Rant #2,522: Here There and Everywhere

Today, I have decided to be here, there and everywhere with my entry that I present to you now.
 
I have just decided that is more fun to do it that way today, to see how one topic rolls right into another so seamlessly.
 
So her goes …
 
Congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers for their World Series championship, their first one in more than 30 years.
 
They were the best major league team during this horrid season, so they deserved to win it all.
 
And kudos for the Tampa Bay Rays, MLB’s second best team, for making it as far as they did.
 
But the whole thing was tainted to begin with, because this season was such a disaster from the get go, shaped by the coronavirus to such a degree that the 60-game season truly resembled a real-life version of Strat-O-Matic baseball.
 
And then to further taint it, we have Justin Turner, one of the heroes of the Dodgers’ season, decide right then and there that even though he had tested positive for coronavirus, he was going to soak up the team’s victory just like his other teammates, and he palled around with them, took a team picture with them, hugged them, etc.
 
The circumstances behind his positive test are kind of murky anyway, and MLB has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. Evidently, as all players were being tested on a regular basis, his test somehow came up murky and had to be redone, and he and the Dodgers and MLB found out at the later stages of the final game of the World Series that he had tested positive.
 
Now MLB and the Dodgers already knew there was a problem with his test, so why was he allowed to play Game 6 to begin with? Why was he even in the dugout, or anywhere near the team with a murky test?
 
Now, he has canoodled with teammates, the Rays, other personnel … they are going to all have to be tested to see if they got the virus, presumably from Turner.
 
People are going crazy stating the Dodgers should be fined, and that Tuner—who refused any attempt by personnel to stay away from the team once the positive test was received—should be suspended for the 2021 season, but shouldn’t MLB also ask itself why, with a questionable test at hand and a retest not yet completed, why they allowed Turner to even be in the stadium for what became the clinching game of the series?
 
But this behavior by Turner, and the total disregard for any safety by the team and his teammates in general, should not be a surprise to anyone, based on a new Center For Disease Control (CDC) survey.
 
According to the just released survey, while mask wearing has increased since the coronavirus took hold of our country in March and April, people between the ages of 18 and 29 are the group that are the least likely to follow safety protocols and wear masks.
 
Yes, the coronavirus did not hit this group as hard, at least at the beginning, as it did other age groups, but the lack of adherence to the basic safety policies put in place to protect all of us may be directly linked to this younger group, who at first spread the virus without getting it, and now, are beginning to register as people who are getting the virus at alarmingly high rates.
 
Turner is 35 years old, so he is a few years out of that group, but how many of his teammates are right smack dab in the middle of that now highly infected group?
 
And that leads us to early voters, who have been panicked into voting early by being told that they are protecting themselves from the coronavirus by doing so, but are finding that not only aren’t they protecting anyone by voting early, but they are wasting valuable time in trying to vote before Election Day.
 
In a ploy to bring out the Democratic vote, the media has scared the public into thinking that if they vote early, they will avoid large crowds trying to vote on Election Day, and thus, lessen the possibility of getting the virus.
 
But early voters have found that the early voting lines are long, people are standing on top of each other and are not social distancing, and that they are wasting hours and hours on these lines.
 
So why vote early, when there is absolutely not evidence that voting on the proper Election Day is going to be any better or worse than it normally is during the presidential election?
 
Again, studies have shown that at least two-thirds of people voting early back Democrat Joe Biden and the party in general, so there you go, it has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It is to give the Democratic challenger a real head of steam and a big lead going into the real Election Day.
 
And then we have our poor children, who will never know the real joys of Halloween, and certainly won’t experience that this year, with warnings to not go trick or treating.
 
Look, Halloween has been a joke since adults began to co-opt the holiday as their own beginning in the 1990s or so, when they took over the holiday from the kids and made the day into some adult fantasy dress-up holiday.
 
When that happened, the holiday was pulled from under the kids’ feet, and the holiday has never been the same since.
 
And now, we are being told that it is not safe for kids to go from house to house, from door to door, with their bags open and our sweet tooths ready to chomp on the sweet stuff.
 
