A funeral – Delivery robots – Two books that are best-sellers before publication – Trump predicts his own defeat – Biden (apparently) attempts his own defeat – Evening statistics
The weather over the past several days has been warm and fairly humid, but there has been a sufficient amount of breezes to make walking reasonably comfortable in the shade. Even along the streets as I was performing errands this morning it was not tiring to walk in the streets in direct sunlight. At one point I passed by the Fairfax Cemetery, where I saw a funeral service being conducted. It appears that the limit of ten people at such an event has been lifted. It was heavily attended. The greater part of the mourners wore face masks, but by no means all of them; nor were they keeping apart from one another. It appears probable that more funerals will be conducted in this manner, and one can only hope that this tendency will not aggravate the spread of the virus too much. It was held out of doors, of course, and in warm weather; but I would not have been altogether at my ease had I been one of the attendees under such circumstances.
I also came across several of the little robots that are used for transporting food. I have not mentioned them before, but they have become quite commonplace over the past two months. Previously I had seen them only on the George Mason University campus, but at this point many restaurants and food stores offer delivery service to local residents in this fashion. The food is packaged within the robot and it is programmed with the cell phone number and address of the customer. When it arrives at the address, it sends a text to the cell phone number. After the customer responds, the robot’s compartment where the food is stored can be opened. It is equipped with cameras and alarms to guard against theft. These robots are useful for deliveries over short distances, although at this point the technology is not sufficiently advanced for them to cover more than a mile or so. They store up to 22 pounds of food (the equivalent of about three grocery bags). They constitute yet another example of how automation will displace jobs currently performed by humans, and the special needs imposed by the coronavirus are accelerating their popularity and future development. In all probability this description of the device will seem incredibly limited and primitive in the course of a few years, just as we might currently look upon an older microprocessor that had to be booted by means of floppy disks.
Yesterday’s entry was something along the lines of what W. S. Gilbert recommended for hyper-aesthetic poets:
You must lie upon the daisies And discourse in novel phrases Of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter If it's only idle chatter Of a transcendental kind.
I wasn’t exactly lying upon daisies yesterday (although I did see a number of large yellow water-lilies while going along the boardwalk at Neabsco – does that count?) and others will have to decide whether the phrases I used were novel or not, but I certainly was discoursing a good deal about my complicated state of mind. So I suppose I should concentrate today on matters of greater concern to the public at large. I don’t know, though – that may be rather depressing. But, to do my best:
President Trump has attempted to block a book by John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor; and Robert Trump, the President’s brother, has attempted to block a book by Mary Trump, the daughter of their deceased elder brother. In all probability it is the publication of the latter that the President dreads the most. If a man’s character is to be abused, after all, there’s no one like a relative to do the work. And it must be admitted, as far as Donald Trump is concerned, that the mere truth about his past activities is enough to cover him with discredit and that any invention of scandal would be unnecessary exertion on his niece’s part. At all events, the lawsuits brought about to stop the publications have backfired in a rather ridiculous manner. The suits were summarily dismissed, and the only tangible result is that both books were given a great deal of free publicity. Even though they haven’t been formally released yet, they have become national best-sellers, with numerous advance orders via Amazon, and will be read all over the country as soon as they are published.
One of the people who predicts that Biden will win the upcoming election appears to be his opponent. The President has said on Fox News that Biden “is going to be president because some people don’t love me.” It is difficult to be certain whether he realized that he was undergoing a television interview at the time or imagined himself to be indulging in a session of free association on the psychiatrist’s couch. One almost expected him subsequently to lament about his unhappy childhood. Well, well – if he isn’t going to win any prizes for stoicism, I suppose that points must be awarded to him for accuracy: he certainly is unloved, and on that account those may pity him who can.
On the other hand, there are times when Joe Biden seems to be working for his own defeat. Just yesterday he claimed that over 120,000,000 Americans died from the pandemic – about a third of the country’s population. There was absolutely no need for such a ludicrous exaggeration. The death toll at the time that he made the remark was about 122,000, which is sufficiently appalling. All he had to do was to provide the correct figure and emphasize the fact that the rate of the death toll has been accelerating ever since the lifting of the lockdown procedures in various states. Even his policy of conducting much of his campaign at this stage through videos rather than in live encounters is suspect. He is probably correct on medical grounds, but we would like to be sure that his staffers are not recommending this method to him in order to rein him in and be able to perform some timely editing whenever errors of this nature occur. At one point he will be forced to address crowds in person, whether he likes it or not, and it is an open question of how well he perform under such circumstances. At this point the image he projects is that of a sleepy old man who would greatly prefer dozing by the fireside to the rigors of administering the government of a nation.
I may be imposing my own personal reactions onto the staffers of the Republican and the Democratic campaigns, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that members of both groups are shaking their heads behind the scenes and are desperately contriving methods to forestall their candidate’s propensity for embarrassing himself and his party at large.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM — # of cases worldwide: 9,896,953; # of deaths worldwide: 496,045; # of cases U.S.: 2,552,446 # of deaths U.S.: 127,619. Several dismal milestones have been passed today. The increase in the worldwide case count today was nearly 200,000. Our case count increased by over 46,000. Brazil’s case count is now over 50% of our own. India’s case count is now over 500,000. Mexico’s case count is over 200,000 and its death toll is over 25,000.