You cannot win if you do not play.

 I have two assignments this week to get done by Friday. Since I'm still figuring all this out, I figure it'll take me two days to properly research and write about it. Luckily, the writing isn't really all that hard, either in mechanics or creatively. It reminds me of the day-to-day grind back when I did weekly newspapers, doing pages and pages of obits or classifieds or legal proclamations papers have to print. Dull as hell but easy to do, just put on some music and go.

 The downside is, of course, I don't know how much of this or The News I'm going to be able to get accomplished. This is easy, really, just ramble on for 500 words and call it "art". The News is a little bit more of a hassle, but even then, I could shmooze it if I wanted. Basically, the news is every day "people are dying from a virus we don't have a solid grasp of yet, we're not doing what we need to do and what we are doing we're not doing well, and the President is a big ol' tittybaby", if maybe not in that order.

 He really is showing his whole ass here the last couple days. Between losing his cool with Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins just being reporters causing him to melt down before announcing that he had "full authority" over when states re-open, sounding awfully authoritarian in the process. It's almost every day at this point that he pitches one of his little fits, when he's not blaming everyone else to distract from his own fumbling.

 It's got to be chaffing him so many governors giving him the finger and doing it for themselves are seeing success, and the ones that do toe the line can't do anything right. It's been sort of entertaining watching the right-wing media twist itself in knots to keep up with Trump's almost daily changing of the narrative, especially when they can catch his pitched bitch as easily as anyone should they show disloyalty.

 Speaking of pitching fits, the Sanders dead-enders are in day two of their wail-a-thon. It's even louder and poopier after Bernie Sanders himself came out and said working against Joe Biden winning the presidency was "irresponsible". A small but loud contingent of Twitter, they do little more than prove how little they know about how politics works. Sanders would not have endorsed Biden if something he wanted wouldn't come out of it.

 Look, y'all. Politics is an ugly business but it's a serious business. It calls for deal making, and if you can handle that, leave it to people who can. Organize and agitate, sure, but recognize it's a different ball game. The more they talk about Biden's legislative choices from 20 years ago or objectionable things the Obama administration did, the more they show they really, really don't care about anything but the "bending of the knee". Which is just stupid, but that's what you get when people convince themselves that Twitter and Facebook was equal to a political science degree.

 Maybe the most amusing thing that's happened in the past 24 hours is Florida increasingly obsequious governor Ron DeSantis announcing that WWE was an "essential" business during the shut down. What that boils down to is they'll be filming wrestling matches in front of an empty auditorium in Florida. They already held their yearly homecoming Wrestlemania in front of an empty house. All this comes off the heels of Vince McMahon's XFL football dalliance declaring bankruptcy for the second time. It also comes just after Linda McMahon's announcement that her Super Pac was dropping a tidy $18.5 million into the "Florida For Trump" re-election push.

 Now, I used to dig wrestling as a kid but bailed out before McMahon admitted it was all scripted to save his ass during the 1993 steroid trial. And, for whatever it's worth, I was more a fan of the NWA stuff than the WWF stuff, which was decidedly aimed towards kids. That being said, I've long been fascinated with the history of professional wrestling and its place in American Culture. I maintain that it's one of this country's truly unique contributions to world culture and a full grasp of the American psyche is impossible without an understanding of how pro wrestling developed alongside the ubiquity of television. Later, it pushed closed-circuit television, pay-per-view and internet development, second only to pornography in its influence.

 People forget that up until the mid-Aughts, Trump was stuck in tabloid hell. His biggest cultural impact came from his feud with then-daytime talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell and nobody cared after they passed through the grocery store checkout line. This all changed in 2007 when he popped up on WWE television opposing the "Mr. McMahon" character in the "Battle of the Billionaires" as a baby face. That is, he was the good guy you rooted for against McMahon's heel character, or bad guy.

 Long story short, he "won" the conflict and soon after became the Twitter tumor we all know and loathe/worship. Again, study the history of pro wrestling. In the process you'll learn what kind of absolute bastard Vince McMahon is, both personally and business-wise. Given that, it's sort of understandable how the U.S. could degrade to such a point that we'd allow a bit of media fluff like Trump to be president. Inevitable, really.

 In any event, I got work to do so I don't know how it'll affect this. If nothing else, I'll post quick updates. But, for the most part, I'm a happy camper because I'm getting paid to write and there's a new XCOM game coming out by the end of the month. Sweet.