Mean Tweets
17/10/21 08:19
Just when I think I'm kicking butt and taking names with my new online word unscramble game in the New York Times, "Spelling Bee", they seem to have made some changes behind the scenes that make the game more challenging. More to the point, getting the "Genius" rating is more of an uphill battle than it was just last week. What kind of bait and switch bitch did I buy into here? Just when I was starting to feel all smart and everything they come along and change the rules up on me.
I'm guessing they received a lot of feedback from their regular readers that this particular game was maybe too easy and maybe not consistent with what their everyday readers expect from the lauded paper of record, the New York Times. Maybe the paper underestimated just how many of their regular readers would end up playing this game. I am not a regular reader of the paper but the missus is so I get to play the games while she reads whatever it is that she reads.
Nonetheless, the changes they made in the dark of night make it not only more difficult to achieve a "genius" rating but it has tripled the number of words that I consider words that I would never get in a million years playing the game. You know which ones you didn't get because they list all of the words the following day and there are little checkmarks next to the ones you were successful in unscrambling and there are no checkmarks next to the ones you didn't get.
I'm no wordsmith but even I found words from time to time that were not in the mix that I thought should have been in the mix. Since when is "pentangle" not a word? Clearly, I was able to make the word from the letters provided. But when I went to spell out the word, it wasn't recognized as a valid word. I sent off an e-mail to the people at the paper who encourage players of the daily "Spelling Bee" game to contact them if and when you think they missed a word.
I never did hear back from the good folks at the New York Times. Either they were too embarrassed to admit that they missed such an obvious word or they just thought that flooding the zone with inane words in daily games going forward would do the trick. I can see them sitting around in a room reading my e-mail and contemplating the following response. "He wants pentangle, we'll give him pentangle." "He can stick his pentangle up his bloody arse." Be nice.
While I'm thinking about it, I should impose a time limit on myself. I typically get about 90% of the words I need to achieve "genius" level in the first 20 minutes of play. That's the low hanging fruit I've referred to in past posts. Much of that low hanging fruit, as it were, is made up of four-letter words. We're not talking "supercalifragilisticexpialidocous" here. Knowing full well that I'll pick up where I left off sometime during the day, I'm happy to have a fresh look at the letters after I've cleared my head a little bit.
What I'm finding now that they've made the game more challenging, is that I'm spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get a very small number of words that will put me over the top. Maybe I should be less concerned with getting to the "genius" level and more concerned about spending too much time on the game. We all want those things we can't have, though, so I'm not likely to leave any stones unturned in my search for the words that will help me get to my goal. Who gives up at "awesome" when you know "genius" is right around the corner? What fool does that?
I see that Merck, the pharmaceutical company, is now approaching the FDA seeking emergency authorization to put their "Covid" pill on the market. The Wall Street Journal is calling this pill a potential "game changer." I think Merck put a stop to the clinical trials when it was clear that any delay in getting it into the hands of the consumer, with its obvious efficacy now well documented, would simply be unethical.
If the FDA turns down Merck's request, which I believe it will because of their financial backroom deals and commitments to Pfizer and perhaps Moderna, that will tell you all you need to know about just how politicized this process has become.The politicians in power are simply too invested, and the financial windfalls to which they are married too vast, to allow another player on to the field. This, mind you, is at the expense of the American people and people around the world whose lives could be saved by this miracle drug.
If you have a bottle of pills by your bedside that you can tap when you feel the virus coming on, what does that mean for the worldwide effort to get the jab into everyone's arm at any expense? What would that mean for the hospitals, funeral homes, and doctors offices across the globe who have been incentivized to classify every death as a Covid death in order to get reimbursed at astronomical rates only seen during a pandemic? Did I mention that the Biden Administration purchased 1.7 million of these pills?
For those of us who have and have not yet taken the jab, there are still open questions about what it is exactly that they are wanting to put in our bodies so badly. So badly, in fact, that they are willing to shut down our economies in order to see that their mandates are adhered to? So badly that they are willing to look the other way when their constituents take to the streets with their placards, their face masks, and their pitchforks. So badly that even after it has been proven that once vaccinated you can both contract and transmit the virus, they not only keep the mandates in place but they double down on putting the jab in not only more arms but younger and younger arms.
