Protesters say the Tokyo Olympics should be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic: Google

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If ever there was a use for Twitter, other than Donald Trump’s tweets, it is the COVID Games in Tokyo.

I almost feel sorry for NBC, but not really, since it is so easy to ignore the NBC Olympics Twitter feed along with The New York Times live feed from the 2021 Olympic Games in Japan.

My ears also basically turned themselves off as NPR Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon spent his Saturday morning trying to talk up the games as if they were actually interesting.

The biggest stories are how many athletes have already tested positive for the coronavirus, and all the events that had to be canceled due to the virus. It’s so hard to keep up with, even if I did report a number it would be obsolete by the time I hit the Publish button.

To make matters worse, the most interesting COVID news is not even coming out of Japan, but from Alabama, where Republican Governor Kay “MeMaw” Ivy made national news this week with her comments on why that ruby red state has the lowest vaccination rates and highest infection rates in the country.

Hanging out with smart people in Maryland and D.C., I’m literally ashamed to say I was born and raised there. Never again.

When asked what more could be done to encourage Alabama residents to get their coronavirus vaccinations amid the latest spike in infections, MeMaw seemed to have “run out of ideas” according to the clickbait story in The Washington Post for how to persuade people in a state to get vaccinated — as if she ever had any ideas in the first place.

Alabama Gov. Kay “MeMaw” Ivy makes excuses for why people in her red state are dying in record numbers of COVID: Google

“I don’t know. You tell me,” she told a reporter in Birmingham on Thursday. “Folks [are] supposed to have common sense.”

“It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” she blurted out, perhaps unleashed with courage for the change in the tune over at the conservative Republican network Fox News, where talking heads have all of a sudden decided to advise people to get vaccinated — after a year of calling the entire pandemic a hoax.

I suspect they finally realized it is their viewers who are dying from the Delta variant. Their ratings have fallen 40 percent in recent months.

Pointing to the nearly 10,000 new cases of Covid in Alabama over the past two weeks, MeMaw blamed the latest infections on the state’s unvaccinated.

It’s like the Capitol insurrection. Blame the dumbass rednecks who stormed the Capitol — not the Republicans who brain washed them into committing treason for Trump.

One doctor was even quoted in a local newspaper telling people dying in the hospital asking for the vaccine: “Sorry, honey,” she told them. “It’s too late now.”

“Almost 100 percent of the new hospitalizations are with unvaccinated folks,” MeMaw continued. “And the deaths are certainly occurring with the unvaccinated folks. These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain.”

Yep, they chose that horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain when they voted Republican in the first place, thinking the anti-government party would somehow fix the government.

As Forest Gump’s mother told him, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

But back to the Olympics. What went wrong?

I remember worshiping the Olympics as a kid, studying the program trying to figure out an event I might could train for and win Gold one day myself. What about archery? Or ping pong?

I actually got pretty damn good at tennis, table tennis and badminton for awhile in college. Just not quite good enough to make the U.S. Olympic Team.

The closest I ever came was riding a mountain bike from an Irish pub in Virginia Highlands in Atlanta to Buckhead in the summer of 1996, and feeling the wind from the peloton as the main field of cyclists whooshed by.

Oh, well. In the summers of my youth, I also thought I would one day play football for the Alabama Crimson Tide’s Bear Bryant.

I did ride the elevator with him once at the Sheraton in Tuscaloosa, and got his autograph after the Tide lost the Orange Bowl to the Nebraska Cornhuskers in 1972.

I took a picture of him once in his hounds tooth hat leaning against the goal post in 1982 when, for some reason, I got a sideline press pass while covering politics for The Crimson White, where I also helped cover his death and funeral in 1983.

We got 61,443 hits on an exclusive YouTube video we ran in 2010 of students at Parker High School in Birmingham interviewing Bryant the day before the A-Day game in the spring of 1973. But since Google stopped us from placing Google ads on videos a few years ago, we make nothing from all that traffic.

So forgive me if I show a lack of interest in sports these days.

I used to love baseball too, but switched to softball in the 10th grade, where I racked up a batting average of 610 for the season, and played short field, vacuuming up all the balls that made it out of the infield and throwing people out at home plate on one bounce.

Do they play softball in the Olympics these days?

Who knows?

Yawn.

Stretch.

Back to watching for black bears in the campground.

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If there was a competition for spitting or farting, maybe some of my friends still stuck in Alabama could make the team.

If they started a new sport for who could sit the longest at a stretch in a camp chair in the mountains, I bet I could beat the band at that.

See you in the campground, or out on the trail somewhere — if I can bring myself to get out of my chair to go for a hike.