*Please Sir, can we have some more…
Oh Steve Mnuchin, your name makes you sound like a bond villain but your glasses make us think you were terribly bullied in your ivy league prep school in NYC. And apparently you have not personally paid for anything since 1985. In a Face the Nation appearance back on March 29th, Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury and a former hedge fund investor and partner at Goldman Sachs, said “I think the entire package provides economic relief overall for about 10 weeks.” He later went on to ceremoniously crack open a Faberge egg on live television with a sterling silver set of soft-boiled egg cups and spoons given to him by the Queen of England. When asked if he knew the average price of bread or milk he looked confused and admitted that he lived entirely off of vitamin injections and cereal made of shredded $100 bills.
Most likely, that stimulus check he was referring to dropped into your bank account this week (unless you were in debt, undocumented or owe child support). The average cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle was nearly $2,000 last month, so you might need to thin down your organic juice and skip the second latte to make that 1,200 stretch the full ten weeks. Good luck with that…
*Racists gonna racist…
In Lansing, MI, “grid lock” demonstrations were held outside of area hospitals and various government buildings on April 16th with one simple demand: “open the economy back up”, because apparently, it has been closed for some sort of frivolous reason. There are plenty of reasons to be in-the-streets-but-socially-distanced in these trying days; retaliatory firings, and lack of supplied employee PPE and ‘hazard pay’ have lead to work stoppages and strikes across the country; prisoners are dying at dramatic rates and front line healthcare workers do not have adequate protections. But these demonstrators had a different message. Donning TRUMP2020 flag capes, American flag bandannas along with Confederate flags-because Michigan is a well known defender of Southern state’s rights- these presumed members (or at least supporters) of the Republican Party and it’s presumptive candidate demanded that despite nearly 30,000 coronavirus deaths across the US that several state governors “open” the economy back to it’s normal pre-covid-19 levels. Proud Boys, the no-masturbating, beer drinking street brawlers that everyone had forgotten about even re-emerged to block the entrance to a Level 1 trauma center in some form of protest of…doctors? Hospitals? Their messaging, while unclear in its implementation, reminded us all that we are in fact still in an election year.
*MLS is not coming back any time soon…
Back on March 12th, Major League Soccer became the second largest sports franchise in the country to shutter its stadiums. The original call was for no games for 30 days. Here in Seattle, the beloved Century Link field, or Clink, was briefly turned into a field hospital to handle the non-COVID-19 cases that were displaced from area hospitals. But this week, MLS announced that the shut down will be extended to at least June 8th-and that was an optimistic guess. For many sports fans the slow trickle of the end of the shortest soccer season was an understandable but difficult blow. Avid fans clung to the few countries yet unravaged by the virus as they played “closed” tournaments, or games with no fans in attendance. The stadiums rang as lifeless and hollow as a Timbers game and the reality that soccer without the fans is just not the same became all the more clear. Those still itching for a fix of some kind of entertainment attempted to watch Australian Football-and after hours of study still no one could understand what the sport was about besides biceps. Even sportscasters were beginning to crack under the pressure of being both out of work and without an outlet. When the time is right, and the health professionals give the go-ahead, everyone -especially Seattle Sounders fans- will rejoice in incoherent yelling at referees and telling Alexi to be quiet. We can’t wait.
*If a mascot falls at a school with no sports teams…does it make a sound?
A rumor has been circulating around campus this past week, or around the virtual campus we all now inhabit that Seattle Central has picked a new mascot for the school. The question at large remains though, who, or what, will this mascot be championing? Even before the shutdown brought our physical gears to a grinding halt-the question hung looming. Who or what was this mascot supposed to be supporting? We could be mistaken, since the science on “how do mascots work?” is still out in the field, but generally, it is understood that they come after one has some sort of team that plays some sort of sport. Does the re-vamping of the school mascot signal some future sports team? Maybe they will jackhammer open the pool again and it will be a swim team? Or the sharks in the MAC will start professionally hustling us in games of pool? The future is still a little unclear-but what we do know is that if there isn’t some sort of tiger-themed costume person there to greet us when we eventually return to campus, we will be very disappointed.
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