I was telling the missus that if Trump were president he would not tolerate any of this mandate nonsense for a minute. We wouldn't have a mandate. It's that simple. Trump would approve this Merck pill in a heartbeat. Our economy would be off and running and we wouldn't be in the middle of a dumpster fire like we are now with Biden in office.
We wouldn't have hundreds of container ships sitting off our shores waiting on the unions or whomever to come unload and distribute the goods across our fruited plains. We wouldn't have hundreds of planes sitting on the tarmac in city after city whose pilots are refusing to take to the air due to their unwillingness to take the jab. When you consider the various groups involved in this movement pushing back against the radical Biden mandates including everybody from rock stars like Eric Clapton to basketball stars and now airline pilots, I think we're seeing the genesis of a star-studded solidarity movement.
Think of all the policemen who would still be on the job were it not for the insanity of the mandates and the unwillingness of our politicians to respect our desires for individual freedom when it comes to taking the jab. The list doesn't stop there. There are teachers, nurses, and god only how many other occupations in the mix. You have to respect people who stand up for what they think is right and who are willing to give up their livelihoods in order to not bend to the will of either government or the corporations who do their bidding. It is an immense sacrifice. God bless them all.
In Bernie Sander's world, the citizenry standing in bread lines for hours on end is preferable to allowing the rich to have easy access to goods and services while the less well off in our society go hungry. One has to wonder, with all of the supply chain issues now in the news, and the Biden Administration now warning people that they may not get what they want for Christmas, if these shortages aren't a creation of Bernie Sanders or someone like Bernie Sanders pulling strings behind the scene to create the very bread lines that Bernie and his comrades lie awake at night dreaming about.
Is this a problem created by Biden so that Biden can take credit for solving the problem that he created? I know how that sounds and it's hard to believe that a president, even an illegitimate president like Biden, would be so brazen and bold to even think about doing such a thing. I've heard people say that rationing cards are coming next and that wouldn't surprise me. Would it surprise you if I told you that in order to get that rationing card you will have to be vaccinated?
There are others who think that everything we're seeing coming out of the Biden Administration is a result of sheer incompetence. That makes perfect sense to me knowing that Joe Biden was probably the most incompetent of Senators during his fifty years in the Senate. Why would that change with his moving just up the street to his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
I mean, literally, everything he touches turns to shit. It's worth remembering that one of his very first acts as president was to put a stop to the construction of an oil pipeline that employed thousands of people and put America on track to be energy independent for the first time in our country's history.
I have a good mind to go shopping today to see what, if any, impact that these supply chain issues are having at the local supermarket. I've been a little surprised in some of my more recent shopping outings to find some things maybe barely in stock or not in stock at all. I'm talking about things like frozen blueberries. Have blueberries become the modern day version of the canary in the coal mine? I think I need more evidence.
If I notice that things are on the wane, I may start putting things in my cart willy nilly just because I can. Assuming that the store is open, and that is never a sure bet these days with Biden paying people to stay at home, I have the time and inclination to do what I need to do at the store.
Mrs G has been complaining that she hasn't been able to find her caramel nips anywhere so I'll see if my local store has any while I'm stocking up on other things usually found in that particular aisle. I've grabbed every last box in sight in past visits since I think other people may be doing the same thing which is why I'm not expecting to find any during my visit today. This is what happens when you have excess demand and a limited supply of any one particular product or item. I've even looked on Amazon for the nips but there were none to be found.
I've also not seen any panic buying in our local stores so that's good. If that happens, we'll see signs up in every aisle limiting customers to one or two, maybe three or four if I'm lucky, of this and that item. Some signs may well read, "while supplies last." In the not too distant past, I noticed that they were limiting customers to one container of dishwashing soap. That was completely unexpected.
I made a mental note to shop for my dishwashing soap elsewhere and just kept walking down the aisle. The odd thing was that the only item with a limit of sorts was the dishwashing soap. Even stranger than that was the fact that they had what appeared to be a plentiful supply of the soap so it was, well, weird. These sorts of scarcity issues, in addition to the unavailability of people willing to do the work, might well explain why stores and restaurants are either closed or open for an abbreviated number of hours on any given day. Anyone miss the mean tweets yet?
