, which smells horrific, yet is dainty, ain’t never gonna be cleaned by some industrial soap that’s half comprised of something pussy like, I don’t know, lotion or aloe or smurf handjobs.

Personally, my soap of choice is Irish Spring. The dude in the Dr. Squatch commercial calls it mass-produced and docile and bovine excrementy. But I’m assured by its mid-1980s advertisements that Irish Spring is made beside a bucolic river outside of Kilkenny, and if I use it, I’ll be whistled at by the comely lass also seen dancing in that Men Without Hats music video. 

“Manly, yes, but I like it, too!”

But Dr. Squatch Dude has a well-groomed beard, ergo I must pay attention. And they sell such manly flavors of soap, like Grapefruit IPA and Pine Tar and… Aloe. I guess ya can’t make a rub-over-skin product without the base aloe model. 

Come to think of it, pine tar? Isn’t that the stuff they put on baseball bats to make them sticky? I don’t know if I want that on my giblets. Is the ghost of Billy Martin going to come measure my cock to make sure I didn’t add too much pine tar? The last thing I need is a scruffy looking, powder-blue wearing George Brett screaming out of the dugout like a whirling dervish.

The first one I tried was the aloe bar. Baby steps, people. I’ve been trained by years of consumer culture and if it ain’t green, it shouldn’t even call itself soap. The Dr. Squatch was fine, I guess. Nothing really to write home about. Other than its clunky square shape, the clarion call of all “natural” products, it pretty much felt like soap. It didn’t quite get the lather up that I like. Wouldn’t want to shave with it, that’s for sure. 

That square shape also makes it hard to get into some of my nooks and crannies. In fact, it feels a little like being bludgeoned. I didn’t know I was supposed to be in pain while showering. And that was before I tried their second “flavor,” Chinese Water Torture.

No, it’s not named Chinese Water Torture soap, but it might as well be. It’s called Cold Brew Coffee soap. Should be perfect for me. I already smell like coffee all day. Or at least until 2:00, after which I smell like a distillery. 

What’s that? Dr. Squatch has a rum soap, too? Maybe I’ll have to investigate. 

Or I can just have some rum. Because if the rum is anything like the cold brew, I’ll pass. 

Sure, the coffee bar smelled nice, even if I had to adjust to the unnatural brownness of it. 

The problem came in its consistency. I’m not sure if Bigfoot’s ever had coffee, but when I get an iced coffee from Starbucks, I don’t have to take the coffee grounds out of my mouth. At home, I occasionally have a filter catastrophe that results in a crunchy cup o’ joe, but that’s not supposed to be the norm. And I know the hipster in the commercials doesn’t brew his own.

The coffee soap, however, is inundated with scratchy coffee grounds. And not the Folgers or Maxwell House ground coffee variety. More like whole beans thrown for ten seconds into a hand grinder cranked by an arthritic octogenarian. 

The first time I used it, I thought maybe it was just an outer layer authenticity thing that would go away as I used it. I once splurged on an Irish Spring “Sport” bar that had little bubble things on the bottom, but they only lasted a couple of washes. Surely, once I got past the outer layer of this cold brew, it would work like normal soap. Or like fancy, all-natural, doesn’t-really-wash-you soap.

But no! That shit stayed through the whole bar. I get the whole “exfoliating” concept, but this wasn’t some John Cougar “Hurt So Good.” It was just straight-up jagged-ass scratching. I suppose I could’ve used a wash cloth, but c’mon, Bigfoot. Your commercials talk about being a manly-man and now you want me to use a wash cloth?

Eventually, I found that it worked best if I lathered up in my hand, then went to the body. 

That felt more like a little bit of gritty exfoliating, similar to the little grains inside some of those soft soaps. Speaking of which, did you know that Bath & Body Works has “manly man” soaps, too? They’re usually hidden amongst the cinnamons and lilacs and Lakeside Estrogens. You can usually tell which ones they are because they’re blue. My favorite also had a fox wearing a blue sweater on the front and had a smell named “musk.” That’s the manly triumvirate right there.

