Friday, December 24, 2021

Hey, it’s Christmas Eve. If you observe the holiday, however you observe it, Merry Christmas. If you don’t observe the holiday, for whatever reason you don’t observe it, have a lovely weekend. To any and all, here’s hoping you and yours – your friends, your family, the guy at the Quick Stop you buy your smokes from and that’s the only person you interact with but he’s a nice guy – enjoy peace and tranquility. It’s a mean old world, brethren, and whether we like it or not, we all have to get through it together. Nobody’s going to help us and whether you believe it or not, that’s the whole point.

Speaking of getting through this mean old world together, COVID continues to make that difficult. As I’ve noted before, the omicron variant is proving to be a booger. It doesn’t seem to be as deadly as previous variants but it spreading faster and further. Even worse, it seems to be getting around all the vaccinations – Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, & Pfizer – as well as booster shots.

Unfortunately, this comes at exactly the wrong time: the holiday travel season. More folks are planning to travel this year because, back when we all made our reservations, it seemed like we had a better grasp on this whole COVID thing. Thanks to a lot of knotheads being buttholes about getting vaccinated or wearing masks or basically just acting like intelligent, compassionate human beings, omicron’s developed and it is what it is.

So here we are. Over 4,000 flights worldwide scheduled for today and tomorrow have been canceled, leaving a lot of folks stranded and wondering how to get where they want to go. This isn’t for safety purposes, though. It’s because they’re having massive staffing problems, mostly due to people being out sick or having to quarantine. There’s been a relative sliver of folks whose refusal to get the jab cost them their gig, but that factors in.

Another thing this time of year brings to many of us is Bowl Season. For those of y’all who aren’t bowlers, this is the time of year when the various college football teams play their various bowl games. For the most part, these include conference champions playing each other. In recent years, the bowls have been expanded to the point where any team with a half-decent record will play a bowl somewhere. More football isn’t a bad thing, goes the thinking.

Another change in recent years is a full-on National Championship Game, deciding which team is the best instead of which team wins the Sugar Bowl or what have you. This year – or next year, really, January 10, 2022 – it goes down in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, home of the Colts. It’ll be between the winners of the Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl, both played on New Year’s Eve. That’s either the top-seeded University of Alabama or Number Four Cincinnati versus Number Two Michigan versus Number Three Georgia.

That is, of course, they’re well enough to play. Texas A&M has already pulled out of the Gator Bowl match-up against Wake Forest on December 31. The Aggies have been dealing with injuries all season and COVID has put the final nail in their seasonal coffin. Wake Forest and the NCAA are working to get another opponent for the game. Right now, it’s looking like Rutgers will fill the spot.

This all leads one to wonder what will happen to the National Championship should COVID get nasty in Tuscaloosa or Athens. Well, the NCAA is on that. If one of the competitors in either the Cotton or Orange Bowls can’t play, the other gets the win via forfeit. If one Bowl is canceled because both teams in it are down with omicron, then the other bowl becomes the national championship. If for some reason all of the teams are out, this year’s national championship will just be considered vacated for the season.

Clear as muddy water, right? Look, y’all, football is football, I understand, and these bowl games are a big deal. But the colleges have to look out for the students and life will go on if they can’t play. However, here’s hoping whatever happens everyone comes out the other end safe, healthy, and happy. Get tested if you think you might have the ‘rona, don’t push your luck or do anything stupid, and remember that your loved ones would rather see you next year alive than have to bury you (or someone else) because they saw you this year.

Have a nice weekend.