Various & Sundry

Everyone is so sports-starved that the NFL Draft took on epic proportions. It was like the Super Bowl despite the promised lack of drama. The Bengals did the obvious thing and picked Joe Burrow making them instantaneously interesting to me - if they play this season.

Most of the players I’d never heard of as I’m not big on knowing offensive linemen from the Georgia Bulldogs or safeties from Iowa, but there was a voyeuristic drama in seeing the homes of these kids as well as the homes of the executives. Jerry Jones skyped in from his $250 million yacht. Coach Mike Vrabel shockingly had someone going to the bathroom (number 2) in the background! You can’t make that up.

Vrabel answered reporter’s questions and said that it was a reflection in a mirror of a cabinet and was not what we thought:

"It’s been a long quarantine over here," he said of the overall setup. "We’ve got a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids but Tyler was not going to the restroom. He was sitting on a stool not a toilet."

Consider toiletgate solved.

The disappointment was OSU star JK Dobbins not going until number 55, in the second round. Seemed harsh. One magazine had him ranked 38th and CBS Sports ranked him 45th.

So basically the draft was excitement until Tua got drafted, then it was all about looking inside other people’s houses. 



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Came across a St. Padre Pio quote I need follow more instead of reading bout corona or drafts: “Help yourself during this troubled period by reading holy books. This reading provides excellent food for the soul.”

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Heard this from a priest on Twitter: “Why is it so hard to convince you people that God loves you? Like, for real, this is the most difficult part of my job.”

Interesting. I think of St. Peter’s response to Jesus’s favor: “Lord, leave me for I am a sinful man.” As well as his later initial refusal to have Jesus love him by washing his feet. Is the problem for many that Jesus is too close to us, as he was for those who stopped following Him after the words in John 6 about having to eat His Body and drink His blood to have life? Is that the appeal in the Muslim idea of a God that is more distant and inhuman?

I learned today that the word “companion” literally means “Bread-with-us”.

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Ohio health guru Dr. Amy Acton said, right from the get-go almost two months ago, is that the goal is NOT for fewer people to get the virus. The point of “flattening the curve” graph was to get same number of people sick but just over longer period of time. That’s pretty amazing thing, to recognize the virus is so contagious that half or more of the country will get it regardless of what we do. The whole point was to allow the virus to come into society in an orderly manner to prevent a rush on our health care workers. It’s like we’re saying to the virus with the lockdown: “Queue up! You’ll get plenty of time to have hosts and you’ll infect the same number by not rushing. We just need you to slow down and sicken people one-by-one.”

I like the transparency of Ohio’s governor and Dr. Acton that their appeal was not for us to avoid getting the virus but to avoid having the health care system crash and not be able to deal with it.

For me, this virus always seemed to have two options: kill it at the start in early cases, by doing social tracing and testing. Don’t let it spread. Once a hundred got it it would be too late. And by “too late” I surely didn’t see that an option was to close schools and workplaces and shut down barbershops and churches. The point of my obsessive need to learn about how the CDC and FDA botched it from the start was related to thinking that all of this would’ve been avoided if we had killed the virus in the crib, so to speak.

But in hindsight I now think that was utopian and could never happen. We have porous borders, a globally connected economy, a population with a high propensity of travel. There was no way the virus wasn’t going to get in and get large. And it’s also probable that the first known cases back in mid-February were surely lagging indicators. All the testing and contact tracing in February was likely already too late. It got in silently due to lack of symptoms and you can’t trace that.

Wall Street Journal opinion piece said:

"What Amer­i­cans need now is not an­other celebrity ad re­peat­ing the un­sus­tain­able 'stay at home' mantra. They need de­tailed ad­vice from gov­ern­ment about how transmis­sion does and does not oc­cur (do masks help? are sur­face residues a sig­nif­i­cant threat? does in­fec­tion con­fer im­mu­nity?) so they can learn to live with a virus that isn’t go­ing away at least un­til a vac­cine is de­vel­oped."