But the blocky coffee soap wasn’t the same as a granulated soft soap. Like its aloe brethren, the cold brew block couldn’t lather worth a shit. So lots and lots and of scrubbing the hands meant the bar didn’t last longer than a week or so. At seven bucks a pop, I feel like the soap should last, I don’t know, a year or so. It’s kinda like paying for a single beer at the ballgame that costs more than a 12-pack of that same beer at home.

And for seven bucks, you get the added benefit of doing a twice over before exiting the shower to make sure you don’t look like a damned leper when you step out. The soap’s supposed to clean me, not leave me looking like I missed the trash can when dumping the coffee filter. Took me so long to shower, I was late to work. Good thing we live in a patriarchy and I can just ask for a raise to make up for the time lost.

Ha ha, just kidding. I’m a teacher. We don’t get raises.

Still, maybe I should stick with the rum bar. Although maybe not on the day I ask my principal for a raise.

Somerset English Shaving Oil.

What the hell is an essential oil anyway? Are there non-essential oils? Do the essential oils tease them? Like the Catholics who say Protestants go to Purgatory, which they think is heaven, but isn’t really heaven. I assume the Catholics spend all of eternity mocking those Protestants in their fake heaven. Something to look forward to.

Although if this is English shaving oil, it probably isn’t Catholic. They leave that for the Irish Spring next door.

Come to think of it, I don’t know if English is really the operative adjective for olde tyme rituals. Sure, compared to us young pups in America, England’s been around forever. But if I really want to be shaving like I’m some grizzly middle ager, how about some Saxon Shaving Oil. Or Mercian. Although that’s too close to ‘Merican. And we all know ‘Merican shaving oil would be buffalo chicken sauce with ranch.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind myself. Where the fuck was I? Oh right, shaving.

I’m fortunate enough to not have much facial hair. It takes me a month to go from clean-shaven to something approximating a goatee or beard. 

It’s the perfect amount of hair growth, because I don’t have to shave every day. If I shave Monday and Wednesday mornings, nobody will be any the wiser. If I then let it go the rest of the week, I might get some comments around closing time Friday afternoon that I’ve got a couple gristles. Not a five o’clock shadow yet, just some noticeable follicles. Actually, I never get a five o’clock shadow. Even if I let it go a week, it comes in scraggly and splotchy like I sent my cheek through chemotherapy. 

So when it comes to the best options for shaving, I never really established a consistent ritual. Through most of my thirties, I gravitated toward the gel that magically turns into foam on your skin. Unfortunately, anything that defies the laws of nature that much wreaks havoc on your pipes. 

And no, that’s not a reference to either my penis or my asshole. There’s a first time for everything.

It was literally my pipes. That gel ends up sticking to everything and clogging the shit out of my drain. It certainly wasn’t the millimetres of follicles going down there. So I switched to shaving in the shower, but the gel doesn’t do well in the wet steam. 

Enter Somerset’s Essential Whatnot and So-forth. You massage it into your skin at the beginning of the shower, then let it work its way in. It starts tingling, feels  like a zesty aftershave, except it’s a slick pre-shave. When the time comes, you lather up a little soap, just not the Dr. Squatch type. I said lather, not leather.

What can I say? The shit works. It’s a weird feeling for someone who thought shaving required a force-field of white goop. It also helps that soap lather is more see through. Who woulda thunk that it would be beneficial to actually see the face while shaving? 

Again, your mileage may vary, especially if you actually grow hair between your neck and ear. But the Somerset’s worked even after No-Shave November when I had an unruly weed-patch growing there, so long as I trim it first.

It doesn’t seem to help after No-Nut November. Although if I needed help with that, I’d feel safer using this than Dr. Squatch’s pine tar. Plus, it tingles!

Lume Deodorant.

Before even trying this product, I was predisposed to hate it.

First of all, it’s named Lume with a fancy little accent on the e. That means it’s either made by a French person or someone who thinks adding random accents to a product make it sound fancier. Like whatever asshole threw that “olde tyme” into his description of shaving oil.

Even worse than its name, this deodorant is goopy, a viscosity reminiscent of snot. When it smudges through three little slivers on top like vomit through your fingers as that last-second dash toward the toilet comes up woefully short. And they expect me to put that on my underarms? Gross. I’m trying to make that area LESS moist, why the fuck would I rub a used handkerchief there.

