Coronavirus daily update: Wednesday, June 18

The honey bun

There’s a loose honey bun dangling from its automated coil in the vending machine in the lobby of our office building. It looks like an easy score — one good shoulder to the side of the big machine to jar it loose. But it’s stuck in there pretty good.

I’ve tried the jostle and the shake. And I’ve tried ordering the item directly above it — Cheez-Its, if you must know — hoping it would knock the errant honey bun into the receptacle below. No dice.

You might think the wise play here would be to just punch in the code for another honey bun, and get yourself a two-fer. But, alas, that code has been disabled somewhere in the guts of the machine. And so the honey bun sits, untouchable, mocking us all.

A funny thing: It’s actually Rob’s honey bun — it got stuck on him last week, and he hasn’t been able to dislodge it. Even the Oreos, two items up, failed to knock it down. He tried that one today.

I feel like a lot of people in the office have made a play for this honey bun. But it’s still there, even now. I just checked.

And I don’t even like honey buns.

Some news

• The city of Raleigh will be mandating masks in public, by a city council vote. The mayor explains to WRAL.
• A crime-reform bill passed the NC House and Senate. It basically appoints a working group to study the problem.
• The Greensboro Transit Authority is giving out free masks to bus riders tomorrow, Thursday.

The numbers

• North Carolina pops by 1,002 today, 46,855 total diagnoses, on 16,001 tests. Call it 6.26 percent of the total.
  • Hospital numbers jumped to 846 statewide, with more than 20 percent of hospital and ICU beds available.
  • A lot of deaths come from congregate living facilities like senior homes, prisons, farms and such.
• Guilford County adds 46 new cases for 2,194 total, with two new deaths making 101 and 1,151 recoveries.
  • That leaves 942.
• Forsyth County has 50 new ones, for 2,333. They say 1,411 have recovered, and 25 deaths.
  • There’s 897 left.

A diversion

How about a nice cartoon? This one’s not the oldest American animated feature — that one goes to Disney’s Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, but good luck finding that on YouTube. But this one came out two years later, 1939, a charming interpretation of Gulliver’s Travels, made before Disney cornered the market, and right in the middle of World War II.

Program notes

• From the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s public-domain collection, tonight we’ve got some Pointilism! “Gray Weather, Grande Jatte,” by Georges Seurat, 1886-88.
• If you’d like to help Triad City Beat, please consider becoming a supporter. You could also give us a like on Facebook and share our stories on Twitter.