More and more professional football players are becoming infected with the ‘rona. Some will carry permanent disabilities; more will never be able to play football again.
So why are we doing this? It’s alluring to believe that if we act normal, things will be normal. But the virus doesn’t care.
Athletes are getting plenty of tests; nurses not so much.
Sally Jenkins, Kurt Streeter, and Jerry Brewer are all asking that question.
Jenkins:
There has been evidence of zombie-like incursion into the NFL’s main office in the Park Avenue headquarters, despite all those hermetic doors that make a hissing noise. The league’s determination to make the Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers play on a Wednesday at 3:40 p.m., after three postponements, is purely unsettling. There is something about it that feels forced, involuntary, creepily so. It’s as though league officials mistake frenzied activity for winning against the virus. But then, they just reflect their audience in that.
Streeter:
Of the league’s 32 teams, all but one, the Seattle Seahawks, have been hit by the virus. The outbreaks began piling up almost from the start, as N.F.L. teams began flying across the country for games, some of them playing in stadiums with a limited number of fans. In October, two dozen Tennessee Titans became infected, causing the first of what has become a string of postponements.
The N.F.L. looks like it is running a circus.
Among the latest lowlights: A marquee game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, scheduled for Thanksgiving Day, was postponed to Sunday after several Ravens players tested positive, including the league’s reigning most valuable player, Lamar Jackson. As the number of infected players began piling up, the league moved the game to Tuesday.
Then the league rescheduled the game again, this time for Wednesday afternoon.
Brewer:
While it is unlikely that Commissioner Roger Goodell will publicly acknowledge any danger, he needs to make sure the league has several firm contingency plans in place. The coronavirus is in charge, and it is raging once again. So let’s keep saying it: It’s impossible to play football out in the open, without a bubble environment, and not be significantly affected. Some teams have been negligent and sloppy about health protocols, and the NFL has grown less compassionate and more forceful in disciplining them. But the reality is that the league can’t mandate its way out of trouble, not entirely.
Open thread!
[Looking forward to a bigfoot from Cole! Update: No, I did it! Unapologetically!]
The Moar You Know
Goodell will kill everyone on the planet willing to pick up a football just so long as he doesn’t have to refund one red cent to his advertisers.
Other MJS
Dinesh D’Souza again:
Pro-Trump Commentator Roasted After Blasting Obama For Talking About Himself Too Much In His Memoir
pluky
@The Moar You Know:
You stated it much more forcefully than I was contemplating, but spot on none-the-less.
Gravenstone
I’m still amazed that MLB managed to pull off some semblance of a season, and baseball is not remotely the contact sport that football is. Even then the ultimate futility of it was highlighted by a member of the championship team getting pulled from the field in the final game when his positive test results came in. Only to rejoin the team on field during the postgame celebration. Understandable but reckless.
What the NFL is doing is orders of magnitude more reckless than MLB, and they’re reaping what they’ve sown. I also wonder how much impact their games are having on community spread.
zzyzx
I’ll be honest: NFL Sundays are keeping me sane and making it easier to stay at home on that day at least. It’s been a lifeline so I’m glad it has lasted this long.
It helps that Russell Wilson has been amazing and the Seahawks will probably make the playoffs. I know why it shouldn’t happen but I’m so grateful for it.
Roger Moore
It’s the same basic problem that has been undermining so much of our response: we’re asking businesses to shut down, or at least run at greatly reduced capacity, without offering anything in return. The business owners, and to a lesser extent the workers this is throwing out of work, don’t like that and would rather stay open, even when it becomes transparently obvious that it just isn’t working. The NFL, like so many businesses, is ignoring the extent to which their approach isn’t working because they see the big pot of gold at the end of the season.
