coronavirus | Frank Scoblete

Irritations

I know I am a grumpy old man, but unlike other grumpy old men I am right in my opinions. That makes all the difference in the world.

***Kars for Kids keeps running its free ad on the radio and sometimes on television. The ad is a simple one; a horrible, mind-numbing ear-worm of a jingle about giving your used, abused, crappy old car to their organization as a charitable contribution. Whoever wrote that jingle and/or arranged the music and/or hired those “children of the damned” to sing the jingle should have something horrible happen to them. Go check out that charity on the Internet and I think you will find it isn’t what you think it is.

***Gold and silver: Here’s another commercial that is constantly irritating me – and I’ve written about this idea a few times but it needs repeating. You take a former star actor, in this case William Devane, and have him spout off about how he votes in elections and how America was strong in the past and basically could kick everybody’s ass. He stands on a battleship to spew his company’s products.

He tells us about the rotten paper money that’s out there and tells us that he invests in gold and silver and he also votes. You can buy these precious metals too. Why would the company he’s hawking sell gold and silver to the rest of us saps and take our crummy almost-worthless money when they have two metals far, far more valuable than the money we are sending them for their gold and silver? Does that make sense to you? Why don’t they keep their gold and silver?

Here’s the pitch: “Send my company your rotten money and we will send you precious gold and silver and, yes, my friends, America will still be able to kick everyone else’s ass. You can bank on that!”

***Vice President versus President? I think the nominee of the Democratic Party for Vice President will actually be the person running against President Trump. Biden is a non-issue in this election. Most people that I have spoken to don’t think Biden will finish his term as President if he wins or he will gradually become the invisible man in the White House.

By the way, Biden looks like the actor Jeff Morrow in the movie This Island Earth. Check out a picture of him!

***I hate the car commercials that always tell you about their special prices and their constant great sales events. Their sales always say that they are giving a huge discount from the “manufacturer’s standard retail price.” Has any car ever been sold at the “manufacturer’s standard retail price?” So you get a discount on a make-believe price that has never been charged to a buyer. Isn’t this as fraud?

***Also about car commercials and real drivers: My wife, the Beautiful AP and I were driving on the parkway to go to a supermarket to buy some food. Given the coronavirus, there were very few cars on the road and those that were there, the drivers were speeding like crazy. The Beautiful AP said, “At those speeds there will be accidents even on relatively empty roads.”

On the way home there it was; a huge three-car accident and it looked as if some people were seriously hurt as their cars were mashed.

The car commercials often praise speed. Enough please! Those idiots speeding risk their own lives but also the lives of innocent drivers.

***And speaking of coronavirus, who are the idiots risking their own and everyone else’s lives by going outside in groups without staying a safe distance from other people? They risk other people’s lives too.

And those idiots are similar to the idiots in your classroom who made it difficult for teachers to teach their lessons. Now those same idiots are on the road, not ruining knowledge for everyone in class, but potentially ruining everyone’s lives.

***Speaking of idiots: What’s with these religious fanatics and their ministers and rabbis and imams who insist on holding services with a congregation in their houses of worship (make that houses of potential death) during the coronavirus outbreak? This is not a religious issue and no one is trying to destroy a religion during the coronavirus pandemic; it is a public health issue that affects everyone, including all the millions of people who are not involved in such religions. Your congregants should stay home and out of your churches and temples.

One televangelist claimed to have “blown the wind of God” at the virus and he asserted that with all the Christians in the country praying, the virus has now been defeated.

Israel had to cordon off the town of Bnei Brak because the ultra-orthodox townsfolk of the area refused to obey the mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the virus. They kept holding their services. Of the 200,000 people in the town 75,000 have already tested positive for the coronavirus at this time. Don’t let these people out. They are clearly dangerous to the rest of the citizenry of Israel.

In Pakistan, Muslim clerics refuse to stop massive prayer gatherings and there is real fear that such gatherings could spell doom for controlling the spread of the virus.

Enough of the idiocy; follow the right thing to prevent the virus from attacking countless people. Your religion is safe but the rest of us want to be safe too. Every believer who sanctimoniously struts about after attending these dangerous services is a threat to everyone they cross. Anyone who dies because of them means these holy-folk have committed murder.

PS: The same applies to those fools who partied on the beaches of America during spring break and the ploppies who held coronavirus parties (yes, people did this!). May they dance their way into an ICU that’s out of respirators.

***I now look at some political celebrities and affix a different career and/or character for them.

Donald Trump: the ever-yabbering time-shares salesman.

Mike Pence: the solemn funeral director.

Joe Biden: your strange uncle who sits in the corner at Thanksgiving looking at everyone because he’s forgotten everyone’s name.

Al Sharpton: a flesh-eating zombie.

Bill O’Reilly: your strange uncle who is always interrupting everyone at Thanksgiving to explain why he is right and everyone in that room and on this planet is wrong.

Andrew Cuomo: the toughest kid in the neighborhood.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: the truly deserving King of the Earth.

Dr. Deborah Birx: the truly deserving Queen of Earth

Joe Scarborough: high school senior who thinks he knows women.

Adam Schiff: your strange bug-eyed uncle who sits in the corner at Thanksgiving whispering to himself.

Rand Paul: Dr. No.

Mitch McConnell: the butcher who enjoys slicing bloody meat.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg: the immortal Hobbit.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez): one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Ilhan Omar: one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Rashida Tlaib: one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Nancy Pelosi: Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.

