A shot and a chaser

As you may have figured I’ve been watching a movie every Sunday evening for several months now. Many of them are through Fandango because I pay by movie and don’t worry I’ll be charged for a subscription I don’t use. I’ve also used other streaming services, such as the one linked to the Detroit Film Theater. Yesterday, I found the Fandango page for suggestions for LGBTQ movies. There are quite a few! I’ve seen many and many others don’t interest me. And there are a few that look interesting. Such as God’s Own Country. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either, but it got a really high score on Rotten Tomatoes It takes place on a farm in Yorkshire in England, John is the grown son of the farmer, yet his parents still need to nag him to do the various farm chores. He’s so dissatisfied with life he gets drunk every chance he has. Then Gheorghe from Romania is hired to get them through lambing season. The two men spend several days at the sheep camp and fall into sex (like the start of Brokeback Mountain, but with a much better ending). The rest of the movie is about John realizing this is love and he can be an adult. A nice feature of this stories is they weren’t teenagers. Another was there was no big coming out scene with parental or societal rejection. The time at the sheep camp made me think of the usual film tradition that men’s beards don’t grow. They may have a beard, as does Gheorghe, but it doesn’t change. But seriously, while John was at the sheep camp, was he really going to shave every day (or before every scene)? Florida’s Gov. Ron Desantis issued an executive order prohibiting businesses in the state from requiring patrons to show proof of vaccination. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community reported cruise lines are telling the governor if we can’t require our customers to be vaccinated we’re not stopping in Florida. One of the big stories early in the pandemic a year ago was the cruise ship Diamond Princess. A COVID outbreak happened and the ship was banned from several ports. A few other ships wandered the seas for a while, their crew banned from coming ashore. If cruise ships start accepting passengers and there is another outbreak (because passengers mingle with locals at every port) the cruise industry could be done for. But a cruise ship shouldn’t be all that different than planes, trains, taxis, hotels, and restaurants. After another spring break superspreader event Florida’s COVID cases are quickly rising again. Hunter of Kos reported the state also has a big stew of variants of the virus. That combination can be where a variant develops that isn’t affected by the vaccine. Hunter concluded:

Ron DeSantis and other ambitious governors might be swayed by a new lowest-tier goal: Endeavor to, at the least, not run your state so incompetently that a newly arisen COVID-19 variant gets named after your ineptitude. Having the national news report that the "DeSantis variant" is surging through America, in some hypothetical future newscast, would be quite the test of the theory that all publicity is good publicity. Could someone really run for the presidency vowing to stop a virus named after themselves?

I had mentioned that an upcoming hot commodity will be fake vaccine cards. Aysha Qamar of Kos reported a bar owner in California has been arrested for selling fake cards for $20 each. He was caught when he sold a few to an undercover cop. Want to boost the number of people getting vaccinated? Offer free beer. Erie County, NY joined with several brew pubs to offer “a Shot and a Chaser.” Turnout has been quite good. Laura Clawson of Kos reported on and quoted Sarah Jaffe, a teacher who has had quite enough and spelled it all out in a column for The Baffler. Here’s some of what Jaffe wrote:

Get Covid and die, get written about in glowing terms. Collectively refuse to die (or to spread the virus to your students and their families), and your ‘allies’ will begin to threaten you. ... If we, collectively, gave a s--- about kids’ learning conditions, they would not be attending overcrowded schools with lousy ventilation; ancient, crumbling textbooks; ice-cold water in the sinks; and no nurses. Teachers would not be the ones bargaining for smaller class sizes and counselors in the buildings and green space and recess time. They would not be sharing photos of mold and mouse droppings in their buildings online. Or they would, but they’d have actual support from all the current scolds. They wouldn’t have to be superheroes; they could be human, grieving, depressed, struggling, messy, and mortal like the rest of us.

Clawson started another post with:

Let’s hope this is one of the hot trends of May 2021—the media is noticing how congressional Republicans are promoting funding from the American Rescue Plan despite having voted against the law. The Associated Press is on the story, with a bluntly accurate headline: "Republicans promote pandemic relief they voted against."

Kerry Eleveld of Kos gives us a chance to compare and contrast. Moscow Mitch is calling Sen. Joe Manchin a guardian of democracy. He has also said there would be zero GOP support for any of Biden’s proposals and that 100% of his focus is on stopping Biden. Manchin was asked about all that and managed to say:

I just hope they help me a little bit in bipartisanship. That’s all.

Eleveld added:

Don't give us assurances, Joe, just show us the votes. That’s all.