Selfish Bastards edition
For those who continue to defy basic decency and common sense because they refuse to wear a mask — either wear one or don’t go in the store. The refusal to wear a mask is selfish. It infringes on the life and liberty of everyone else in the store.
Gov. Roy Cooper
Yeah, he said it — out loud, today, during a press conference. And the sooner everybody gets on board, the better.
This strain of anti-science is nothing new to the American psyche — there was a faction during the 1919 pandemic that refused to wear masks. Even today, there are members of the US Congress who believe the Earth is just 6,000 years old.
But for the first time this century, it is quite dangerous to disregard science and other accurate information — life-threatening, even. Sometimes I feel as if we are on the verge of an evolutionary event.
Speaking of which, President Trump is scheduled to resume his nightly televised coronavirus updates tonight. It’s happening right now.
The numbers
- In North Carolina, we’ve jumped to 1,815 new cases today, up from 1,268 new ones yesterday, in a wild swing of the numbers over the last seven days. 102,861 total.
- A new high in hospitalizations: 1,179, with 339 of them (28.75 percent) admitted in the last 24 hours. We have at least 526 ICU beds left across the state.
- Our positive-test rate remains low at 8 percent.
- Forsyth County has 77 new cases, for 4,297, with 2,693 recoveries, 41 deaths.
- Guilford County claims 4,112, including 145 new ones today. 2,155 have recovered, 133 deaths.
A diversion
Peanuts has endured as one of our most cherished pieces of American pop culture — and, unlike Garfield, it still holds up. Charlie Brown and the gang began as a newspaper strip by Charles M. Schulz, which spawned books and, eventually, movies and TV specials, each of which is a complete classic. There was also a live-action musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which was pretty big in the 1970s among high school theater troupes. In 1975, on the West Coast, Snoopy The Musical premiered, and then it was made into an animated special for TV, which I bring to you tonight.
Program notes
- Tonight’s featured image is a family portrait from 1855 by American photographer WL Germon. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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