My life continues to be the exact opposite of everything I'd hoped it to be this time two years ago thanks in no small part to the pandemic, which merrilessly rolls along. The year 2020 was horrible, and 2021 was only marginally better, thanks to Trump being displaced from office and the brief respite we got from the pandemic between the decline in cases and the sudden blow from Delta. But the year is now ending the way it started; the record for the highest daily average COVID case count was broken after eleven-and-a-half months, and the new one was broken in eleven-and-a-half hours. And it will be broken again.
Me, I'm hunkering down again. I've been told I don't have to go into lockdown because of Omicron, and it's not March 2020 and all that, because there are these "tools" to fight the virus (yes, and I hear them on CNN all the time), but we're in winter now, so where the heck am I going to go apart from the supermarket? And I'll probably end up getting the omicorona anyway. Cases are expected to spike to an all-time high before dropping off sharply, at least until the next variant comes along. And, of course, I am looking at the items on my bucket list that COVID, appropriately enough, has made it increasingly impossible to check off.
Oh yeah, while all this has been going on, the replacement cassette player I got under warranty malfunctioned, and now it plays tapes to slowly as well. I'm going to have to wait for Omicron to pass before I get this one replaced under warranty.
I don't know what my commentary on this blog in 2022 will look like, but I can guarantee you that there'll be a lot less popular culture. I can't and don't keep up with it these days, largely because I don't care about it. I found the story of Britney Spears' conservatorship to be largely dull, and I could care less about all of the pop music and TV shows from South Korea. Just to show you how behind I am, I actually discovered on public television this year "Packed To The Rafters," an Australian comedy-drama series that went off the air Down Under (except for a reunion or two) in 2013.
A for what's going on today, well, I'm very sorry that Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story is a box-office disaster, but despite the good reviews it's gotten, there's been a lot of pushback from Hispanic groups about the new movie, continuing Spielberg's uneasy relationship with communities of color - as if trying to turn The Color Purple into a movie taught him nothing. (See why I gave up making year-end winners and losers lists?) I can't let 2021 go ,however, without addressing the shooting accident on the set of Alec Baldwin's latest movie project: It was a terrible, tragic accident, and I hope all of the parties involved get through this.
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