The View from the Hermitage, Day 218

A variety of sites come up if you Google "pandemic poetry." The first few appear to have been done back in late spring or early summer. It's not the first party to which I've been late. As I walked this morning, pandemic poetry arose in my thoughts. Haiku seemed too difficult to compose while walking and listening to music (Michael Franti and Spearhead), to I turned to a limerick. It doesn't suck, but it could definitely be better. 

There was a virus that came from Wuhan | In spite of the China travel ban | What to do? we did ask |      Stay apart; wear a mask | To me, that's a very good plan

I typed it the way I did because I was lazy and didn't want to hop around figuring out how to format the space between paragraphs. Notice that there is no direct mention of The Orange Foolius, just a hint at his ban on travel from China. Maybe on tomorrow's walk I'll attempt something more scathing with him in mind.

The Orange Foolius spent much of today's phone call berating Dr. Fauci. I particularly liked his comment that if he'd listened to Dr. Fauci's advice, more than 500,000 people would have died of covid-19 by now. And how many fewer would have died of covid-19 had the general populace had a good example of the value of wearing a mask? The Foolius is just worried that someone will make a deal out of the fact that Dr. Fauci's ratings are higher than his depending on how you define ratings. 

The final debate is on Thursday night. It doesn't start until 9:00, so I don't expect The Professor and I will watch any of it. The moderator will be Kristen Welker of NBC, about whom The Orange Foolius just tweeted on Saturday "She’s always been terrible & unfair, just like most of the Fake News reporters, but I’ll still play the game. The people know!" Here's hoping she takes after Savannah Guthrie rather than Chris Wallace. I think a female moderator bothers The Foolius. Why should he have to answer to a mere woman?

Trying to minimize my exposure to potentially depressing or angering political news is keeping my stress level lower but doesn't seem to give me as much to write about here. I'll see what I can come up with tomorrow.