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Batman and Robin would’ve gotten the shot

9/22/2021

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Charles City Press, 9-21-21

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.

I have a friend from high school who makes wonderful and hilarious fake photos. He got a ahold of some kind of photoshop program on his computer that allows him to put different faces on different bodies without much training and with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of skill to do it, but to do it right, you should have a good creative mind and a twisted sense of humor. My friend has those things.

This weekend he made me Robin, from the cheesy old Batman television show. Another friend was Batman, and although I was happy to be Robin, I would have preferred Batman. Anyway, we were the Caped Crusaders for a day, and I got a belly laugh out of it.

In the past, I’ve been David Lee Roth and Thor, the Norse “God of Thunder.” I actually looked kind of sexy as Thor, which was nice. I’ve also been a “Midget” professional wrestler, among a few other things, some of them not appropriate to print in a family newspaper.

He works up these fake photos and sends them to us — “us” being other old friends — via Messenger or other social media. I always just laugh at his pranks, and sometimes even thank him for thinking of me. I believe if I were to get upset or express my displeasure with his creations — or up the ante by pranking him back — it would inspire him to start picking on me, or pull me into a twisted competition that I know I can’t win. So I just laugh and give him the thumbs up.

This is fun to me.

My photo-prank-happy friend does other things, too. He’s an electrician by trade and a husband, dad and grandpa. We’ve been friends for close to 40 years now, I think, and although we don’t do a lot together these days, we’re still in touch regularly.

A couple weeks ago my buddy went to check on his brother-in-law, who had been sick, and when he got there he thought his brother-in-law was dead. He was unconscious and unable to breathe, and a mild case of COVID-19 turned out to be not so mild.

My buddy got his brother-in-law to the hospital, and at the moment, things didn’t look good. They did everything they could to treat him without putting him on the ventilator, as the doctor seemed to think that once he was on a ventilator, he probably would never come off it.

They managed to save his life, somehow, as after a week or so of desperate treatment, he was able to come home from the hospital. The last thing I heard was he was a long way from being out of the woods, but at least he was home.

And so it goes. Another horrible COVID-19 story, similar to the literally hundreds of stories I’ve heard in the last year and a half. Some of them have tragic endings, none of them have happy endings. It looks like this one won’t end tragically, although had my buddy stopped by the house a couple hours later than he did, it almost certainly would have.

As I write this, I look up at the news on television and see that there are six kids in a children’s hospital in South Carolina on ventilators. A drug company is claiming that it has a lower-dose vaccine that is both safe and effective in kids as young as 5 years old. There are no open hospital beds in Idaho, so they are sending COVID-19 patients to Washington, and now they’re almost out of beds there, too. Good Lord. We’re still doing this.

Honestly, I thought we were going to be done with this by now. I got my shot last spring, and it seemed to me at the time that everyone else was excited to be getting their shot as well. I read that one wrong.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can not make him drink. You can give everyone in the country all the information and resources they need to do the right thing, but many of them can choose to not do it.

If Batman and Robin were real, they would have gotten vaccinated before they ventured forth to keep the Gotham City streets safe. This is a fact.

There are discussions going on throughout the state of Iowa as to whether or not students and teachers and others should be required to wear masks in the school buildings. As important as these discussions are to some, to me, they are boring and I’m tired of them. Most of the biggest talkers have no idea what they’re talking about, and there are no good listeners, anyway.

And if everyone would’ve just gotten their shot, this wouldn’t be a thing anymore.

I can’t make you take the shot. No one can — not your boss, not your spouse, not the government, not even your grandkids. This is America, and you can choose what’s right for you. That’s why I like living here.

But good God, man, people are still dying horrible deaths, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Not anymore. I love and honor my freedom of choice, but that love tends to fade when so many people choose so poorly.

To choose to put yourself at higher risk is one thing. To choose to put others at higher risk — that’s just not cool.

