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I was inspired to modify a song to fit with recent news about President Trump. Imagine Frank Sinatra’s voice before you peruse the following image.

Note: if the image is too small to read easily, click on it and you should be able to zoom in better.

For those of you not keeping up on things, the Huawei company has been banned from doing certain business in various countries. Trump has weighed in on things, and around that time I saw a comic of Bucky Katt singing his version of I Did It My Way, and the two things just clicked. I left a bit of the song out, keeping just the most memorable and applicable lines to the situation.

There are plenty of downsides to the Covid-19 pandemic, but there are also some benefits to how things are going. Here are some of the silver linings I’ve seen.

1. Teens get enough sleep. Enough studies were showing that schools have their start times backwards that some schools around here were looking at changing things so the elementary schools start earlier and high schools start later. It’s better for teenagers to be able to sleep in. But the district that was seriously considering it decided it didn’t want to mess with the status quo so it dropped the matter.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, my teenagers get up whenever they want to. Although if the oldest one isn’t up by lunch we remind him to wake up. Their developing bodies get all the sleep they need. They do their schoolwork in the afternoon, and still have time for whatever in the evenings.

2. The open office plan is dead. Before this, the company where I work was just about to convert our office from standard cubicles to the open floor plan for “increased collaboration”. We’re an engineering department, we need decreased distractions. No one in our building wanted the open office, but headquarters decreed it so it was going to happen.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, an open floor plan means “increased contamination” and CDC guidelines make it a bad idea. When I do go back to the office (see point #3) it will remain old-school cubicles for a while longer until management decides what the new CDC-friendly trendy office plan will be.

3. Work from home is required. Working from home was always an option, but it was frowned upon if one took too much advantage of it. It always helped to have an excuse of why you needed to be home that day, such as a sick child or an appliance being delivered. I suppose a sick appliance or a child being delivered would also have been valid. Officially, no excuse was needed – the excuse was just to avoid being seen as a slacker.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, those of us who can work from home are discouraged from going to the office. In fact, we must get approval beforehand if we want to go into one of the buildings. I’m saving hundreds of dollars on gas each month, I’m getting to enjoy hours of my life each week not commuting, I eat lunch with my family, I don’t have to think about packing a lunch – I just open the fridge, I get to sleep in, I get to be outside while it’s sunny, I go days without combing my hair, etc. Work-from-home is a major part of social distancing, but it’s good for many things besides that.

I might be able to come up with some more benefits, but those are the main things to me.

It’s interesting how much difference context makes. For example, consider these slogans:

• Keep your laws off my body
• My body my choice
• Politicians make bad doctors

What does that make you think of?

What if I said the context is Covid-19 and government-mandated wearing of masks?

The interesting part to me is that the two sides of those slogans flip if you change the context from abortion to quarantine.

Talk about public health and social distance and masks and shutting down gatherings, and all of a sudden the conservatives are the ones saying

• Keep your laws off my body
• My body my choice
• Politicians make bad doctors

and the liberals are welcoming laws and executive orders that limit what they can do with their bodies and they are trusting politicians to make good medical decisions.

Of course that’s a generalization and there are exceptions, but in general that’s how it appears these days.

So it seems to me those slogans are not true because people don’t believe them across the board. Also, “if you don’t like masks then don’t get one.”

P.S. I was going to submit this as an idea to the Babylon Bee, but I couldn’t find anywhere to send it. Their contact form has a dropdown list of reasons to contact them but the glaring omission of “article ideas” made me think they did that on purpose.

I would have reformatted it first – something like “Conservatives and liberals are engaged in negotiations for who gets to use which slogans. The initial proposal was to have the conservatives return ‘My body my choice’ on June 1 and retain ‘Politicians make bad doctors’ throughout the summer, but talks have stalled over ‘Keep your laws off my body’.”

I didn’t fully write the article, as you can see, but it’s mostly there.

For those of you keeping track, you were expecting this week’s post to discuss the most popular baby names of 2019. I know I certainly was.

But, alas, that is yet another effect of the coronavirus – no more baby name lists until further notice. Don’t blame me – that was the decision of the Social Security Administration.

Here is their reason for not fulfilling their annual tradition: “Out of respect and honor for all people and families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the announcement of the 2019 most popular baby names is being rescheduled to a to-be-determined date. ”

Now there are several reasons that would have made sense to me – reduced staff, higher priorities at this time, etc. – but “out of respect and honor”? That does not make sense to me. How are people honored by not being able to see what names are popular? Maybe some medical workers are pregnant and want to check their possible names against the list – how are they respected by withholding the list?

I just don’t get it. Why that reason? Did they not want to tell us the real reason they don’t have the list?

Anyway, my annual post of the real most popular baby names is postponed until the SSA agrees to release their list.

I know people have already done all the coronavirus comparisons to Disney’s Tangled, but I think our governor is filling her role too well. She compares quite easily to Mother Gothel.

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Tangled, how about Stockholm syndrome? Think about it – a captor (Whitmer) keeps innocent people captive (Michiganders who aren’t sick) and tells them it’s for their own good and they believe her.

We are supposed to help this COVID-19 die down so we don’t get a second wave? That’s vague enough that it is always true. A second wave inevitable no matter how long you postpone, so give us information about how we’ll know it’s safe enough. Something more concrete than “trust me”.

Similarly, how flat a curve is flat enough? The growth rate has tapered off, the daily new cases have been on the decline for some time now. We were supposed to stay home to flatten the curve. Without a clear definition of when the curve is flat enough, I say it is. If you disagree, please let me know why Michigan hospitals are closing and laying off their workers.

Finally, why not let people work, who can work by themselves? Like lawn services, surveyors, some contractors, etc. “But science says social distancing works…” Sure, and if the point is to prevent person-to-person interaction, why did the governor ban surveyors from working? They walk in fields and forests alone, taking measurements. The same could be said about the guy who mows our neighbor’s lawn by himself, or at least he would if he could.

Anyway, here are some images that illustrate our dear leader’s decisions.

I suppose I could have gone on with America in July and America in August, but the image was getting a little too long, plus I don’t want to predict exactly when we’ll be out of trouble. I thought that sequence from The Empire Strikes Back was a good fit for how things will go, but if you remember that part of the movie, Han Solo just moved into another bit of trouble and it wasn’t good for him just yet.

I thought about trying to caption who Jabba and cronies are in the world of 2020 – something like “countries who didn’t cripple their own economies” but it’s a little early for that. But I’m guessing there will be some countries in decent shape by the time America gets up and starts stumbling around – maybe they handled things better or maybe they were hit earlier so they recovered earlier.

For brevity’s sake, I should have stopped after the second image. Use that as the TL;DR version.

Another day, another announcement from the governor about what else is being shut down. The problem is that we disagree on what is “good behavior”. Not a big disagreement yet, but a number of small divergences add up eventually. New rule! New rule!