I mean, a lot of these kids can’t even go to school the right way anymore, and now their holiday is being completely swiped from them.
 
How sad that is.
 
And this dovetails right into Thanksgiving, a holiday where the family is the real centerpiece, and we are being told these gatherings are not safe either.
 
Yes, whatever your feelings on the virulence of this virus, we are being brainwashed into thinking that the only safe thing to do is literally to sit in our houses with our hands folded and not to move,
 
One wrong more could give us the coronavirus, or so we are being told.
 
Human beings are social people, and you just can’t tell people not to get together on a holiday like Thanksgiving … and wait until Christmas! What will the verdict be then?
 
Yes, some people want us to be automatons, but sorry, all the controlling nonsense is not going to end this virus, a malady which I think has been milked to the hilt by some people who have great influence on us.
 
I don’t claim that this scourge doesn’t exist; it does.
 
But I do think that we are being over-done with the safety stuff, and the backlash is being felt now, as more and more people are canoodling as we enter the most social part of the calendar year—and the number of people getting this disease, mostly mildly or barely not at all, is rising each and every day.
 
So have a good day, stay healthy, but don’t believe everything you read or are told by our very unreliable national media and our leaders who buy into all of this.
 
A lot of it is filled with a lot of hooey, and I do think people are beginning to see through a lot of it, to a certain degree, but when I see people waiting on line to vote for hours on end, I know that a lot of the mind control and brainwashing has, sadly, worked its magic.
 
I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I won’t be writing a column on Friday.
 
So have a great weekend, as good a Halloween as possible—“Abbott Costello Meet Frankenstein,” here I come!—and don’t forget to set the clocks back on Sunday morning.
 
Speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #2,521: The Finish Line

 

Today is a big, stupendous day in my life.
 
Wednesday, October 28  is the day that I am formally, officially, retired.
 
My retirement was actually official on September 1, but the way the government handles Social Security is that you skip a month to get paid, and then they pay you based on your birth date.
 
Thus, since I was born on the 28th of April, my first payment is October 28, and bingo!, today is that day, so today I am officially retired, at least in my mind and in my pocketbook.
 
My payments will then revert to the usual payment schedule after that, and I will be receiving my next payment on November 3.
 
So, the saga that began on October 10, 2019—the day the company I worked for since 1996 went out of business after months of teetering on the brink—has officially ended.
 
I did not want to retire, I really didn’t, but job market conditions forced me to do so against my will.
 
I could not fight complete and total apathy against older workers, nor could I fight the coronavirus. These were two incredible obstacles that I had to face head on, and while I knew that the former would thwart my chances—and I knew it even years before I lost my job—I, or should I say we, had no idea that a medical situation would throw the entire world into total chaos like it did.
 
So here I was, fighting to find a job and doing it completely and totally alone. I put up a good front, did my best to find something—yes, I did my due diligence—filled out all the forms the state required of me via my contract with them to find a job, but it simply was not in the cards.
 
I contacted everyone I knew who I thought could help me—friends, relatives, former fellow employees—but absolutely nothing worked.
 
So in between looking for a job, I did so many other things to fill up my time.
 
I helped my elderly parents with whatever they needed me to do. I helped out my own family with whatever they needed me to do.
 
I wrote a novel. I picked up on my hobby of record collecting, and digitized hundreds of record albums and singles.
 
And when people were crying that they were bored when the pandemic struck and they were at home looking at the walls, I had had a head start on all of this, and I was as busy as a bee, and I put up a couple of videos on Facebook to attest to that fact.
 
Sure, there were days that I had no idea what I was going to do next—and that was at 8 a.m. in the morning—but on other days, I was never, ever bored.
 
The worst part of the whole year-long ordeal is that I had to watch my son be put on furlough from a job he loved, sit on the couch watching TV waiting patiently for the call to come back, and then being told six months after the fact that he did not have a job.
 
Not only didn’t he have a job, but he had no social activities, all of them canceled due to coronavirus concerns.
 
Now, at least, some of those activities have come back, and he has something to look forward to, but as far as getting another job, we have been everywhere, done everything we could do, spoken to people who might be able to help him, joined all the job groups for those with disabilities, but right now, he still has nothing.
 
