A week from tomorrow, I'll be doing the third Cartoon Voices Panel. I just "signed up" the last of the five panelists and I'm quite pleased with who I've got. I'll announce the names here over the weekend and you'll see why I'm quite pleased.
Not a lot to report. I'm not watching much news but I gather the spread of COVID-19 is being matched by the spread of a certain mindset — the "I don't believe anything that tells me what I don't want to hear" mindset. That's a good way to be wrong a lot…and unprepared for all sorts of things.
Earlier, I watched some of a very long police pursuit that dominated Los Angeles TV this morning. I find these interesting for a number of reasons, one being that they're among the few times a TV station is broadcasting something with absolutely no idea what's going to happen or when. Someone at the station makes the decision to cover a chase which could last two minutes and end in a bloody shoot-out or it could last two hours and end up in a quiet, anti-climactic peaceful surrender. Other outcomes are possible.
Many outcomes are possible with a baseball game but 90+% of the time, it ends in nine innings with one team scoring 1-3 more runs than the other. But that person decides to pre-empt regular programming (which pisses off devout followers of the absent shows) and skip all the commercials (which costs the station money). I wish I knew more about how those decisions are made. I've seen some cases where I'm sure they later thought they'd made the wrong call.
Also, the news coverage of chases is interesting with reporters who have about five minutes of actual information and have to fill 90 minutes in which nothing new happens for long stretches. For this morning's chase, I channel-surfed and on every station, the newsguy or newslady was saying, over and over, "He's driving with no regard for others." True but obvious. When you're running red lights at busy intersections, you aren't showing a lot of concern and caution.
As you may have noticed, these chases offer a lot of analogy to the virus situation we're now in. No one is sure what's going to happen, no one knows when it will end…and a lot of people are running around doing potentially destructive things with no regard for others. If only we could solve the coronavirus emergency with a couple of spike strips…