Handkerchiefs don’t seem to exist anymore, and that’s a good thing. My grandpa always used one. I’ve never understood why we should want to deposit our snots into our pocket for removal later. I’m sure it’s better for the environment than Kleenex, but if I promise to recycle my beer bottles, can I keep the Kleenex? Do earth-hugging communes allow tissue paper? What about toilet paper? I know way too much of our modern society is disposable, but I hope we never have to debate the trade-offs of those two paper products.

Anyway, for ninety percent of my life, I’ve liked precisely one style of substance under my arms: Bone-ass dry. Don’t give me those sprays. Don’t give me those roll-ons. If the process of applying deodorant doesn’t remove some hairs and skin, it’s probably not doing its work.

I also can’t abide by deodorants with smells. I don’t want fresh scent or forest morning or scorched earth. Not even “evergreen musk,” which was the magical manly smell that Bath and Body Works put into my sweater-wearing fox soap. Again, the purpose of deodorant is to remove smell. Replacing it with a different smell doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not fooled by the taxicab air freshener, either.

In fact, most of those scented ones give me a rash before long. Maybe I’ve got sensitive skin. Maybe I’m allergic. For a good portion of my teens and twenties, I used Ladies’ Speed Stick. It’s okay, you can judge. But maybe that’s where my hatred of smells come from, because trust me, the types of scents assigned to most of the Ladies’ Speed Stick varietals aren’t smells a nineteen-year-old dude wants wafting out of his pores. What the fuck is a Pampered Lilac, anyway? Does that mean the flower’s living a cush life? Or is it wearing diapers?

In my adult years, I settled on Arm n’ Hammer. It fits my desire for both lack of smell and dryness. If I could rub actual baking soda on my armpits and be done with it, I would. Preferably with a sweater-clad fox on the front.

Then along came Lume.

“It’s organic,” my wife told me. “It’s hypoallergenically designed by medical professionals.”

“Did they design it to have all the comfort of the Sahara desert?”

“No, but it’s professional OB-GYNs.”

Ummm…. What?

Look, I’m not the manliest man ever. The closest I ever come to standard toxic masculinity is when we’re drafting fantasy football. I prefer mini golf to real golf. When I visited Minneapolis, I took my picture throwing my hat into the air right next to the Mary Tyler Moore statue. I like my beer more nutty than hoppy. I can’t figure out whose ass was more impressive in Demolition Man– Sandra Bullock’s or Sylvester Stallone’s.

Seriously, in those tight-fitting pants, that movie is a monument to two of the best-sculpted asses on the planet. 

With all those facts in her corner, maybe Wife didn’t think I’d blink an eye at a deodorant developed by a gynecologist. The left side of my brain gets it. There are a lot of similarities between the armpit and the crotch. Dank. Moist. Hair for no damned reason. A man’s taint is the only body part that smells worse than his armpit. 

And yet…

There’s a reason things it’s called feminine hygiene. I don’t think I need to give my armpit a morning-after pill.

Although, in all honesty, I’m only showering three times a week during the quarantine. So maybe my armpit DOES need a morning-after pill.

Let’s see, goopy substance with the consistency of snot, designed for vaginas, in my armpits? Sorry, Wife. I tried your all-natural soap with poor results. I tried your olde tyme shaving oil with mixed results. But I think I have to draw the line at…

Whoa, what’s that comfortable tingle? And that pleasant smell? Why are my pits feeling so fresh? And… dry?

Holy crap, y’all. This Lume shit is as pleasant as… okay, maybe not pie, because that wouldn’t really be appetizing. But the goop rubs in as simply as my Arm n’ Hammer, especially if I’ve just gotten out of the shower. Even on day two, it rubs in seamlessly. Sure, in these COVID times, you also might wonder what happens on showerless days three and four? Truthfully, I hit a limit around day three, when I switch back to the baking soda. Lume works great at preventing the funk from happening. When it’s already there, it’s not quite as effective. Sure, I could shower more often, but this is Quarantine Time, baby!