So it is déjà vu all over again for me, as I go through the same thing with my son as I went through myself.
 
But maybe there is hope, based on my own circumstances.
 
Nearly at the end of my unemployment and with nowhere else to go, to apply to, and no one else to speak with, I was contacted by a former Pentagon executive who had taken over the trade association covering military resale—military stores including commissaries and exchanges—and he told me that he needed a writer who could cover the industry on a freelance, remote, basis.
 
He remembered my work for the past nearly quarter century, where I covered that industry, and he thought I would be a good fit for this job, which I could do at home.
 
We agreed to a salary—something that would not throw my Social Security retirement payments into a dither—and I was on contract with them.
 
I went right to work, and have been working for them for a few weeks now. The work is fun, the work can be strenuous, and while I came to them cheap, it was nice to get my first paycheck a few weeks back.
 
It is a nice job to have for right now, and while I am on contract, I hope it lasts into the foreseeable future.
 
It isn’t the job I hoped to get, buck heck, did it come at the right time!
 
So I hope it is déjà vu all over again for my son, who maybe can get something like I have on a part-time basis, which he was working on when he was furloughed.
 
Hopefully, with all the work we have put into finding him something, that job is just around the corner for him.
 
I hope so … I really do … he needs to go back to work as soon as possible.
 
I said the exact same thing to myself during the past year, and while it became nothing more than a pipe dream for me until the very end, I hope it turns into a cornucopia of plenty for my son.
 
He doesn’t deserve to be where he is now, and my wife and I are hoping for the best for him.
 
And speaking of my wife …
 
She has been the true “Rock of Gibraltar” for myself and my family during this crisis time.
 
Without her, I don’t know where I would be or our son would be.
 
She has worked on the front lines during the coronavirus period as a bank teller, and don’t tell me that what she is doing is not on the front lines. It is, and has been during this entire horrible situation that we are in.
 
People spit at her, they put gum in the ATM machines to vent their frustration, they tell her off as if she can do anything about their inane personal situations, and yes, she has been exposed to the coronavirus, and we have all had to be tested.
 
Happily, we are fine, but don’t tell me that she hasn’t been on the front lines as much as any essential worker, because she has been.
 
She, herself,  will probably be retiring in the coming months, and it will be a well-earned retirement. At least she will be able to go out on her own two legs, unlike myself, who had my legs taken out from under me when my company tanked.
 
But back to today …
 
This ends up a grand day for me, and while I do wish that I didn’t have to go through what I ultimately did to reach this day, I thank God for my family—including my parents, and yes, I do wish my recently deceased father was here today to enjoy this day with me—my extended family, and my friends, without whom I could not have gotten to this point in one piece.
 
And yes, I thank you, the readers of this Blog, who have also helped get me through the muck and mire that I have been through.
 
Thanks to all, and to all a good day!

Rant #2,520: You Talk Too Much

Sometimes you have to have chutzpah to make a certain point and/or to get something concrete done, and I certainly understand that.
 
That is when chutzpah is a good thing.
 
But when you use chutzpah to soothe and boost your own already over-inflated ego, it is a bad thing, and very bad thing, and what’s more, it makes you into a bigger moron than you already are.
 
And yes, that is what New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio did yesterday with his idiotic in and out responses to the sale of the impending sale of the New York Mets to hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen.
 
DeBlasio, who has demonstrated not only no aptitude at all for the position he has spent nearly two terms in and with an ego that inflates seemingly each and every minute of the day, chimed in yesterday on the sale of the Mets, and rather than give his full endorsement to a measure that will help improved New York City’s standing once the pandemic is over, he instead demonstrated that his ego continues to grow at an enormous rate.
 
He told reporters that he isn’t going to give a carte blanche endorsement of Cohen as the new owner until city lawyers went through every layer of documents that they could to make sure that Cohen is the real deal.
 
The mayor said he has to do this because technically, the Mets’ park, CitiField in Queens, is situated on New York City land, so in essence, the city owns the land, so it also owns the park that sits on it, so he has to go through such an ownership to keep the integrity of the deal in place as a benefit to New Yorkers.
 
