Last night, we actually watched a new movie — Wonder Woman 1984 or as they call it on HBO Max, WW84. It was a bit of a production just getting it on the air, involving about an hour of tech support until finally, we got the right screen and was informed that the password they wanted was my email password which, even though I entered it, they rejected until suddenly, the screen (having thought about it for a while) decided maybe I had it right after all. At least I got a discount for the month. And after all that, the movie was pretty good. Pedro Pascal, hero of The Mandalorian, is way over the top as the exceptionally evil total bad guy of the story. But that’s what villains are all about, right? He was the most over-the-top villain I’ve seen in years. We loved it. If you’re gonna be bad, be really, really BAD.

Tonight, we are back to old movies. Not even old movies, but old movies about even older movies — “That’s Entertainment” version 1, 2, and 3. We are currently watching three.

Cringing in extreme embarrassment at Joan Crawford’s middle-dark-face-makeup as songstress doing “Torch Song,” the awfulness of which is beyond my ability to describe, I got to thinking about blackface, though in her case, it was “middle brown” face. I decided the purpose of blackface was actually to honor Black performers. The white singers and dancers, unable to be as good as their darker sisters and brothers (who never got to make major movies) decided to pretend to BE them. It proved that even with makeup, they still couldn’t be as good as Those People.

You think? I asked Garry if maybe the whole thing was some bizarre form of honorific. He said he thought it had more to do with burlesque and the roots from which movies grew. Since I was always told that imitation is the finest kind of flattery, is dark face some bizarre form of flattery? No? Okay. Never mind. I was just trying to come up with a good reason to not hate something which makes my skin crawl.

So it’s New Year’s Day, the first full day of 2021. I guess we are now into the twenties. Still we are locked in our homes, those of us with conditions that make catching the plague very dangerous, so it’s time for a mini rant. When I started complaining about this, no one else was complaining yet, but today the rest of the world and news media seems to have caught up. Everyone is complaining. Despite having had several months available to plan how to deal with the incoming vaccines, nobody did nothin’. In Massachusetts, where we pride ourselves on the exceptionally high quality of our medical facilities (it’s one of our major industries) and where the Moderna vaccine was developed, we had no plans to distribute it. Not Pfizer (from next door Connecticut) nor Moderna.

Moderna was co-developed by a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Considering that just the leakage of information from people working on the vaccine should have been sufficient to get our governor and state Congress to sit down at a big table and figure out how they would distribute vaccinations, it’s remarkable they did nothing. Okay, they didn’t have the funding, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t make plans. Massachusetts has the infrastructure to vaccinate our population. We have more than enough hospitals, doctor’s offices, fire houses, and pharmacies to get the job done.

Was it because of the holidays? Did they decide to do zero planning because they were too busy figuring out a special stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey? Too obsessed with online shopping for Christmas presents, not to mention figuring out how to have a New Year’s celebration in the midst of a pandemic? Shouldn’t that have triggered the idea that vaccinations could make a perfect gift for pretty much everyone?

Police and firefighter medical people haven’t gotten vaccinated yet. This is our local cop shop. We have a new firehouse in downtown Uxbridge.

We have resources but unless you work in a hospital COVID ward, you haven’t been vaccinated — except for the few who were vaccinated in front of network TV cameras to prove vaccines exist and convince us we’d get them. Soon. Apparently the wealthy and more or less famous are jumping the lines and getting their vaccinations. It’s good to be the King. The reality is we’ll be lucky if we get our vaccinations by June. Biden pointed out that, at this rate, it could take years to inoculate even a quarter of our population. Meanwhile, Israel has managed to already vaccinate 10% of their entire population and I bet they’ll get the whole job done in another month or two.

I’ve been patient. I’ve been good. I’ve worn a mask. My hands are so dry from frequent washing you could grow cactus on them. I don’t think I’ve got years to wait for a vaccination. It’s time to stop figuring out who to blame and do something to solve the problem!

Categories: #Health, #HealthInsurance, Anecdote, Coronavirus - Covid 19, Epidemic - Pandemic - Plague, Government, Medical, Movies, old movies, vaccine

Tags: 2021, Marilyn Armstrong, New Year, old movies, Patience, vaccinations, WW84