Fast forward 24 hours and I can now report out on my visit to the supermarket. The store itself was not overly crowded when I arrived around noon. That is not when I typically go shopping so maybe it was crowded for noontime and maybe it wasn't. Not surprisingly, they still had no frozen blueberries. Normally, you can find the generic brands but they too were nowhere to be found. I didn't notice any empty shelves or seriously depleted stocks of any one item. The milk that I like to buy, which is always in short supply, was in short supply today and I took the last four containers.
I surreptitiously eyed baskets here and there looking for hoard-able items like toilet paper, etc. Again, nothing seemed out of place. It was only when I went to check out that I noticed that people and their carts were backing up at the small handful of open aisles where I might have expected more aisles to be open. I also noticed that the carts lining up at the open aisles were filled to the brim with groceries. Finally, the first sign of panic buying. What or who were they listening to in the privacy of their homes or cars that prompted them to come to this particular store today to do a little panic shopping?
Were they buying into the claptrap that inflation was driving prices up not by the week or the day but by the hour and they wanted to get their shopping in while the prices were low? There is nothing like the threat of prices being more expensive tomorrow to get you to splurge today. Maybe, like me, they watched in horror on the telly as the container ships backed up at our country's ports and, with nobody to unload them, who knows when, or if, the goods would ever end up on the shelves of our local stores.
Maybe they had a chance to catch one or more of demented Joe Biden's speeches about any one of the many horror shows he's created and they decided that our days as a civilized country are numbered. You go back to the basics and that all starts with being able to feed your family. That's job numero uno. I'm getting frazzled sitting here just thinking about it. There is also a helter-skelter quality about the things that people put in their shopping carts when they're shopping for what they think are end times.
You know you've outdone yourself when the bagger gives up on trying to organize your purchases and just starts filling bags as fast as he or she can with whatever he or she can grab off the conveyor belt. It's a fools errand to try and bag up cold thing with cold things and hot things with hot things. There simply isn't enough time. Any residual guilt you might be feeling about having depleted stocks at the expense of your fellow hoarders starts to fade as you place your final purchase on the conveyor belt.
You save the heaviest item for last. It's a 5-lb bag of Carolina rice. That, and some dried beans you have left over from the last pandemic, will suffice as sustenance during the hardest of hard times which you hope will never come. Optimism is hard to come by in Joe Biden's America in the year of our Lord, 2021.
You gird yourself for the final obstacle course which has you pushing a top heavy cart of groceries out of the store and out and around people and vehicles before arriving at your final destination. Never mind that people heading into the store look at you, and then your cart, and wonder to themselves if they didn't wait too long to do their shopping. You can watch in real time as they quicken their pace and beat a more determined path to the entrance of the store. You can see the panic setting in. The things those cashiers must see in the course of their day.
The missus and I were just finishing a little dinner the other day when we got a call from Mrs G. She had broken down by the side of the road while driving home and was now just waiting for AAA to send along a tow truck driver. The good news is that she was using her cell phone to reach out to us to let us know of her predicament. She actually had the presence of mind to take her phone with her when she left home which is not, incidentally, always the case. It's not that she's not mindful of such things, or forgetful of such things as it were, but rather she simply isn't in the habit of carrying around her cell phone. That probably goes with the territory for people of her generation.
By the time she called us, Mrs G had made all the necessary calls and she had taken all the necessary precautions that you might otherwise expect someone to take who was in her situation. In fact, she wasn't necessarily even asking that we do anything to lend a hand. It was all over but the waiting. She was in good spirits otherwise and not overly concerned one way or another about her own welfare, her car, or the fact that nightfall was imminent. That's me saying in a roundabout fashion saying that Mrs G is no shrinking violet. No sireee, Bob.
The missus and I decided fairly quickly that it was probably not a good idea to leave a woman her age, and we're talking about Mrs G here, sitting by the side of the road in a broken down vehicle with nightfall just around the corner. There are simply too many stories of people in a situation like that who end up in a bad way for one reason or another. One fella did stop by and was good enough to take a quick look beneath the hood but went along on his way after offering his unsolicited assessment. Mrs G had a bit of a bone to pick with the people in a building adjacent to where she had broken down since not a soul came out to offer any help. The nerve!