Get the shot. Doesn’t cost a thing.
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The Bishop Sycamore Fight Song

9/8/2021

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The Bishop Sycamore Fight Song

We will fight with our might for Bishop Sycamore
We will fight for victory 
We are not what you’d call a school, really, though
We’re a “football academy.”

We’ve got a field and a weight room and even some blocking sleds
But no classrooms, or bells that ring
No cafeteria, auditorium, or teachers, either
But we’ve got uniforms and everything.

So cheer, cheer cheer for Bishop Sycamore
As our colors fly under the lights
Though we’re not really an actual high school football team
ESPN still purchased the rights.

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Loo-ooo-ooo-ooo-oozers

9/6/2021

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My biggest problem with the Trump Presidency wasn’t as much about his politics or his blatant self-interested dishonesty, his obvious corruption, his lack of respect for mankind, his lack of personal responsibility, his lack of leadership skills, his immoral and unethical values or his completely transparent incompetence.

Yes, he may be the dumbest asshole in the entire history of the entire world, but that wasn’t my biggest problem.

It was more about his supporters’ ridiculously terrible grammar, spelling, punctuation and language usage. As an English major, I felt like I had been roped into four years of perpetually correcting essays written by “differently abled” fourth-graders, all with arrested emotional development and anger management issues. 

And if you tried to help them see their errors, they had a tendency to get all pissy and cry like little pussies and call YOU the bad guy.

They even called themselves “MAGAs,” which, I guess, stood for “Make America Great Agains,” which is about the stupidest-ass thing any group has ever called itself.

He lost. Please go away, you dipshits.

It’s time to return to the good old days, when most stupid people just shut their collective piehole because being stupid was embarrassing, rather than celebrated.
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Living to be 100 is no longer the exception

9/1/2021

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Charles City Press, 8-31-21

I’d give up anything I own to spend one more day with any one of my grandparents.

I realized a couple of days ago that it was my grandmother’s birthday. If she celebrated it, it was somewhere up in Heaven, because she died way back in 1981, when I was just 13 years old. She was born in 1902, and that’s 119 years ago, and no one lives that long, right?

Well, maybe.

The U.S. Census Bureau has been releasing some rather interesting statistics from the 2020 count, and they indicate that today’s grandchildren might get the chance to spend a lot more time with their grandparents than the children of previous generations.

There are a lot more centenarians — people 100 years old or older — than there used to be.

The Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that today, there are about 90,000 centenarians in the country, an increase from about 72,000 centenarians in 2014 and 50,000 in 2000.

In 20 years, the number of people who are 100 years or older has almost doubled. That growth is expected to continue, potentially reaching nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. by the middle of the 21st century.

Medical science, better nutrition, better preventative care and better health care technology all contribute to the increase. I do not know if they factored in the fact that a lot of these people are just tough, stubborn old bastards who refuse to die, but I would bet that also plays a part.

Let’s admit it. Older people alive today were made from tougher stuff than than we younger people are. Folks born 100 years ago saw the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. They sent a few guys up to walk on the moon. They survived polio and 100 other diseases, most recently COVID-19.

They’ve seen some things, and some stuff, and they wouldn’t recommend it.

My parents are both around 80 years old, and my in-laws are also in their 80s. When your parents reach that age, you start thinking about things you don’t like to think about. They’ve spent far more time on this Earth than what they have left to spend. They have life experiences that we can’t possibly imagine, and not enough time left to share them all with us.

I’m always aware of the fact that whenever I watch a ball game with my dad, or tell jokes with my mom, or have dinner with both of them — it might be the last time I ever do that.

Then I read those numbers. About 90,000 people 100 years or older. More than half a million of them in 30 years.

Maybe they’re going to be around longer than we think. Maybe a lot longer.

Won’t that be nice?

Like I said, I’d give up just about anything if it meant I could have one more day with any one my grandparents.

Maybe my kids won’t have to say that.


And maybe I’ll get to watch their kids get old.
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