Of course the root of this incoherent public health strategy is a ridiculous political conflict. On one side, you have people who want to shut down businesses but subsidize them, and on the other side you have people who want to open everything so we don’t need to subsidize anyone. I think the “shut down as much as possible but provide subsidies” is clearly a better approach to the virus. Business isn’t going to go back to normal when people are afraid of going to public spaces, even if we don’t formally shut down anything. But the “compromise” of shutting things down while offering nothing in return gives us the worst of both worlds: a crippling hit to businesses without doing enough to stop the pandemic.
artem1s
there are going to be a lot of municipalities burdened with disability claims for the next 5 decades. My BIL is a firefighter in Columbus, Ohio. He and other coworkers had COVID leave taken away from them early on. If they wanted to self quarantine because of exposure on the job, they have to use personal leave. The city wasn’t getting them tested even when they came into contact with those who were showing symptoms. Only if someone was known to have tested positive were they allowed to get tested themselves. There has been a massive attempt to hide the infection rates among city workers. Little or no attempt to be transparent about track and trace. Quarantining was discouraged because they would have had multiple firehouses shut down and been unable to fill shifts. It has been a free for all for the last 3-6 months. My BIL’s entire firehouse had to go into quarantine right before Thanksgiving. He was supposed to work right up until he and multiple co-workers became symptomatic and tested positive. For now he seems to have no lasting effects. But I imagine cities all over the country are going to have additional hits to their budgets due to COVID disability claims. All because football must go on and bars must stay open for the armchair quarterbacks.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Other MJS:
I blame whoever it was at Dartmouth that told that dipshit that he was smart.
CaseyL
While I am of course relieved and proud that the Seahawks are so far Covid-free, I wonder how long they can stay that way if all the other teams are contagious.
@Roger Moore: You are absolutely correct, though I don’t see how the country could have subsidized college and professional football in any meaningful fashion. I don’t mean the high-marquee players and coaches, but the supporting personnel, stadium employees and vendors, etc.
randy khan
The NFL would have a lot less of a problem if it had set out strict penalties from the start for violating the protocols – suspensions for people who don’t wear masks, particularly on the sidelines during games, lost draft picks starting with the second violation, the same kinds of rules for players that MLB had, etc., etc.
Even then, it just seems like football is inherently much more risky than baseball and soccer. Some of that is the number of players and some of it is the more intimate level of contact. It probably was insane to think that there could be something resembling a normal season for the NFL, let alone for college.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Roger Moore:
That national motto on the money? “In God We Trust”?
Paraphrased appropriately, it reads “Fuck You, You’re On Your Own”.
Frankly, I think it is a lot more accurate, and describes the public-spiritedness of Christian Conservatism.
Some wag should offer up THAT resolution in Congress.
mad citizen
I wondered one day why or if Goodell was pushing the season/games, because I thought the owners and him agreed upon him leaving in the near future. Why should he care?
It will be interesting after all of this to see how the pandemic killed or seriously curtailed certain activities–movies, brick and mortar shopping, various sporting events, etc.
Simpler post: MUST…………………HAVE…………………..SPORTSBALL!
Adam L Silverman
scav
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: God helps them who help themselves (to the nearest available cashpot). As for the NFL, what’s one more additional source of potential injury?
eta
@Adam L Silverman: Now there’s a team logo for a local sport!
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
I think enhanced unemployment benefits would have been the right general approach across a broad swath of the economy. If your employer gets shut down by a public health order, you’re automatically eligible for unemployment benefits for a large percentage of your pay. Having that there as a backstop would have made it much easier for any public health official to issue a public health order.
jl
Last I heard, they’re still playing baseball in Taiwan. I think they managed to get through their world series. Last I heard, they could play sports with reduced capacity crowds in the stands (though, ‘crowds’ is probably not the right word anymore). And Australia and New Zealand too, if you like cricket.
Anyone from there knows different or can give info on how they are handling sports with covid, I’d like to hear.