We contemplated for a moment or two that the Ev man might be able to go sit with her but, not knowing what he might be in the middle of, we didn't want to put any pressure on him to do something that he was not otherwise inclined to do. We certainly didn't want or need him driving bleary eyed across town only to show up at the scene with a teeter in his step and a half cocked smile on his face reminiscent of some Cheech and Chong album cover from back in the sixties. I don't know that that would ring any bells with Mrs G but we weren't taking any chances.
It wasn't long after we arrived that the tow truck driver showed up. I was telling the missus on the way over there that the best case scenario was that we would arrive at the same time as the tow truck driver. We went back and forth a little bit about who would stay with the car while the other drove Mrs G home but it turned out to be moot point when we saw the flashing lights of his flat bed truck coming round the corner. The last little bone I had to pick with Mrs G is that she could only muster a $5 tip for the tow truck driver. I thought he deserved more but my pleas fell on deaf ears. Oh, well.
There are just a couple more items I want to chat about before clocking out on this week's blog. One, is the bizarre anger we see coming from Biden when he's reading off the teleprompter. This is something new. First, it was the weird whispering. The country saw that and must have wondered what the fuck they were seeing. Is this Joe off his meds? Maybe, just maybe, this is Joe on his meds. He's still whispering so we've come to accept that it is just part and parcel of his overall affect when he speaks. It's not less weird, it just is what it is.
The anger is new and maybe just a little alarming. He actually looks a little like Hitler without the mustache when he's all worked up and pumping his fists and grimacing like a madman at the podium. This is serious businesss, folks. The other word that comes to mind is "unhinged." I mean we're talking off the rails unhinged. If I saw a foreign leader speaking like this I would be no less alarmed and might even question the people who voted he or she into office. You expect a certain civility out of your elected officials and when you see just the opposite it makes for a worrisome event.
What is he so angry about anyway? Is he trying to compensate for his otherwise feeble demeanor? Does he think that expressing anger like a bloody and demented old fool will somehow move people to do what it is that he is wanting him to do? He's out there on the stump trying to make the case for the boondoggle of a bill he and progressives are trying to pass and his fiery tirades are doing more to alienate people than anything else.
Did I mention that his approval numbers are in the mid thirties? Watching old films of Hitler from the 30's and 40's in pre-war Germany is probably not something that you want to try to emulate. Does Sleepy Joe even know how that movie ends? I suppose his handlers can only do so much in the hours and minutes leading up to a planned speech. They can control his getting on and off the stage pretty well but, once he is up there, he is on his own. Left to his own devices, and this is unfolding in real time, we're seeing the real Joe Biden. It is not pretty. God help him and God help America.
Lastly, there is this growing feud between democrat senator's Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Bernie Sanders from Vermont. Manchin is a moderate who wants better things for his people in West Virginia but doesn't believe that government programs are the answer to every problem. Sander's think that every problem under the sun can be solved by government and that a perpetual welfare state is just what we need in America.
"We are the richest country on the face of the earth", bleats Bernie. "We can afford it"! The problem is, the progressives in the House and Senate need Manchin's vote if they are going to pass this boondoggle of a bill in the US Senate. Bernie is not happy that Joe is getting cold feet as the time to cast their votes draws near. He's worked too hard to get his socialist agenda passed into law and now, after decades of trying to bring his brand of communism to the floor of the Senate for a vote, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema are the two senators who are about to deep-six his agenda.
I know it's hard to believe but get this: Bernie wrote an op-ed and put it in a newspaper in Manchin's West Virginia in an attempt to get the people of West Virginia to exert pressure on Manchin to vote for the bill. West Virginia is maybe the poorest state in the union so, as you might imagine, Bernie's message of free this and that had a certain appeal to people in Appalachia and similar environs.
This enraged Manchin. I mean, who does that to a fellow senator? Is decorum no longer a thing? I wouldn't be surprised to see Manchin dig in his heels even deeper after this egregious sleight of hand by Sanders. Manchin responded with something along the lines of Sanders being a socialist and yada-yada-yada. I mean we're talking bad blood here. Manchin comes from the land of the Hatfields and the McCoys so we're not just talking feud here, we're talking blood feud. You can't fix this.
I'm getting a little long in the tooth here as usual. It's hard to say where this bill goes so that will be fodder for an upcoming blog post. If you see a blog of mine entitled "Good Riddance", you'll know the bill went down to defeat in the Senate. I'll be singing the praises of the baby Jesus and that will be that. I still think Mrs G could have ponied up a better tip for the tow truck driver so I'm not letting up on that. I'm like a dog with a bone sometimes. Sometimes?