Yes, I am sure his lawyers vetted the paperwork to allow protestors to destroy the city too.
 
What’s more, deBlasio’s idiotic tactics—which I don’t remember any mayor invoking during other ownership changes in sports teams, including such changes made by the Yankees, the Knicks and the Rangers, and the Nets during the past 50 or more years—appeared to be nothing more than an effort to get his name in the paper for something that he has little or nothing to do with, as he even said that the change in ownership is a formality and that he hopes it happens quickly.
 
Tell that to all the restaurant owners and owners of other establishments in the city who waited months—and some are still waiting—to open their doors to the public as he dragged his feet during the past six months.
 
But he really hit the nail on the head when he stated, “You know how I feel about billionaires,” referencing Cohen, who made his money on hedge funds,
 
Yes, and what are your feelings about millionaires who paint “murals” while the city falls to the ground?
 
DeBlasio is a real piece of work, but heck, New York City voters elected this guy not once, but twice, so I guess you pay what you get for … and he is a Red Sox fan to boot, hates the Yankees, and has little love for the team from Queens.
 
Cohen is no angel, either, and even though he was never convicted of a crime, his company was fined over $1 billion for improprieties several years ago/
 
And when I hear the tem “hedge fund,” I think of Bernie Madoff, who the Mets ownership was involved with. When Madoff fell, all the greedy investors fell with him, and the Mets fell into an abyss that they still were drowning in until Cohen supposedly came to the rescue.
 
City officials are trying to cover up the mayor’s snarky responses to the impending sale, stating that he was not acting in an official capacity when he made the remarks, and it is not New York City policy to get so involved in such deals.
 
But for the mayor of the world’s most important city to chime in on this deal like he did, completely out of the blue, really demonstrates that his ego wasn’t satiated when he had the audacity to run for president several months ago, believing that the way he ran New York City—pretty much into the ground—would be a perfect fit to lead our country.

 
While New York City voters evidently aren’t very bright, others saw through his imbecility, and he had as much chance of getting the Democratic nod as I did, and he was quickly banished back to New York City, where he subsequently let the city he is running crash and burn.

(And it is interesting to add as a sidelight that the Wilsons, the family who is seeking to sell the Mets to Cohen, was a major financial contributor to deBlasio's failed presidential run. Hmmmm ... .)
 
As a Yankees fan, I almost have to laugh at all of this nonsense, but when I see what deBlasio has already done to the city he is supposed to be leading, I really almost have to cry at his scare tactics, sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.
 
And I have one further question for deBlasio, which I would ask him when he finally realizes that his comments about the Mets’ sale have absolutely no weight in the matter, even though it probably boosted his enormous ego.
 
And that question is this:
 
“Where and when are you going to paint the next “mural?”

I guess I have a lot of chutzpah myself ... .

Rant 2,519 : Don't Stand So Close To Me

Election Day is on Tuesday, November 3.
 
Or is it?
 
This year in particular, the importance of that date has been completely diluted by alternative methods to vote in the presidential election, including by mail and with early voting.
 
I would not trust the mail vote with my precious vote. There a so many variables that can happen to a mail-in vote that anybody using this method is really tempting fate.
 
To begin with, mail-in voting should only be used by those who have no alternative, the infirm and the elderly in particular, to get their vote counted. Those in nursing homes, those that are bedridden and confined to their homes, those overseas serving our country in the military and other overseas posts and those who simply cannot leave their homes on their own to vote are the only ones who should be using mail-in voting.
 
But of course, we have people who skirt that issue, claim that this is the only way they can vote, and do it simply because they are lazy ... and simply because some of them don't want to chance it that they will have to provide documentation that they are valid voters.
 
Mail-in voting is far from fool-proof.  Ballots are regularly sent to dead people, non-citizens, people leave out information on these ballots, making them invalid, and multiple ballots are also sent out to the same name. I have said this before, and I will say it again: during this year’s dry run for mail-in ballots on Long Island, during the school board elections, my wife received two ballots were her name on each one.
 
It is bad enough for that type of election, but what about a presidential election? Is it fair and right to either candidate that people are filling out multiple ballots?
 