Anyway, point being, that the US is a country that is operating like a set of nested dolls of failure. The problems the NFL is having is inside the failure of the US to handle covid anywhere near some other countries. I think, as Cole expressed a while ago, that major league sports should have cancelled their usual seasons. They could have done exhibitions, done charity work, lots of things. The NFL using up tests to try to have a season, and then not being able to pull it off, while we need more tests for covid control, and the epidemic is killing more people everyday, is ugly.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: Honestly, I’d be ok with the NFL and some other pro sports trying to continue playing, as they have the resources to test and isolate people and, in some sense, most of these guys get paid a lot of money for the risk involved and could probably opt out without being evicted or going hungry if they don’t want to risk it (I think NFL players still get paid, albeit less). It’s ridiculous to keep bars and indoor dining going, however. Obviously, it’s because states generate a lot of sales tax revenue from them and the federal government has done squat to replace that revenue.
jl
There were warning signs of how brutal and ugly the US has become. Life expectancy in the US fell between 2014 and 2017. Was a slight uptick in average life expectancy in 2018. But age adjusted life expectancy, which is more important for what any individual experiences (since no one is the average of all ages in the population) was still falling in 2018, and probably is still falling.
The US didn’t care about that. The US didn’t care about increasingly inadequate US residential housing supply, rising rents all over the country that were a burden on average people, the rise in homelessness. The US didn’t care about seriously deteriorating conditions for the average person before covid. Why would the US care that much about people dying from covid? What social and economic problem for the average person has the US cared about recently
Edit: There was an editorial someplace, I forget where, by a conservative US economist, that said that a bright side of covid for national security is that it is proving that the US is tough, our population can handle adversity and death, and it can handle a gut punch. Good signaling that we are tough country. I think it was Tyler Cowen but not sure. I don’t have any comment on that view, if any is needed.
JPL
@jl: It started with Reagan. He was the one with the massive tax cuts, and large deficit. Remember government is the problem.
Roger Moore
@jl:
The thing that’s really frustrating about the testing stuff is that places like big universities and the NBA have shown it’s possible to massively increase our testing infrastructure, and that large-scale testing really can work to keep the pandemic under control. Despite this, we still don’t have a national testing strategy, and most state testing strategies aren’t very good. We could do it if we had the political will, but it’s lacking.
mrmoshpotato
@Other MJS: Memoir, memoir…
Ah.
noun
a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.
Usually memoirs.
The conceited bastard! Obummer, you’ve really done it now! You made Dinesh DiFelon look like an IDIOT!
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@artem1s: There are already COVID-19-related claims moving through the Social Security Disability system; I saw one in October that was close to completion. And that trust fund was already pretty stretched.
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
It’s more than just sales tax revenue. There’s also a big public desire to have restaurants, hair salons, and similar businesses open. There were literally people in the streets with guns threatening their state governments demanding businesses reopen so they could get haircuts and go to the gym. I think a lot of politicians are reacting to that public demand.
NotMax
Being part of the group which cannot fathom why do we do football at any time, consider this to be a subset of that POV.
;)
KenK
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: @#11
That national motto on the money? “In God We Trust”?
Paraphrased appropriately, it reads “Fuck You, You’re On Your Own”.
They probably are one and the same, yes.
zzyzx
@Roger Moore yeah, even with WA restaurants not allowing indoor seating, I drove by a place in the exurbs a few weeks ago that basically had a sealed tent that was technically “outdoor seating” and it was packed.
I miss dining in too and casual socializing but I don’t miss it that much that I understand taking risks for it.
Roger Moore
@jl:
A large chunk of our population apparently can’t tolerate going more than a couple of months without access to a hair dresser.
Benw
From the league that did fuck all about CTE: crippling indifference to the virus!
raven
Steelers and Ravens 4:00!!!
jl
@Roger Moore: Countries that have done well at control are able to surge tests by factors of 4, 5, even 10 or more. That seems an important element in emerging evidence Western European will be able to beat back the resurgence there without very damaging, prolonged and ultimately futile, lockdowns. Not saying that they haven’t had lockdowns, but their populations are seeing results quickly, while we have all pain and no gain.
Norway and Finland, which so far have been able to control their resurgences with flattening the curve at levels far below their first waves, rather than a huge crisis, ramped up their testing enormously early, when cases were extremely low, but with very early signs of increasing spread. Their efforts seem to have paid off (so far, knock on wood).
mad citizen
@JPL:
“Remember government is the problem.”