I'm guessing they received a lot of feedback from their regular readers that this particular game was maybe too easy and maybe not consistent with what their everyday readers expect from the lauded paper of record, the New York Times. Maybe the paper underestimated just how many of their regular readers would end up playing this game. I am not a regular reader of the paper but the missus is so I get to play the games while she reads whatever it is that she reads.
Nonetheless, the changes they made in the dark of night make it not only more difficult to achieve a "genius" rating but it has tripled the number of words that I consider words that I would never get in a million years playing the game. You know which ones you didn't get because they list all of the words the following day and there are little checkmarks next to the ones you were successful in unscrambling and there are no checkmarks next to the ones you didn't get.
I'm no wordsmith but even I found words from time to time that were not in the mix that I thought should have been in the mix. Since when is "pentangle" not a word? Clearly, I was able to make the word from the letters provided. But when I went to spell out the word, it wasn't recognized as a valid word. I sent off an e-mail to the people at the paper who encourage players of the daily "Spelling Bee" game to contact them if and when you think they missed a word.
I never did hear back from the good folks at the New York Times. Either they were too embarrassed to admit that they missed such an obvious word or they just thought that flooding the zone with inane words in daily games going forward would do the trick. I can see them sitting around in a room reading my e-mail and contemplating the following response. "He wants pentangle, we'll give him pentangle." "He can stick his pentangle up his bloody arse." Be nice.
While I'm thinking about it, I should impose a time limit on myself. I typically get about 90% of the words I need to achieve "genius" level in the first 20 minutes of play. That's the low hanging fruit I've referred to in past posts. Much of that low hanging fruit, as it were, is made up of four-letter words. We're not talking "supercalifragilisticexpialidocous" here. Knowing full well that I'll pick up where I left off sometime during the day, I'm happy to have a fresh look at the letters after I've cleared my head a little bit.
What I'm finding now that they've made the game more challenging, is that I'm spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get a very small number of words that will put me over the top. Maybe I should be less concerned with getting to the "genius" level and more concerned about spending too much time on the game. We all want those things we can't have, though, so I'm not likely to leave any stones unturned in my search for the words that will help me get to my goal. Who gives up at "awesome" when you know "genius" is right around the corner? What fool does that?
I see that Merck, the pharmaceutical company, is now approaching the FDA seeking emergency authorization to put their "Covid" pill on the market. The Wall Street Journal is calling this pill a potential "game changer." I think Merck put a stop to the clinical trials when it was clear that any delay in getting it into the hands of the consumer, with its obvious efficacy now well documented, would simply be unethical.
If the FDA turns down Merck's request, which I believe it will because of their financial backroom deals and commitments to Pfizer and perhaps Moderna, that will tell you all you need to know about just how politicized this process has become.The politicians in power are simply too invested, and the financial windfalls to which they are married too vast, to allow another player on to the field. This, mind you, is at the expense of the American people and people around the world whose lives could be saved by this miracle drug.
If you have a bottle of pills by your bedside that you can tap when you feel the virus coming on, what does that mean for the worldwide effort to get the jab into everyone's arm at any expense? What would that mean for the hospitals, funeral homes, and doctors offices across the globe who have been incentivized to classify every death as a Covid death in order to get reimbursed at astronomical rates only seen during a pandemic? Did I mention that the Biden Administration purchased 1.7 million of these pills?
For those of us who have and have not yet taken the jab, there are still open questions about what it is exactly that they are wanting to put in our bodies so badly. So badly, in fact, that they are willing to shut down our economies in order to see that their mandates are adhered to? So badly that they are willing to look the other way when their constituents take to the streets with their placards, their face masks, and their pitchforks. So badly that even after it has been proven that once vaccinated you can both contract and transmit the virus, they not only keep the mandates in place but they double down on putting the jab in not only more arms but younger and younger arms.
I was telling the missus that if Trump were president he would not tolerate any of this mandate nonsense for a minute. We wouldn't have a mandate. It's that simple. Trump would approve this Merck pill in a heartbeat. Our economy would be off and running and we wouldn't be in the middle of a dumpster fire like we are now with Biden in office.
