The First of September

Wear a mask, don't wear a mask, I don't care.  Myself, I'll wear one when I go out and about and mingle with my fellow humans.  Much has been said and written about Covid-19 but I have the feeling that we still don't know much about it and its effects.  I was expecting a huge surge of cases from the biker rally in Sturgis but there have not been that many, relatively speaking.  As a pandemic it seems to be taking its own sweet time and we may find out that like the common cold (also a coronavirus) that it is unavoidable.  I expect that reasonable people will take reasonable precautions,  and that will be that.

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An old song by The Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth," keeps popping into my head when I see news reports of the many civil disturbances we've been having.  "Battle lines being drawn..." indeed.  It's curious to me that the masses are at each other's throats when they share the common enemy of an inept government heavily influenced by big business and foreign interests.  Right wingers moan about the threat of Antifa but don't they realize that it stands for Anti-Fascist?  I don't think enough people are thinking things through.

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For the last couple of years my cell phone service has been getting progressively worse, to the point where I could barely get a signal in my apartment and would have to go outside for a good connection.  I put the blame on T-Mobile, figuring they were just a crappy provider, and I was almost right.  I failed to take into consideration the great strides that cell phone service has taken over the years.  I read about 5G networks but didn't pay any attention to it because I had an old and trusty flip phone, certainly not a fancy smartphone like all the kids are using today.  The thing is, that old phone ran on a 2G network, the kind of network that is being phased out by all of the carriers except for rural areas.  Hence, my lousy service.  Did they bother to tell me?  Of course not!  And as luck would have it, T-Mobile had an up-to-date flip phone available, 4G network, with enough bells and whistles to make it a smart phone if I wanted to buy into a data plan, which I don't.  The legacy "pay as you go" plan still works for me so I can get by on the cheap.  Big buttons, great call quality, and if I snag a Wifi connection I can play on the internet, just like all the other hipsters.  The camera stinks, though, but you can't have everything.