I’ve been posting here (and only doing so again in the vain hope some Biden person reads here) that I would love it if Biden would hit back on this in the inaugural speech–at least a couple of paragraphs pointing out how wrong it is. But even more so to start pounding some nails in the Saint Ronnie bullshit
Most days when I think of our nation and the virus the overwhelming thought is “we failed”.
jl
@Roger Moore: Give me no mask inside the store, or give me death!
Jackie
@zzyzx: You and me both! I wonder if Seattle’s distance from the other teams may also be a plus.
At any rate – GOOOOO SEAHAWKS!!!
raven
@Jackie: Careful, the righteousness police are gonna get you.
KenK
@zzyzx: @26
“basically had a sealed tent that was technically “outdoor seating” and it was packed.”
Covid tents – yeah, we have them in Buffalo, too.
KenK
@Roger Moore:
Nor, apparently, tolerate wearing a mask for a few minutes.
J R in WV
@Other MJS:
D’Souza is such a stupid ass… how hard is it to figure out what an autobiography really is? Is there an American autobiography NOT written in the first person?
Geminid
@randy khan: The NFL did start out with heavy sanctions for violations of social distancing policies. Early on six coaches were fined $100,000 each for non-compliance with masking rules; the six teams received $250,000 fines, and the league has not backed off since on fining coaches, players and teams for violations. But even with fairly diligent adherence to standards, Covid-19 is so infectious that any lapses can result in community spread. The League knew this season would be a science project, but with hundreds of million dollars at stake it went ahead anyway. And even if they had known then what they know now- and basically they did- the owners and and league management would probably still do the same.
J R in WV
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
This!! A thousand times this~!!~
My uncle went to Dartmouth, and came out a socialist pacifist. What happened up there since then?
J R in WV
@CaseyL:
The stadiums are empty, the crowd noise comes from the stadium’s PA speakers. There are no stadium employees, no vendors. No one but coaches, TV staff, players and trainers. Oh, yeah, team doctors, who are mostly orthopedists.
ETA:
As suggested above, a complete, nation-wide federal unemployment insurance system, that wouldn’t go away after the pandemic is dealt with, would be a great value to the whole nation. If you quit working, whatever the reason, you get a large percentage of your earnings, which could drop slowly after a few months.
The Moar You Know
@zzyzx: I call those “gas chambers”
We’re having a cold winter here in San Diego, in that the average temp during daylight is about 65 degrees. So a lot of “gas chambers” are popping up. Guess breaking out your once-a-year jacket is just too hard.
zzyzx
Now where I’m frustrated is with college football happening. Not only do those players not get paid, not only is it leading to superspreading events happening in college towns as the bars open, but the whole system is so haphazard that they’re rescheduling games on the fly and just winging it. They’re not even getting a season out of it.
O. Felix Culpa
@raven: Eastern time?
zzyzx
@O. Felix Culpa: 12:40 PM PST so yes.
With no Lamar Jackson, it’ll likely be a blowout but I’m sure I’ll turn it on as a work from home novelty.
Other MJS
@J R in WV:
That would be an elitist affectation.
raven
@zzyzx: On the west coast and the Big 10.
geg6
The Steelers, despite having had very few cases, have really been hard hit by this. The Titans game that was postponed was against the Steelers. Now we’ve had three different dates for this Ravens game and, if everything goes off as planned, their Sunday game is going to be postponed until Monday. Basically, because the NFL insists that this game has to be played this week, the Steelers will have to play 3 games in about 12 days. They are the team being punished and they aren’t the ones violating the league’s COVID rules. And believe me, they are aware of it. They had Cam Heyward respond for the players because he’s the most media friendly but he was clearly pissed off. The NFLPA has to take some of the blame because they agreed to all of this ridiculousness. Worst union ever.
And still the Steelers are 10-0.
Lacuna Synechdoche
Sally Jenkins @ WaPo via Cheryl Rofer @ Top:
So, basically, anyone watching the Wednesday game is essentially watching the prologue to a stochastic snuff film.