So I guess I stand corrected. The KY works great on my manly-man armpits. But the manly-man soap was unfulfilling. Meanwhile the nonessential but quintessentially British oils are workable and don’t clog my drains. 

Snotty lube is a good deodorant, but coffee grounds should keep their asses in the kitchen. Bare foot and pregnant, yo!

While I’m at it, I’d like to admit one other earlier mistake. 

Sly’s ass is far better than Sandra Bullock’s. 

2020 Virtual Concert Review

· January 5, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , , · One Comment

Last week I wrote about the two aborted concerts that I hoped to attend in 2020. One was from Billy Joel, a tried-and-true entertainer I saw once before when I was in college. The other was Vampire Weekend, a band I wasn’t even aware of a year ago. For obvious reasons, neither concert happened.

But 2020 wasn’t completely devoid of live music. As long as you were willing to watch it on a screen.

So although I didn’t see the two concerts I intended to see, I did manage to watch two concerts in their entirety. Again, one featured old performers that I’ve already been throwing money at for decades, while the other came from a newish band that I’ve always been curious about seeing live.

Preservation Hall. 

I couldn’t make it to New Orleans to watch Vampire Weekend, but at least I could watch a streamed version of a concert for the New Orleans Jazz Preservation Hall. Or maybe it was on PBS. I can’t remember.

Seeing as New Orleans is one of my favorite cities to visit, I’ve watched a few concerts at Preservation Hall. It’s fun to stop in on an afternoon jaunt down Bourbon Street to hear jazz combos similar to my high school jazz band That’s not knock. My high school jazz band was pretty kick-ass. I love me some saxophone, trumpet, and trombone combos. Play me a simplified arrangement of a Count Basie tune, and I’ll happily put off my next hand grenade for twenty minutes or so.

At least I thought it was Preservation Hall I’d frequented on those trips down Bourbon. But now that I looked it up on Google Maps, it might actually be Maison Bourbon, a half-block away from the actual Preservation Hall. Oops.

Regardless, I was happy when they had a benefit concert online, with some really big names. I’m talking Dave Matthews, Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, it was in typical telethon fashion, where they wasted twenty minutes in between each song with interviews and “call in now” and shit. At least I could pause and skip ahead, something my grandparents could’ve only dreamed of back in the Jerry Lewis Labor Day snoozefests. 

Those big-name benefit songs had a very, very pre-recorded feel to them. There were a few, like Dave Grohl and Nathaniel Rateliff, who seemed to take it more seriously, picking their jazzier numbers and talking about the importance of either live music or of preserving olde tyme music. Others seemed to send in whatever promo song they had recorded for charity write-offs. I was looking forward to Elvis Costello and was disappointed when he just played some “songs off his newest album,” aka the part of the concert containing the Great Restroom Exodus.

Everybody on the comment box was pining away for McCartney. Where’s Paul? When will Paul be here? Clearly they haven’t sat through proper telethons. It was obvious he was going to be last, and it was obvious to be as non-specifically for Preservation Hall as it gets. He might’ve done “Hey, Jude.” I don’t remember. And he might or might not have looked two decades younger. At least Elvis had the decency to half-ass a newer song so we knew it was recorded this decade. 

I ended up liking the actual jazz band, who played an occasional song in between the big acts, better than the names that brought me there in the first place. Even so, I didn’t donate. 

I’ll drop some money at Maison Bourbon next time I’m in NOLA and we’ll call it good.

Nathaniel Rateliff. 

Later in the pandemic, Red Rocks in Colorado did an online fundraising concert, as well. Again, a place I’ve been to and enjoyed. And a band I like, as well. Tune me in.

And this was legitimately live. They were literally playing on the stage in front of an empty Red Rocks Amphitheater. You could switch cameras to watch the rocks instead, something I found myself doing when I went there, too. Although I didn’t have to switch cams then, I only had to pivot my neck.

Nathaniel Rateliff has been on my short list for some time. He wasn’t some unknown to top ten skyrocket like those Vampire Weekend upstarts. 

