Post 261 - November 27, 2020

Day 261…

The dishes are done. The leftovers are in the fridge.

I slept for about ten hours last night so this morning I still feel sleepy.

It was so nice not to look at the news at all yesterday. It really did turn out to be a day about family and friends. Our building meal turned out better, I think, than any of us expected. Michael’s first turkey was perfectly cooked, and all of the sides were delicious.

The feeling of community that we generated was far better than anything we ate, as tasty as it all was.

Today is Black Friday - the beginning of the Holiday shopping season. What will it look like?

Stores all over the city have had sale signs up announcing bargains galore. I’m interested to see later on today whether people actually show up. Amazon has added a massive number of new workers for the holidays expecting that many more people than usual will be doing their shopping online.

Police officers in Philadelphia and Rochester started referring to the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday’ in the early sixties because of the increase in crowds around the start of the shopping season. Terming something difficult or calamitous ‘black’ has been done for centuries. Think Black Plague, or Edward the Black Prince who lived in the 14th century and is remembered for his well-documented brutality and for all of the massacres he ordered.

In an attempt to make the term more politically correct, the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981 started pushing the idea that this day marked the period of time when retailers saw their balance sheets go from the negative (usually indicated by red ink) to the positive (indicated by black ink). Stores that were operating in the red could now begin to operate in the black.

Regardless of what it is called, for many businesses, this next month often means the difference between a successful year financially and total failure. Increased sales and revenues over this month really can balance out losses over much of the preceding year. This month, this year, is going to be more important than ever.

Movie studios don’t release their major tent-pole movies over the holidays because it’s fun, they do it because their audience is primed to expect them and have the time off from work to go. In some case, the studios have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into their film and they have an extremely short window to make that money back and put it into the black, or profit numbers.

The winter holidays, like the very beginning of summer are perfect launch dates. People want to go to the movies, and they have the time.

The big studios are trying to figure out how to release their films this year. With all of the product out there, the question is, can they make their money back by streaming them?

The biggest new film to debut in theatres this week was the animated sequel The Croods : A New Age. It has grossed about $4 million so far since its release on Wednesday. The first film, The Croods, grossed nearly $44 million over the same period when it debuted. Both films have had a similar critical response. Their Cinemascope rating is within a 1% point of each other.

Many movie theatres are closed. New York, which is usually a major market, is completely shut down. Theatres that are open across the country have limited seating and unpredictable show times.

Two major blockbusters, Marvel’s Wonder Woman 2 and Pixar’s new animated movie Soul are going to be available to HBO Max subscribers to stream on Christmas Day even as they open in theatres around the country. It remains to be seen whether these moves will allow the studios to return a profit.

By the end of today we will have added another million cases of the virus in just a few days. Sunday is expected to be the busiest travel day of the year.

It will take another week or two before we see just how bad the spike from this weekend’s get-togethers and traveling is going to be.

Reports have just surfaced that North Korea tried to hack AstraZeneca to gain control of their potential vaccine, using Russian links and emails. They reportedly sent Whatsapp messages and other emails as trojan horses to AstraZeneca employees in an attempt to get in. They do not appear to have been successful.

AstraZeneca is hitting some glitches in its approval process for their vaccine. They are not being fully transparent about what those glitches really are. There appears to have been a dosing error with some of the trial participants. There is some missing data and there are no details about two participants who became ill with neurological problems after they received the vaccine.

The President, while continuing to deny that he lost the election, is back on the golf course.

At a news conference yesterday, one of the first times he has taken questions from reporters since the election, he somewhat lost his mind when Jeff Mason of Reuters questioned his claims of voter fraud, “Don’t talk to me that way. You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

There are stages of grief. Some say seven, some say five, but they all boil down to much the same thing.

The first stage is shock and denial. We have certainly seen plenty of evidence of that from the President.

The second is pain and guilt. I imagine that in these days where he has been largely absent from public view that he has experienced a lot of that.  Given his pathology, as outlined by his niece, I am sure that he is experiencing a massive amount of shame as well.

Some will skip over stage two and go directly to the next one. Stage three is anger and bargaining. That appears to be where we are. His outburst to the reporter yesterday is indicative of that.

He also tweeted after that, that he will leave the White House if President-elect Biden can prove that his 80 million votes are not fraudulent. Bargaining. President-elect Biden does not need to prove any such thing, it is up to the President to prove that there was. Even his own lawyers say there wasn’t. Denial.

He did tweet that he’d leave office if the Electoral College votes for Biden. More bargaining.

If he continues to follow the steps, depression is next, followed by an upward turn that will lead to reconstruction and working through which should finally end with acceptance. So, while we wait for the Electoral College to cast their votes on December 14, the president will continue to lurch through his grief while we are all forced to watch each bloody step.

All of us will keep paying for him to play golf while nobody actually leads the country.

These next weeks are just going to drag out endlessly.

My favorite thing to eat after Thanksgiving is dry white turkey on white bread with a light scraping of butter. The worse the bread, the better. I like it when you take a bit and it all compresses into the roof of your mouth and you can’t get it out.

I don’t know why I like that, but I do. Candy Corn for Halloween and a dry white turkey sandwich on white bread for Thanksgiving. Nothing better. Michael keeps asking me if I want cranberry sauce or anything else on it. No. Just dry. He appears to have made the decision to just let it all happen despite how horrified he is.

His sour dough bread is far too good for my ideal sandwich, but we are all called upon to make sacrifices these days. It will have to do.

It would be great if a lot of our local businesses did well this month after all of the hardship they have gone through this year. As much as we can support them all, we should, but not at the expense of our health and the health of those around us.

If a store looks crowded, go somewhere else and come back when it isn’t.

As everybody gets back from their Thanksgiving celebrations in other places, there is going to be a lot more movement of the virus. We really won’t know for a while where it is.

If you do go out today, shop intelligently. Keep away from your fellow shoppers. And wear a mask.

Be safe.