Ruckus
This entire thing is showing us that the US has devolved into a cult of the wealthy, religiously worshipping the all mighty dollar. And yes I was a businessman, interested in making a buck, but not at the expense of the country and my fellow humans. The republican party has become/maybe has been for decades only and all about the money, never about the people.
raven
@Lacuna Synechdoche: Oh, well now that YOU have weighed in. . .
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@The Moar You Know:
Feel the waves of my seething hatred rolling at you. My house was at 65 when I woke up.
rikyrah
The players and their union are to be blamed for this. They didn’t have a group of owners that cared enough to put them in a bubble the way that basketball was, and didn’t have enough sense to know that if enough of them said, No, I don’t think so, there would have been no season. Football is always the weakest link.
So, now, they’ve caught a disease that might prevent them from continuing to play football.
Amir Khalid
@Other MJS:
Dinesh D’Souza is the Jimi Hendrix of stupidity; he is always exploring new and amazing ways to express himself on his instrument.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Did you get the email I sent you yesterday using the email address you’d previously emailed me from?
Amir Khalid
@zzyzx:
Sitting in a sealed outdoor tent is for all intents* and purposes the same thing as being indoors.
*No pun intended, honest.
Quaker in a Basement
This past Sunday, the NFL forced the Denver Broncos to play a game with 0 quarterbacks available on its roster. All three of the team’s quarterbacks were unavailable due to Covid exposure rules. The team put a wide receiver from its standby roster in the game as quarterback. He completed one of nine passes with two interceptions. Most of the offensive snaps were directly to running backs. It was a total joke of a game.
frosty
@zzyzx: It might have been a blowout (or at least a loss) with even with Jackson. It’s been looking like the other teams figured him out this year, at least somewhat.
I’ll turn it on, curious to see how RG III does. Or at least record it so my night shift son can watch it with me when he wakes up.
Soprano2
Yes, 1000 times this!!! I wish we could have stayed closed for 3 months. I wish all the restaurants, bars, and small shops around here could have done the same. Unfortunately, the bills keep coming even when you’re closed. For us the big problem with PPP was that it was specifically designed for businesses who were trying to stay open, and had nothing to offer to those who had to be closed. Our employees were already getting good unemployment in April and May; why would we want to borrow money to pay them (if you wanted to get the loan forgiven, most of the money had to go to pay employees)? Meanwhile, we’ve still got utilities, phone, internet, and cable TV bills to pay even when we’re closed. If they want things to be closed for a long enough period to actually get COVID under control, then three things need to be done 1) give small business owners enough money to pay their bills when no money is coming in 2) make sure the employees have enough unemployment to live on while their places of employment are closed, and 3) give state and local governments a supplement to replace the sales tax money they’re losing with all those businesses being closed. I can sympathize with everyone here who says, multiple times, “All the restaurants and bars and other non-essential businesses should just close for the forseeable future!”, but how on earth can anyone do that under these circumstances? We couldn’t close right now – we still have bills to pay, and there is no supplemental unemployment for our employees. All the customers would just go somewhere else (I think at least 3/4 of our regular customers have already had COVID – several went to Florida and got it there!). This is the conundrum we’re all in – the government isn’t willing to do what it would take to really get the COVID numbers down, so this is the result.
And the reason they’re playing football is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Only look at any of my e-mail accounts sporadically. Maybe once month, if that much. Will add a visit there to the to-do list (have to dig out the password first).
Soprano2
At my city government employer, all of this is handled by the rumor mill. They aren’t even telling us when an employee in our department gets sick. I asked why they didn’t sent out e-mails saying “A person in building ‘x’ got COVID, if you need to be tested the Health Department will contact you”, and was told HR decided not to break it down to buildings. When I asked why they didn’t tell people when someone in the department got sick, the only answer I got was some mumbling about privacy concerns. Basically, they’ve decided it’s on a need-to-know basis, and none of us employees need to know! However, everyone knows who’s been out sick with it and who is quarantined because of it anyway. I keep telling them there are privacy exceptions to HIPPA when it comes to infectious disease, but HR has ruled so that’s the end of it. From talking to other people, I’ve found that most employers are atrocious at handling this situation.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: We generally could use some longer-term stabilization instruments like that to deal with economic crises, but they don’t have to be limited to transfer payments like UI. A national infrastructure bank administered along the lines of the Fed would probably have been very helpful in this situation, a good stimulus providing work that could probably be done relatively safely and take advantage, for example, of reduced traffic to upgrade transportation facilities. States can’t operate countercyclically like that.
