The next 2020 surreal horror story, cutting through some dirty underwear, a great obit
At times, 2020 feels a little like a chapter from Revelations, the last book of the New Testament that predicts the end of days.
At the very least, the first four and a half months of the year look more like a Stephen King rough draft than a scrapbook.
Forget Andy Dufresne and his time at Shawshank or that crazy Kathy Bates and her sledgehammer and wooden block. That’s child’s play next to 2020.
We got the coronavirus. We had wildfires in Australia. There are locusts and murder hornets.
And now a new one from Mother Nature: killer sea foam. Yes, a homicidal head on a serial-killer surf. Talk about a crime wave. Five surfers in the Netherlands drowned this week in sea foam, which also prevented rescuers from helping them out.
Makes you wonder what June could possibly have in store for us.
AIRING THEIR DIRTY LAUNDRY
You think you got the quarantine crazies?
Meet Virginia Hamilton, a 69-year-old woman who was charged with felonious assault in Youngstown, Ohio, earlier this month. Virginia, according to local news station WKBN, got tired of her boyfriend’s dirty underwear sitting in the laundry basket. She grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and attacked her boyfriend, who tried to defend himself with a pocket knife.
When the authorities arrived, Virginia was on the front porch cleaning her knife and the blood from her hands while her boyfriend was inside covered in his own blood with cuts all over his arms and hands.
Two hunches here: First, here’s betting that fellow tends to his dirty drawers a little quicker next time. Also, anyone want to bet whether alcohol was involved?
ORDER OF IMPORTANCE
While polls are expensive tools to deploy, they are wildly popular clickbait for the internet.
CNN conducted a new poll on the upcoming presidential race. The title was somewhat surprising — and the only thing more interesting than polls are polls with surprising results — and read “CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump.”
That’s news, right, especially if it’s your own news service’s exclusive?
But continuing to feed the fire of cable news giants preaching to their regulars rather than straightforward reporting hurts all of the folks in the media.
That poll was the eighth headline on CNN’s site Wednesday evening behind headlines including the safety of our five surfers from the Netherlands and how 87% of a church choir got COVID-19 at practice.
Wonder where that story would have been on CNN. com if the headline had read “Biden holds double-digit lead over Trump and takes edge in battleground states,” or something of that ilk?
OBIT OBSERVATIONS
We’re going to go back a couple of weeks and review an obit I missed last month. (And thanks to the alert reader who mailed the details to me)
There are several ways that an obituary can jump out, at least to me. Length of life (short or long). The size of family. The activity in a life.
Well, friends, Clara “Toppi” Griffin checked all of those boxes and more. Toppi died on April 10 at the tender age of 101, and just trying to imagine the changes in our world she lived through is a two-Advil-worthy headache.
Family? Well, how’s the reach of Toppi and her husband, William Ernest Griffin? According to her obituary, Toppi was survived by two sons, six grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren.
Variety? She sang, worked in a school cafeteria, painted, wrote poetry, operated a Tunnel Hill restaurant for three decades, was a substitute teacher and sat with the sick at Hamilton Medical Center.
Activity? Toppi traveled to all 50 states, to China, 12 countries in Europe and the Holy Land.
Rest easy, Toppi, and here’s hoping the folks in Heaven have enough planned to keep you busy.