Congratulations – you’ve made it halfway through 2020! The bad news is, it’s 2020 for six more months.
You knew it was coming, and it strangely feels as though this announcement was already made, but the 2020 Austin City Limits Music Festival is officially cancelled.
This seems like a good time to note that, just maybe, if we had done a better job as a community in helping curb the disease – in NOT going to parties, in NOT walking around maskless, in NOT crowding into bars – ACL ’20 might have had a chance. Every one of us who gets sick is additional delay in getting the Austin we love back. We MUST dedicate ourselves to this, otherwise, get used to being bored.
Everybody’s favorite grocery slinger H-E-B has announced that it will impose requirements upon its customers and partners to wear masks inside its stores…ALL of its stores! This starts today, and includes locations where mandatory masking is very much a new concept, so it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out – look for a fresh crop of Ken and Karen videos to be an early bonus. This is a tough but necessary, smart and downright humanitarian call that demonstrates clearly how much this company cares about its customers and employees. It’s been established that corporations are people, and that H-E-B is a corporation, and thus it should be perfectly reasonable for H-E-B to run for Governor.
Local heroes Bob Schneider and Ethan Hawke both took part in the 6th session of TED2020, which is this year’s online version of TED’s annual convention. Looks like a pretty penny to get to watch, but you might give it a go.
John Prine has posthumously been named the first state poet laureate of his home state of Illinois. From the statement issued by Governor J.B. Pritzger: “He leaves behind an unparalleled musical legacy and was beloved by family and millions of fans who hope that in Heaven he finds Paradise waitin’ just as he longed for,” and Prine’s widow Fiona Whelan Prine says her husband never fully left the land of his birth behind: “John continued to follow Chicago sports teams and had never found a hot dog, pizza or Italian beef sandwich to rival the originals.” Super sweet.
A couple of things from the COVID department: a new study published in the sexily-titled academic journal Physics of Fluids shows in pretty damned graphic detail just how far and fast your cooties fly out of your face when you cough or sneeze, making a mighty convincing case for masking your mug.
Also on the COVID tip, add to your arsenal of dashboards a new and really nice one done by the Harvard Global Health Institute that might just replace the others – it’s designed to bring together a common framework of data assessment to attempt to draw a clearer overall picture for both the macro and micro views. As of July 1, Texas ranks #8 among the states for average daily new cases per capita, while Travis County actually remains on “yellow” alert with 23.8 new cases per 100,000 people. Hays County is the real local hotspot, roughly twice Travis at 53.4, ranking fourth in the state.
And….it’s Debbie Harry’s birthday.