We wouldn't have hundreds of container ships sitting off our shores waiting on the unions or whomever to come unload and distribute the goods across our fruited plains. We wouldn't have hundreds of planes sitting on the tarmac in city after city whose pilots are refusing to take to the air due to their unwillingness to take the jab. When you consider the various groups involved in this movement pushing back against the radical Biden mandates including everybody from rock stars like Eric Clapton to basketball stars and now airline pilots, I think we're seeing the genesis of a star-studded solidarity movement.
Think of all the policemen who would still be on the job were it not for the insanity of the mandates and the unwillingness of our politicians to respect our desires for individual freedom when it comes to taking the jab. The list doesn't stop there. There are teachers, nurses, and god only how many other occupations in the mix. You have to respect people who stand up for what they think is right and who are willing to give up their livelihoods in order to not bend to the will of either government or the corporations who do their bidding. It is an immense sacrifice. God bless them all.
In Bernie Sander's world, the citizenry standing in bread lines for hours on end is preferable to allowing the rich to have easy access to goods and services while the less well off in our society go hungry. One has to wonder, with all of the supply chain issues now in the news, and the Biden Administration now warning people that they may not get what they want for Christmas, if these shortages aren't a creation of Bernie Sanders or someone like Bernie Sanders pulling strings behind the scene to create the very bread lines that Bernie and his comrades lie awake at night dreaming about.
Is this a problem created by Biden so that Biden can take credit for solving the problem that he created? I know how that sounds and it's hard to believe that a president, even an illegitimate president like Biden, would be so brazen and bold to even think about doing such a thing. I've heard people say that rationing cards are coming next and that wouldn't surprise me. Would it surprise you if I told you that in order to get that rationing card you will have to be vaccinated?
There are others who think that everything we're seeing coming out of the Biden Administration is a result of sheer incompetence. That makes perfect sense to me knowing that Joe Biden was probably the most incompetent of Senators during his fifty years in the Senate. Why would that change with his moving just up the street to his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
I mean, literally, everything he touches turns to shit. It's worth remembering that one of his very first acts as president was to put a stop to the construction of an oil pipeline that employed thousands of people and put America on track to be energy independent for the first time in our country's history.
I have a good mind to go shopping today to see what, if any, impact that these supply chain issues are having at the local supermarket. I've been a little surprised in some of my more recent shopping outings to find some things maybe barely in stock or not in stock at all. I'm talking about things like frozen blueberries. Have blueberries become the modern day version of the canary in the coal mine? I think I need more evidence.
If I notice that things are on the wane, I may start putting things in my cart willy nilly just because I can. Assuming that the store is open, and that is never a sure bet these days with Biden paying people to stay at home, I have the time and inclination to do what I need to do at the store.
Mrs G has been complaining that she hasn't been able to find her caramel nips anywhere so I'll see if my local store has any while I'm stocking up on other things usually found in that particular aisle. I've grabbed every last box in sight in past visits since I think other people may be doing the same thing which is why I'm not expecting to find any during my visit today. This is what happens when you have excess demand and a limited supply of any one particular product or item. I've even looked on Amazon for the nips but there were none to be found.
I've also not seen any panic buying in our local stores so that's good. If that happens, we'll see signs up in every aisle limiting customers to one or two, maybe three or four if I'm lucky, of this and that item. Some signs may well read, "while supplies last." In the not too distant past, I noticed that they were limiting customers to one container of dishwashing soap. That was completely unexpected.
I made a mental note to shop for my dishwashing soap elsewhere and just kept walking down the aisle. The odd thing was that the only item with a limit of sorts was the dishwashing soap. Even stranger than that was the fact that they had what appeared to be a plentiful supply of the soap so it was, well, weird. These sorts of scarcity issues, in addition to the unavailability of people willing to do the work, might well explain why stores and restaurants are either closed or open for an abbreviated number of hours on any given day. Anyone miss the mean tweets yet?
Fast forward 24 hours and I can now report out on my visit to the supermarket. The store itself was not overly crowded when I arrived around noon. That is not when I typically go shopping so maybe it was crowded for noontime and maybe it wasn't. Not surprisingly, they still had no frozen blueberries. Normally, you can find the generic brands but they too were nowhere to be found. I didn't notice any empty shelves or seriously depleted stocks of any one item. The milk that I like to buy, which is always in short supply, was in short supply today and I took the last four containers.
