Quarantine Control #27: The Lyin’ King

The pandemic had faded long enough from the news that too many people have dropped their guards. The news cycle never lets up in the United States, especially with a monumentally important presidential election happening within less than four weeks, so it’s a little tough to blame anyone for temporarily forgetting all about the virus still swirling around and killing a lot of people. But only “a little tough,” because it’s been covered enough since March that even the average person with a terrible memory should somewhat remember that it’s still pervades. It’s no excuse for getting together with your friends or going to parties unmasked, because you never know who could be carrying it while asymptomatic.

Not to mention the place in which the virus invaded in the US within the last week, inevitable given how they were carrying on. Anyway, some of us did stuff outside of looking at US politics with a peculiar mixture of horror and bemusement, so let’s talk about that instead.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

Oh, I wasn’t talking about me with the “some of us” above. I am glued to a video game at the moment, which I’ll address at a point in the near future. But how could I not talk about how the goddamn President of the United States and the First Lady contracted Covid-19 in this week’s Quarantine Control? I couldn’t.

The stunning announcement came very early on Friday morning, confirmed shortly after gone-and-back-again White House Communications Director Hope Hicks was revealed to have contracted the virus. The year 2020 has already been one full of exhausting and exasperating twists and turns, but this topped everything. Since then, the White House and the president’s physicians have been figuratively (though almost literally) swearing up and down that Trump was never in that much trouble, despite him having to be flown to the Walter Reed medical center for some reason.

This White House can’t keep a secret to save their lives — they actively tried to keep Hicks’ positive test under wraps to no avail, and absolutely would have tried to do the same with Trump’s and the First Lady’s had the first one not spilled. The most alarming, though hardly surprising, secret is just how sick the president was, or still is. There have been so many mixed signals since last weekend that no one has any idea of what Trump’s actual condition is. His physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has already been caught in a handful of lies, though he might have accidentally spilled that Trump tested positive on Wednesday, earlier than WH officials said. That lines up with reports of him looking fatigued at a fundraiser on Thursday. It’s possible he attended those while knowing he was infected, which… man, what the hell.

It couldn’t be clearer that Trump was in some deep shit shortly after announcing his positive test, regardless of how the WH and Conley tried, and are still trying, to spin it. Just look at the so-called cocktail of medicines he had to take, the best drugs you’ve ever seen. He received an experimental drug known as Regeneron (which — funnily enough! — Trump has personal ties to), along with Remdesivir (commonly used to speed up recovery, though it’s not cheap) and Dexamethasone. They’re all eye-raising in their own ways, but it’s the last one that requires a particular “holy shit,” given that the World Health Organization classifies it as a steroid for patients “seriously ill” from Covid-19, and can be actively harmful for patients only experiencing mild symptoms.

There are two possible scenarios here: Either they were lying about how sick the president was, or the doctors and physicians assigned to him were very stupid and gave him needlessly aggressive treatments. Given what we know and can see about Trump’s health, age, and weight, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t the former.

Not that you can trust any of the people working at the WH or for the president to tell the truth. Dr. Conley seemed a step away from going full MAGA and saying that Trump overcame the virus and overcame it very strongly. Truly, a man powerful enough to behead the Roman hero Hercules with the pluck of a finger. This, and the stunt pulled at the WH balcony on Monday and other comparatively smaller tough guy displays, had Big Mussolini Energy. Next thing we know, he’s going to fake his own death to smoke out his Deep State enemies.

This is all bad and profoundly dumb enough, and I haven’t gotten to the inane, though predicable, recklessness of Trump saying “don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” We’re talking about a virus that’s killed 210,000 Americans here, about one-fourth of the world’s total deaths, a number that could have been lower if the administration actually did something worth a damn to combat it. Not to mention most Americans won’t have access to the dizzying array of drugs readily available for the president, let alone afford them. It’s all so, so stupid, but like everything Trump’s said, too many people are eating this up.

With all the lies and propaganda going around, it’s impossible to gauge the president’s actual health. He and his physicians have claimed he’s fine even though he’s looked like a disheveled mess (I mean, more than usual) on camera, and sounded hoarse while talking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business this morning while hopped up on the ‘roids. He could be in such bad shape that he could drop dead tomorrow for all we know.