J R in WV
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That’s a good sleeping temperature. We set the thermostat for 67 at bedtime, but the actual bedroom is 3 sides outdoors, and at the far end of the duct system, so it’s quite a bit cooler than the room where the thermostat sits. I crack a window too, for fresh cold air.
Sheet, quilt, feather comforter. Some nights a dog on top, that’s surprisingly warm! They seem to run several degrees warmer than people run…
Steve in the ATL
@J R in WV: to answer your question from the other day, during my hiatus I avoided B-J entirely for a while, then lurked for a bit before commenting again. Like many people, I had to have a break from thinking about the trump kakistocracy so much.
@Soprano2:
An HR department with actual power (LOL), or management hiding behind HR to get what it wants?
@J R in WV:
Those are called “biographies”! Can you imagine the outcry if Obama had written about himself in the third person?
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: Sidney Powell and Lin Wood are speaking about trump’s win in GA, in Alpharetta. From Greg Bluestein…. Powell: “I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all unless your vote is secure.” She wants system of signed paper ballots, no Dominion voting machines. Basically, she’s urging Republicans not to vote in the Jan. 5 runoffs
? ? ? ?
raven
@J R in WV: We got new HVAC recently and put in a smart thermostat (eco bee) that has sensors you can place where you want the actual temp to be. We put one in the bedroom and set it at 65 to sleep and it works great.
catclub
Also, someone DID count pronouns. Obama’s memoir was 2.64% ‘I’ and variants thereof. Trump’s is 4.12%
Projection seems to be a thing… again.
also: Dinesh D’Felon, FTFY
raven
@Quaker in a Basement: Fuck Elway and his plea!
catclub
I think depending on how heavy the quilt is, having the quilt with a down comforter is counterproductive to keeping warm. or at least it takes much longer to warm it all up.
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV: Knew a guy in NH, built his own (log) house, wood stove for heat. Master bedroom was upstairs, said sometimes in the morning he’d find a skin of ice on his bedside glass of water. He liked it that way.
Steve in the ATL
@Quaker in a Basement: @raven: hard to be sympathetic when they knowingly violated all the COVID protocols! Also hard to be sympathetic to Elway. I have more sympathy for the fans who watched that shitshow.
@JPL: ha!
And Lin Wood? Christ, what an asshole.
NotMax
@catclub
Flashing back to pre-heating a bed using a long-handled metal bedwarmer into which hot coals had been put when visiting Scotland in wintertime.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Knew some people who chipped in to buy a seen better days farm in very rural* Pennsylvania. House had a forced air grate for heating in the middle of the floor of the main room on the ground floor. That was it.
A glass of water upstairs on a bedside table would be frozen solid upon awaking the next morning during the teeth of winter.
*So rural they needed to dial one for 1-1 for long distance. Dialing a single 1 connected them to local numbers outside the small privately owned phone company.
;)
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: Raven… Watch this OM Now Lin Wood is telling them not to vote… link
Lacuna Synechdoche
@raven:
Sorry? Have I caused offense somehow?
Steve in the ATL
@JPL:
Christ, what a moron!
Other MJS
@Roger Moore: Bravo!
raven
@Lacuna Synechdoche: Nah, you’re just part of the choir.
raven
Big Ben with a pick in the endzone!!
J R in WV
Have always had a high level of disregard for John Elway. Far more arrogant and condescending than his modest skills deserved. And after he retired as a QB, now he’s top dog in charge of the Broncos. A real creep to me.