I surreptitiously eyed baskets here and there looking for hoard-able items like toilet paper, etc. Again, nothing seemed out of place. It was only when I went to check out that I noticed that people and their carts were backing up at the small handful of open aisles where I might have expected more aisles to be open. I also noticed that the carts lining up at the open aisles were filled to the brim with groceries. Finally, the first sign of panic buying. What or who were they listening to in the privacy of their homes or cars that prompted them to come to this particular store today to do a little panic shopping?
Were they buying into the claptrap that inflation was driving prices up not by the week or the day but by the hour and they wanted to get their shopping in while the prices were low? There is nothing like the threat of prices being more expensive tomorrow to get you to splurge today. Maybe, like me, they watched in horror on the telly as the container ships backed up at our country's ports and, with nobody to unload them, who knows when, or if, the goods would ever end up on the shelves of our local stores.
Maybe they had a chance to catch one or more of demented Joe Biden's speeches about any one of the many horror shows he's created and they decided that our days as a civilized country are numbered. You go back to the basics and that all starts with being able to feed your family. That's job numero uno. I'm getting frazzled sitting here just thinking about it. There is also a helter-skelter quality about the things that people put in their shopping carts when they're shopping for what they think are end times.
You know you've outdone yourself when the bagger gives up on trying to organize your purchases and just starts filling bags as fast as he or she can with whatever he or she can grab off the conveyor belt. It's a fools errand to try and bag up cold thing with cold things and hot things with hot things. There simply isn't enough time. Any residual guilt you might be feeling about having depleted stocks at the expense of your fellow hoarders starts to fade as you place your final purchase on the conveyor belt.
You save the heaviest item for last. It's a 5-lb bag of Carolina rice. That, and some dried beans you have left over from the last pandemic, will suffice as sustenance during the hardest of hard times which you hope will never come. Optimism is hard to come by in Joe Biden's America in the year of our Lord, 2021.
You gird yourself for the final obstacle course which has you pushing a top heavy cart of groceries out of the store and out and around people and vehicles before arriving at your final destination. Never mind that people heading into the store look at you, and then your cart, and wonder to themselves if they didn't wait too long to do their shopping. You can watch in real time as they quicken their pace and beat a more determined path to the entrance of the store. You can see the panic setting in. The things those cashiers must see in the course of their day.
The missus and I were just finishing a little dinner the other day when we got a call from Mrs G. She had broken down by the side of the road while driving home and was now just waiting for AAA to send along a tow truck driver. The good news is that she was using her cell phone to reach out to us to let us know of her predicament. She actually had the presence of mind to take her phone with her when she left home which is not, incidentally, always the case. It's not that she's not mindful of such things, or forgetful of such things as it were, but rather she simply isn't in the habit of carrying around her cell phone. That probably goes with the territory for people of her generation.
By the time she called us, Mrs G had made all the necessary calls and she had taken all the necessary precautions that you might otherwise expect someone to take who was in her situation. In fact, she wasn't necessarily even asking that we do anything to lend a hand. It was all over but the waiting. She was in good spirits otherwise and not overly concerned one way or another about her own welfare, her car, or the fact that nightfall was imminent. That's me saying in a roundabout fashion saying that Mrs G is no shrinking violet. No sireee, Bob.
The missus and I decided fairly quickly that it was probably not a good idea to leave a woman her age, and we're talking about Mrs G here, sitting by the side of the road in a broken down vehicle with nightfall just around the corner. There are simply too many stories of people in a situation like that who end up in a bad way for one reason or another. One fella did stop by and was good enough to take a quick look beneath the hood but went along on his way after offering his unsolicited assessment. Mrs G had a bit of a bone to pick with the people in a building adjacent to where she had broken down since not a soul came out to offer any help. The nerve!
We contemplated for a moment or two that the Ev man might be able to go sit with her but, not knowing what he might be in the middle of, we didn't want to put any pressure on him to do something that he was not otherwise inclined to do. We certainly didn't want or need him driving bleary eyed across town only to show up at the scene with a teeter in his step and a half cocked smile on his face reminiscent of some Cheech and Chong album cover from back in the sixties. I don't know that that would ring any bells with Mrs G but we weren't taking any chances.