And then we have early voting, the latest canard thrown onto the public by the media, who have assured us that there will be so many people voting on the actual Election Day, and so much chaos as a result, that we actually MUST vote early when that option becomes available—as it did in New York State this past weekend—to avoid potential disaster.
 
And what’s more, the scientists out there in the media had proclaimed that we have less of a chance getting the coronavirus if we vote early, so if you don’t want to get the disease, don’t vote on Election Day, vote NOW.
 
Of course, anybody with a head on his or her shoulders knows that this is all balderdash, but we have become so used to being programmed like robots since March by our elected officials and the media that many of us shiver in our boots when they hear about the possibilities, and claim that they MUST OBEY, and like sheep, fall into line.
 
Here is what I wrote on Facebook yesterday about this subject:
 
“Can somebody please explain to me why people are choosing to vote early?
 
If they are trying to avoid coronavirus contact, they appear to be waiting on long, long lines seemingly without end, standing with hundreds of like-minded people, so how is waiting three or four hours on a line with others preferable to going to vote on Election Day?
 
And how many of these people have gone to their local Target or supermarket during the height of the coronavirus? They weren't worried about picking up the coronavirus when they were shopping for a necessity ... like let's say a bottle of ketchup?
 
So the argument that voting early will prevent the virus from spreading is idiotic, so I ask again, what is the benefit of voting early?
 
Someone please explain this to me ... if you can.”
 
So several people did just that.
 
They told me they wanted to avoid long lines on Election Day, they told me that they wanted to avoid getting the coronavirus, they told me that it was just easier for them to vote now and avoid the problems that the media has told them about if they chose to vote on the actual Election Day.
 
I continued my Facebook post:
 
“There is going to be a wait whether you do it today, tomorrow or on Election Day. In Newsday today, the editorial said voting early prevents the spread of the virus.
 
This is pure nonsense, but honestly, it is pretty obvious why the media is promoting this way of voting, and it is disgraceful how they believe this benefits Biden and that is why it is being promoted like it is. Is it to prevent the spread of the virus or to benefit the Democrats? What is it? I will vote like I normally do on Election Day. Period.”
 
I watched several different TV news reports on Saturday, and not only did I not see a single instance of social distancing on any of the lines I saw, but I also saw reporters standing parallel to the lines doing their reporting, with the lines in back of them, and the reporters stating that people were social distancing on the lines, but on the lines right in back of them, viewers did not see any social distancing at all, with people waiting on line on top of each other.

So once again, are reporters actually doing reporting, or are they playing up the current narrative that we are being force fed about early voting preventing the spread of the virus?

That being said, although some respondents downplayed the notion that early voting benefits the Democrats, I have heard one polling expert after another proclaim just what I said, that two-thirds to three-quarters of people voting early will be voting Democrat, simply based on the roles of those choosing this voting option.
 
The last I heard, 57 million people are voting early across the country, which means that perhaps 38 million have cast a vote for the Democrats,
 
Since evidently most of those voting on Election Day are presumably Republican, you can see how this benefits the Democrats right out of the gate, and if this is true, well, where is the level playing field here?

And it also wrongly paints the Republicans as troublemakers and intimidators, so why would any self respecting Democrat want to vote on Election Day when they are going to confront such ugliness on that day?

 
I ended my participation in this Facebook post with the following, which I know is so Pollyanna-ish, but it is really what I truly believe. Others continued the post, and if I knew how to shut off the posting to this subject, I would do so, because for once, I wanted the final word on the matter.
 
So here is what I said, and this will conclude what I have to say about this subject:
 
“Whatever the case, I think to sum up, VOTE!
 
Not voting, and then complaining about who is running things, is a waste of time and energy.
 
Just go out and vote!
 
Funny, the first thing I ever had published was when I was I think five years old, I was in kindergarten, and I wrote something about voting for P.S. 165's (Flushing, New York) fall literary publication.
 
Funny, at five years old, I think I got it:
 
"You vote. I vote, We all vote."
 
That is what I wrote, and it is funny how the little kid in me got it better than some adults ever did.”