Of course, my first introduction to him was “S.O.B.,” the best drinking song this side of “Tubthumping.” Although neither of those songs should be considered happy drinking song. Maybe thinking enough about booze to want to write a song about it predicates a certain bipolar dependency. But then just when you’re about to commiserate with the artist, right there on the precipice of singing the blues, they bang the door down with a grandiose “fuck it, let’s get blotto.”

With a first song like that, one could understand my hesitation against full-throated bandwagon-jumping. If your initial hit is reminiscent of “Tubthumping,” you’ve gotta worry about being the next Chumbawumba. And how many other Chumbawumba songs have you ever heard? Unfortunately, I’ve heard others, and they need a drink. Holy crap, that’s a bad album.

At least Rateliff seemed to have some musical talent going for him, which was always missing from even the acceptable Chumbawumba song. Something similar could be said about Fun., which you must properly pronounce as “Fun period,” another band with a song that, at first, sounds like a fun (period) song about hanging out with your friends at the bar, something I did the majority of my twenties (and thirties). But on closer listen, it’s closer to a creepy “Every Breath You Take,” with the dude hoping to swoop in on an ex (whom he beat) when she’s drunk at the end of the night. At least Fun. had some good musical talent, but it was all based on something approaching ten-part harmony. Rateliff gets there by himself. With apologies to the Night Sweats.

But still, if you take one look at him, you don’t think rockstar. Or at least not young, eager, carpe-diem rock star. In his first music video, he looked like someone who’s been touring for forty years. Tore up from the floor up. Rode hard and put away wet. Whatever phrase you wanna use, he was no Justin Timberlake.

So somewhat gimmicky song about drinking and looking like he might be dead by the end of the week. I spent most of the last decade on the fringes of fandom. Perhaps appreciation would be the best descriptor. I heard some of his other songs and they all showed promise. What I was waiting for was the staying power. It’s so much easier when the band already has four full albums before I discover them.

Similar to Vampire Weekend, Nathaniel Rateliff’s most recent album (actually his third album, not his second as I originally believed) came out shortly before the pandemic, so I was able to hear the songs as they received copious amounts of radio play. I enjoyed “Baby It’s Alright.” Very bluesy. A ballad. Some vibrato in the voice. Polar opposite of “SOB,” although not really, because you’ve still got the mournful voice, the hurt. There’s a lot lying there underneath the surface. This was no Chumbawumba. This wasn’t even a repeat of Fun. (Am I supposed to put another period if Fun. is at the end of a sentence?).

The final hurdle I needed to pass (aside from buying his albums because that’s what YouTube is for) was to see him live. He definitely seemed to have the vibe of a good live act. I tend to like the acts whose songs are equal parts emotion and talent. Those tend to make the best shows as opposed to, say, a band that’s more concerned with choreography or pyrotechnics. In all honesty, I’m a little worried my current fascination with Vampire Weekend might wane after seeing them live. They seem a wee bit aloof, a sconce “we wrote good songs, so we don’t need to put any emphasis into it. Sing along if you must.”

So the last thing I needed to become a proper Nathaniel Rateliff fan, to finally determine if he’s talent or hack, was to see him live. And if I can see him for free, all the better. 

Oops, was I supposed to donate to Red Rocks while watching the free concert?

And yeah, the dude is solid. He feels every song. He emotes. And he’s no slouch on the guitar, either. I could see him being the kind of guy who would play for three or four hours if the crowd and venue allowed it. With “S.O.B.” it’s clear he’s got some inner demons. It feels like the stage is where he exorcizes them, and he’s all too aware of it.

One oddity was that he appeared to be playing through his entire new album, track by track. I tuned in late, so I don’t know if this was explained or if the first half of the concert was some old stuff. So he never played “S.O.B.”

I bet a lot of artists wish they could do that. After all, the new songs are the ones that mean the most to them. It’s our fault that they keep having to bust out “Freebird.” If we aren’t in the crowd then we can go fuck ourselves if we’re only tuning in for his one hit six years ago.

The weirdest part of the whole concert was that he DIDN’T come out for an encore. What the fuck? Were we not cheering loudly enough at our homes thousands of miles away? What do you want us to do? Pay to get you to…

Oh…

Oh, I think I get it now.

My bad.

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