Couldn’t even manage to keep his team from being quarantined? That’s a bare minimum to me, really just making sure everyone follows procedure, always all the time. Can’t be done, evidently.
The Broncos are a team I can always root for the other guy, unless it’s the Cowboys. Not real fond of the Ravens, who ran away from Cleveland, nor the Colts, who ran away from Baltimore in the DARK of NIGHT!!!
J R in WV
@NotMax:
When we started moving onto our current farm back in the 1970s, wife was working shifts for The AP, and could be called out for any emerging disaster, mine collapse, industrial disaster, etc. So she told the phone company we needed a private line, as opposed to the party lines the neighborhood had. Those would ring for everyone on the circuit, and the ring pattern told everyone who the call was for… Long and two shorts was JC and Rosie, Two Longs was Earl, etc. And anyone could listen in to any call, too!
Wife insisted, neighbors would not care for phone calls at 2 or 3 am. But they said they didn’t know if that would be possible. This was a Bell company, C&P… it did happen before we were moved in.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
yea, sure !!! ;~)
Geminid
@Quaker in a Basement: NFL teams are starting to add fourth “quarantine ” quarterbacks to their rosters. The Washington Football team just signed Taylor Heinecki to practice separately from the rest of the players. He’s worked with the offensive coaches and their system, and will be available in case the two active and one practice team quarterbacks catch the virus. I guess they saw what happened to Denver. What the WFT really needs is a new owner, but that’s another story.
The NFL went ahead and played this season, for better or worse. One better aspect is that sports fans get to see the impact of Covid-19 in the sports world. Many fans keep up to date on news generally, but many others do not. But now even the most myopic fantasy football fans have to take the reality of the pandemic into account.
Soprano2
I would say both. Our HR department has real power, but if the supervisor wanted to do something different, he or she could do that probably without much pushback as long as no identifying details were released. I think HR and Law have conferred, and they are terrified an employee will come after them if they think they can be identified as having had COVID from an official communication. Of course, like I said, everyone knows who has had it and whose wife has had it and so on, but that’s not official so to HR that doesn’t count. They wave HIPPA around a lot to justify all of this, but I know there are exceptions to HIPPA for infectious diseases. You don’t have a right to keep it secret from me if you might have exposed me to a possibly fatal disease!
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV: Still pining for the Brooklyn Dodgers, I bet.
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV: Well, otherwise he’d have had to write “for all intensive purposes.”
raven
I love that this ani-football screed has turned into a game day post!
raven
@J R in WV: My friend had a house in Palominas. Right by the San Pedro River in the Herford area.
J R in WV
@catclub:
We use the down on top of the quilt, and as we get warmer or cooler, we push the feathers down or pull them up.
And then there’s the dog, who will sometimes creep undetectibly, very gently into the bed between us, I think if she gets too cool, rather than going into the kitchen where the thermostat is. Very warm puppy! Welcome if she stays still.
Although earlier she threw up some bambi bits onto her toes, which isn’t acceptable in bed!!!
Steve in the ATL
@raven: it’s about damned time!
zzyzx
@raven: Well John Cole and I got into it over Super Bowl XL, so it makes sense since this is a Steelers’ game.
raven
@zzyzx: IMHO the anti-football posse here got so intense that the blog owner and front pagers just gave up. I just want to poke them when I get a chance.
NotMax
@raven
If watching burly men run around in tight pants happens to be your bag….
:)
Geminid
@NotMax: I have something better than a brazier of charcoal. I take a 20 lb soapstone scrap and heat it on a gas burner set low. After it’s hot but not so hot I can’t handle it, I flip it over and put it at the foot of the bed and throw my blankets over it. It stays warm for a couple hours. The right person would be even better, though.
J R in WV
@raven:
That’s lovely country, I drove around there with my cousin last winter, prior to the Trump Plague. Rolling land just this side of the Mexican border.
The San Pedro is a huge flyway for migratory birds — there are several B&Bs that specialize in birders, huge variety of hummers coming up out of Central America.
