I listened to the coverage of the UDP leadership convention on KREM News (on my phone) and on Love FM. Later in the day I heard Mr. Hulse giving this very interesting interview, so I glanced at the show on my phone. I had no doubt that he had on a mask. We wear a mask so that if we’re infected we don’t pass on our germs to other people.

One bad aapl can ruin a whole baril

So, Blue Creek and San Felipe are now under SOE (state of emergency) — all because some of us won’t listen or don’t care. You see, what we do affects others. No person in this world is an island onto him/herself.

If we cross the border, we run a high risk of getting infected with COVID-19, and when we return home we bring back the disease, and we spread it in our community, and if the disease escapes into the wider community, the entire nation could go under lockdown again, and the cost of that is an immense loss in health, and freedom, and earnings to feed our families.

If we had a lot of money in our treasury we might not suffer so much while under lockdown because the government would be able to provide for us so that we don’t starve. We cannot afford this border jumping!

COVID-19 is not the “little flu,” as described by Brazil’s president, Bolsonaro. It is a serious threat to our elders, and to our brothers and sisters who are battling diseases such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension, heart disease, and emphysema. The disease might remain a threat to the world for years to come, so it might be that no matter how hard we try we will get infected, but the longer we hold out, the better for us, because new treatments are being identified that will help us to better fend off the disease.

Years ago I read the book, The Plague, by Albert Camus, and while I tend to stay away from dreary or horror stuff, I read it through. This is a story about a fictional outbreak of the horrible bubonic plague, a disease that is rare in our modern world but still kills 10% of the people who get sick from it. The story is set in Oran, Algeria. I’m not about reading The Plague again – I told you I don’t like horror – so I borrowed some of the less grisly stuff from this piece “What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus’s The Plague,” written by Liesel Schillinger and published in the magazine, the Literary Hub. You will see some of our behavior in the excerpts:

In the 14th century, the bubonic plague, also known as the “Black Death,” killed almost a third of the people on the continent of Europe. When it rampaged through London in 1656 and 1657, it killed nearly a quarter of the population…

…As the story begins, rats are lurching out of Oran’s shadows, first one-by-one, then in “batches,” grotesquely expiring on landings or in the street. The first to encounter this phenomenon is a local doctor named Rieux, who summons his concierge, Michel, to deal with the nuisance, and is startled when Michel is “outraged,” rather than disgusted…

…Michel falls sick and dies. As Rieux treats him, he recognizes the telltale signs of plague…A low-level bureaucrat, Richard, insists the disease must not be identified officially as plague, but should be referred to merely as “a special type of fever.” But as the pace and number of deaths increases, Rieux rejects the euphemism, and the town’s leaders are forced to take action.

…Soon the city gates are closed and quarantines are imposed, cutting off the inhabitants of Oran from each other and from the outside world….A journalist named Rambert, stuck in Oran after the gates close, begs Rieux for a certificate of health so he can get back to his wife in Paris, but Rieux cannot help him. “There are thousands of people placed as you are in this town,” he says.

…If you read The Plague long ago, perhaps… you paid more attention to the buboes and the lime pits than to the narrator’s depiction of the “hectic exaltation” of the ordinary people trapped in the epidemic’s bubble, who fought their sense of isolation by dressing up, strolling aimlessly along Oran’s boulevards; and splashing out at restaurants, poised to flee should a fellow diner fall ill, caught up in “the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity”: the comfort of community. The townspeople of Oran did not have the recourse that today’s global citizens have, in whatever town: to seek community in virtual reality.

World’s greatest footballer is not a discussion

Some arguments don’t make sense to me. Really, we all have license to our opinions, but we shouldn’t talk foolishness. Diego Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi (Adolf Hitler’s grandson – doppelganger bizniz) are great players, but to mention them as equal or better than Edson Arantes de Nascimento, “Pele”, is just way out there.

The beauty in sports is that matters are settled in an arena before the eyes of everyone interested. There are no secret ballots. Everyone plays by the same rules, and the only possible distortion is if the arbiter stumbles during the contest. There is no perfect thing under the sun; the closest to it is sports.

There is little space for conversation about who is better in single-person sports. Track and field, ping pong, lawn tennis, golf —those are one-person sports, and who is best is written in black and white.

Team sports allows for more conversation about “who is better”. In basketball, with five players on a team, a single player can’t get all the credit for the victory, but anyone who is objective, and has a fairly good understanding of what is going on, on a basketball court, knows who runs things.

The greatest talent to ever play basketball was a guy named Wilt Chamberlain, and much of that had to do with his height. Wilt towered over almost all of his opponents, and height is to basketball what weight is to boxing and wrestling. I will tell you that if you shaved off five inches from Michael Jordan (6’6″ tall), he would not have been the equal of 6’1″-tall Isaiah Lord Thomas (Detroit Pistons).

Ah, as physically gifted in basketball as Wilt was, another basketball player, Bill Russell, who was nearly as tall as Wilt, was better. Head to head, Chamberlain had Russell out on pure physical talent, but when you factor in the intangibles — leadership capacity, effect on teammates, etcetera, the nod goes to Russell.

Football is an 11-person game, so the individual footballer usually has less impact than a basketball player has, but if you will be objective, and you have a pretty fair understanding of God’s game, you can tell when there is a separation of players.

There can be a discussion if it’s about what the players did in watered down leagues in Spain, England, Germany, Italy, and Brazil. The comparison between Pele and the others ends, punto final, when the game is played at the highest level, when you look at what they did in the greatest show on earth, the World Cup, which is held every four years.

The brilliant Ronaldo, a Portuguese, hasn’t inspired his team to even come close in a World Cup. The best World Cup showing of Ronaldo is 11th place, in 2010. Portugal did better with the devil Christopher Columbus. He is the world’s most famous sailor.

Maradona, the best player of his generation, has one World Cup title with the powerhouse Argentina, in 1986, with the help of “the hand of God” in a quarterfinal victory against England. In 1994 he was sent home from the World Cup when it was discovered he had a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs in his system. Messi, the wizard, also with Argentina, came close with a second place finish in the 2014 World Cup.

Pele, the greatest, appeared in four World Cups, winning in 1958, 1962, and 1970. In 1966, the year England won — hurray for them because they are not only our friends, they gave the world the great game – the world decided that he was not to win again. Brazil did not make it out of the first round that year. The short of that story is that world football records that he was the victim of the worst referee protection in the history of the game. He was savaged in the first game, which Brazil won; he had to miss the second game, which his team lost; the referee allowed the Portuguese to savage him so badly in the third game he vowed he would never play another World Cup.