Ted Cruz: Macbeth in Macbeth.

Bernie Sanders: King Lear in King Lear.

Sean Hannity: Claudius in Hamlet.

Hillary Clinton: Gertrude in Hamlet.

Melania Trump: Ophelia in Hamlet.

Bill Maher: the jester in King Lear.

John Oliver: Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Not everything in this world is nice.”

Long Island, New York, March 2020

We are on lockdown. The coronavirus is rampaging through New York State and the City is the hardest hit area in the country. We have to stay in our house but we can still go food shopping or to the doctor’s office or the hospital if we catch the virus. The more we go out, the better the chance we’ll catch this virus.

I turned to my wife, the Beautiful AP, and said: “I don’t remember anything like this. It’s like being in a science fiction book. The entire world is affected by a virus. It’s horrifying.”

“I’m thrown,” she said. “I don’t feel like myself. We’ve read about stuff like this happening but I never thought it would happen here.”

“This has spooked me,” I said.

“It’s spooked everyone.”

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 1953

I’m playing outside my father’s store at 7007 Third Avenue. I’m six years old, about to be seven.

There’s Lento’s Restaurant on the corner of Third and Ovington avenues; then Todd’s clothing store, then my father’s store, then a dry cleaners and then a grocery store, then Bedell’s pet shop. Across the street are Trunz Bakery and a new pizza parlor that just opened. Pizza was 15 cents a slice. I fell in love with pizza.

The grocery store had just been sold to a group of men who had accents just like many of the men in our neighborhood. But these men were not Italian or Irish or Norwegian like many of the men who had accents. The Norwegians owned the two delicatessens near us. They were very tall and blonde. And there were Pole-axe people in the neighborhood too.

We sat in the backyard yesterday. We have a beautiful deck that we rarely use. We wanted to get some sun. It was a pleasant day, about 60 degrees. We took two Coleman camping chairs outside. We have no furniture on the deck. Why bother? We might sit outside four times in a year. I get the best views of outdoors from my office which is three quarters windows. I spend a lot of hours in my office.

I have three fish tanks in my office: a 20-gallon, a 55-gallon and a 205-gallon. I love fish and have since I was a child.

I bought fish from Bedell’s. My mother always said to me, “You can have one small tank but when you grow up you can have as many tanks as you want.”

I wanted a lot of tanks.

The men who owned the grocery store were quiet. They had crummy-looking tattoos on their arms too; just like Kaplan the butcher, whose store was down the block on 72 Street and Third Avenue. Kaplan the butcher was not quiet. He joked around and complained about everything, even his customers. “They are always complaining and complaining about this, that and everything.”

He and my father were good friends. Kaplan the butcher would always say, “Your father is a great man, Frankie, a great man. Remember that.”

The new owners of the grocery store were very friendly to my father. But they did not talk a lot. A couple of times I saw their wives entering or leaving the grocery store. They were quiet too. I would wave to them and they would wave back. They didn’t smile. They had those tattoos on their arms too, usually covered up. They were the first women I ever saw with tattoos.

I asked my friend Stevie G. about those tattoos. He said, “They were in the Navy. All sailors get tattoos. My uncle has one too but my uncle’s is a woman bending over. It proves they were in the Navy.”

But were women in the Navy? I didn’t know.

One morning I asked my father, “The tattoos those men and Kaplan the butcher have. They are so ugly, just numbers and a letter or two. Why did they get them?”

My father looked at me for a few moments. I was six years old, going on seven. “Frankie, you are right, they are ugly tattoos. They show us that not everything in this world is nice.”

Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, kindle, e-books and at bookstores.

Gambling with Coronavirus

The estimates for how many people will get the coronavirus range from 40 percent to 80 percent. This is the worldwide estimate. Based on our current knowledge of the disease, approximately two percent of the people who get this virus will die.

At first you might think that two percent is a very low number and that we really have nothing to worry about. Not so. Two percent is a large number.

Let us split the difference between 40 and 80 percent of world population getting the virus and calculate the deaths from those numbers. We’ll say 60 percent of the world will be infected. Since there are 7.5 billion people on earth, then 4.5 billion people will get the disease and with a two percent death rate that translates into 90 million people dying.

In blackjack, an advantage player using card counting can expect to earn between one-half and 1.5 percent of the money he wagers. Yes, casinos will throw out a card counter for having that kind of edge over them. Big money can be earned with such a small edge over the casino. So what sounds small is not really all that small. Two percent is a big number.

If your expectation is to die two percent of the time when you switch on a light; you’d probably forgo switching lights on. If you can expect to die two percent of the time when you turn on your car, you’d probably take up walking.

And 90 million people is certainly no small number of deaths.

The population of the United States is 330 million. If 60 percent get the virus that means 198 million Americans will catch it, of which approximately 3,960,000 will die.

Obviously it is important to do everything possible to slow the spread of this virus. A vaccine will take at least a year to get on the market and we have no idea if any of the “anti-virals” about which folks have been talking will work on this disease.

It is up to each one of us, including those sad excuses for intelligent beings partying in the parks, on the beaches, and on the boats, to take seriously the threat to 330 million Americans and those 7.5 billion people on our planet. Distance yourselves, wash your hands, and follow the advice of those who know a lot more about pandemics than we do.

Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, kindle, e-books and at bookstores.