It’s spelled Hereford, I think… You head west out of Bisbee and loop around, then up into Sierra Vista from the south. Old mines all over the place. Some kind of monument down there too… Coronado National Monument, a piece of the Coronado National Forest. People pan for gold in the Coronado National Forest.
NotMax
@Geminid
Just for the record, ’twas not charcoal, was coal coal.
NotMax
@Geminid
Too strenuous getting them to stay put on the gas burner.
;)
misterpuff
@J R in WV:
As some one who has come to turn with modern sports machinations, i can only say you limit yourself if you only root for (and /or like) teams that haven’t moved.
Of the original teams in the NFL only two survive
The Decatur Staleys and the Chicago Cardinals .
The Staleys moved to Chicago and became the Bears, who drove off the Cardinals to St. Louis and now Arizona.
All the rest of the core pre-60s NFL teams were expansion teams technically. Of those, only the Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers have not moved. The Giants and (the Jets) moved out of state though still in the metro area, Washington moved to MD although in metro area.
Of the 60s (and newer) expansion teams many have stayed in place: Minnesota, Atlanta, New Orleans, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Houston #2, Baltimore #2, Cleveland #3 and Seattle have stayed put. Dallas , while in the Metro area is in Arlington, not that close to its orginal city.
The LA Rams, the Cleveland Browns and the SF 49ers came from failed leagues to the NFL. Only SF has not moved (unless you count moving from the original city to Santa Clara)
Of the AFL teams that came in in the merger: Buffalo, Cincinnati and Denver have stayed in their original cities. The Chargers, the Raiders, the Titans, the Colts and the Browns have moved to new pastures (a couple of those multiple times). The KC Chiefs were originally the Dallas Texans but lost the competition with the Cowboys. New England and Miami still rep their metro areas but have moved out of city limits.
So things change.
raven
@misterpuff: From Decatur. Mr Staley gave the franchise to George Halas on the condition he never did anything to embarrass him. (I’m not sure the promise was kept but I am pretty sure you knew this!)
mad citizen
Dying thread, but will point out my local team the Colts many years ago surpassed the Baltimore Colts in number of games played (like around 2010), and for number of years it’s around 37 to 31; Baltimore 1953-1983, Indy 1984-2020. Once I heard the Baltimore “fans” would yell and swear at the Indy team bus on the rare occasions to Indy Colts played there, I pretty much lost the rest of any respect for those people.
What misterpuff said! When I was a kid in NE Indiana my (late 60s/early 70s) teams were the Raiders and Orioles. Never really had a fav NBA team; maybe Wilt’s Lakers. Kenny Stabler and John Madden, etc.
TS (the original)
@Gravenstone:
Late to the thread but
reckless – YES, Understandable – NO
Defines a deplorable perfectly. Zero concerns as to what harm is caused by their actions.
Geminid
@NotMax: Well, I like a tough woman, but not that tough.
TS (the original)
@jl:
The football season in Australia started late (End of May, after the games were cancelled, late March ) and was played under very strict guidelines. The teams were NOT allowed out into the general community for the season. Anyone breaking the rules was fined (large fines) and put in quarantine for 2 weeks. No games were played in Melbourne. The Melbourne team spent the season in Queensland. There were initially no spectators but this changed as the virus situation in Australia was controlled.
I didn’t think it would work, but as the virus subsided in Australia, it worked well and the season ended without any disruptions – other than the few players ( and I think one coach) who just had to break the rules they were given.
Cheryl Rofer
So much for basketball
Wyatt Salamanca
@Quaker in a Basement:
He’d be a perfect fit for the 0-11 NY Jets.
redoubtagain
@misterpuff: Point of order, but the Cleveland Rams moved to LA in 1946. (They won the NFL Championship in 1945 but lost $300 K or so in the process.) Baltimore Colts One came over from the AAFC with the Browns and 49ers but folded after the 1950 season. Baltimore Colts Two started as the NY Yankees/Boston Yankees/Dallas Texans (1952) before moving to Baltimore (1953)
Misterpuff
@redoubtagain: You are correct. I find the competing leagues fascinating with their particular history distilled in the surviving teams.