It wasn't long after we arrived that the tow truck driver showed up. I was telling the missus on the way over there that the best case scenario was that we would arrive at the same time as the tow truck driver. We went back and forth a little bit about who would stay with the car while the other drove Mrs G home but it turned out to be moot point when we saw the flashing lights of his flat bed truck coming round the corner. The last little bone I had to pick with Mrs G is that she could only muster a $5 tip for the tow truck driver. I thought he deserved more but my pleas fell on deaf ears. Oh, well.
There are just a couple more items I want to chat about before clocking out on this week's blog. One, is the bizarre anger we see coming from Biden when he's reading off the teleprompter. This is something new. First, it was the weird whispering. The country saw that and must have wondered what the fuck they were seeing. Is this Joe off his meds? Maybe, just maybe, this is Joe on his meds. He's still whispering so we've come to accept that it is just part and parcel of his overall affect when he speaks. It's not less weird, it just is what it is.
The anger is new and maybe just a little alarming. He actually looks a little like Hitler without the mustache when he's all worked up and pumping his fists and grimacing like a madman at the podium. This is serious businesss, folks. The other word that comes to mind is "unhinged." I mean we're talking off the rails unhinged. If I saw a foreign leader speaking like this I would be no less alarmed and might even question the people who voted he or she into office. You expect a certain civility out of your elected officials and when you see just the opposite it makes for a worrisome event.
What is he so angry about anyway? Is he trying to compensate for his otherwise feeble demeanor? Does he think that expressing anger like a bloody and demented old fool will somehow move people to do what it is that he is wanting him to do? He's out there on the stump trying to make the case for the boondoggle of a bill he and progressives are trying to pass and his fiery tirades are doing more to alienate people than anything else.
Did I mention that his approval numbers are in the mid thirties? Watching old films of Hitler from the 30's and 40's in pre-war Germany is probably not something that you want to try to emulate. Does Sleepy Joe even know how that movie ends? I suppose his handlers can only do so much in the hours and minutes leading up to a planned speech. They can control his getting on and off the stage pretty well but, once he is up there, he is on his own. Left to his own devices, and this is unfolding in real time, we're seeing the real Joe Biden. It is not pretty. God help him and God help America.
Lastly, there is this growing feud between democrat senator's Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Bernie Sanders from Vermont. Manchin is a moderate who wants better things for his people in West Virginia but doesn't believe that government programs are the answer to every problem. Sander's think that every problem under the sun can be solved by government and that a perpetual welfare state is just what we need in America.
"We are the richest country on the face of the earth", bleats Bernie. "We can afford it"! The problem is, the progressives in the House and Senate need Manchin's vote if they are going to pass this boondoggle of a bill in the US Senate. Bernie is not happy that Joe is getting cold feet as the time to cast their votes draws near. He's worked too hard to get his socialist agenda passed into law and now, after decades of trying to bring his brand of communism to the floor of the Senate for a vote, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema are the two senators who are about to deep-six his agenda.
I know it's hard to believe but get this: Bernie wrote an op-ed and put it in a newspaper in Manchin's West Virginia in an attempt to get the people of West Virginia to exert pressure on Manchin to vote for the bill. West Virginia is maybe the poorest state in the union so, as you might imagine, Bernie's message of free this and that had a certain appeal to people in Appalachia and similar environs.
This enraged Manchin. I mean, who does that to a fellow senator? Is decorum no longer a thing? I wouldn't be surprised to see Manchin dig in his heels even deeper after this egregious sleight of hand by Sanders. Manchin responded with something along the lines of Sanders being a socialist and yada-yada-yada. I mean we're talking bad blood here. Manchin comes from the land of the Hatfields and the McCoys so we're not just talking feud here, we're talking blood feud. You can't fix this.
I'm getting a little long in the tooth here as usual. It's hard to say where this bill goes so that will be fodder for an upcoming blog post. If you see a blog of mine entitled "Good Riddance", you'll know the bill went down to defeat in the Senate. I'll be singing the praises of the baby Jesus and that will be that. I still think Mrs G could have ponied up a better tip for the tow truck driver so I'm not letting up on that. I'm like a dog with a bone sometimes. Sometimes?