I will not wish that the president succumbs to Covid in this piece, one that, I’ll admit, turned out to be a hell of a lot longer than I planned. But I will also not wish him well like political punditry’s finest Norms Respecters have. For as tough as they’re trying to make it, it is absolutely possible to do neither while simply watching, shaking your head, and rolling your eyes at the sheer absurdity of it all.

Predicting what will happen even in the near future is a fool’s errand in the Trump era, so we’ll just have to see what happens next. Just thinking about what could happen has alone been frightening throughout 2020, a year for the record books.

 

Joseph Daniels

Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai (2020)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: Ongoing (1 so far)

This brand new Dragon Quest anime is not only based on a classic manga, it’s also a remake of sorts of an anime of the same name that ran nearly thirty years ago.  The Adventure of Dai is set to run for at least thirteen episodes, but not much is known beyond that.  The original anime ran for 46 episodes and didn’t have a complete manga series to draw from.  The modern remake of the series does, but it remains to be seen whether it will or not.

That said, the series is drawn in a style meant to appeal to a shonen audience, so it’s likely that it might run until the story is complete this time, similar to shows like Naruto and One Piece.  There is some easily detectable CGI placed alongside the more traditionally animated characters, and sadly, it shows.  It’s pretty obvious which characters are hand drawn and which aren’t.

For a description of the first episode of the series, yesterday’s entry in the ongoing Dragon Quest Retrospective series heavily mentions this new show as a framework to casually talk about heroes in the Dragon Quest series.

I’m optimistic that this series is going to be a regular fixture of my weekends, for new episodes drop on Saturday.

Magic of Disney’s Animal Kingdom (2020)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: Ongoing (2 so far)

I have always liked to visit the Animal Kingdom in Walt Disney World, even though it’s pretty much a glorified zoo.  It’s a relatively big place, and I can tell that they’re genuinely trying to do right by their animals, but it’s basically a zoo, disguised with the usual Disney magic to make it look better than it actually is.  The Animal Kingdom isn’t actually as crowded as other places in the park tend to be, and it’s not hard to have room to breathe there among the animals.

Speaking of the Disney parks, I can also confirm that when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates really don’t eat the tourists.  Jurassic Park clearly did its research and is pretty much a documentary.

Sadly, a few years of financial troubles and then the global pandemic right after I’d clawed my way back to financial stability have prevented me from going back for almost a decade now, and given the longevity of Covid-19 compared to other flash in the pandemics like SARS, it might be a few more years before I feel safe going again.  The next best thing is going to have to be this new series from Disney+, which I expect is more like free advertising for the park instead of the latest National Geographic series that it’s pretending to be.

So far, the series appears to be three parts veterinarian shows not unlike Animal Practice and one part a making of documentary about the Animal Kingdom.  Your mileage may vary regarding how you like the show depending on whether or not Disney’s credibility was shot over the White Wilderness fiasco when they faked lemming suicide and then presented it as fact, causing decades of misconceptions and a reference to lemmings following the leader in Zootopia which feels like a dick move for Disney to make light of it all, now that I say it out loud.

For me, I’m watching for the animals and not necessarily to learn stuff because after watching three seasons of The Lion Guard and being steeped in a series that tried to teach things about animals but got as much wrong as it got right and which led Kion and the rest of the Guard through Asia starting in Japan during season three, somehow getting there directly from Africa and then slowly making their way to India or thereabouts, it’s hard to trust Disney to deliver a 100% honest series.

The series is narrated by Josh Gad, which goes to show that once you do work for Disney, they own you for life and you will be doing more and more work for them in the future.

The best way to watch this show, in my opinion, is to tell yourself “It is not safe to travel to Walt Disney World right now, this is the next best thing” and then to hit play.  New episodes are released on Friday.

 

It’s been a wild week, and don’t forget: There’s potential for things to get wilder with and without the deadly virus still swirling around. Stay safe out there, if you have to go out at all.