One of my favorite television programs was the Dick Van Dyke show. You Minnesotans of course remember because you have a Mary Tyler Moore statue down on Nicolette Mall I think. Anyway one of the funniest shows was a prankster who called up Dick and said he was from the telephone company and they had detected some different issues with his line. He told him they could probably fix it if he would just perform a few little acts like unscrewing the speaker and screwing it back in again, unscrewing the ear peace and putting it back in again and finally the last act was to unplug the phone from the cradle, put it in a brown paper bag and go out on his front porch and scream like a chicken while waving the bag over his head.
Early in the China virus craziness people went to buy a mask and we were told not to and then all of a sudden we had to have masks and we had to do this and that. Quarantine at home, couldn’t go in our backyards and on and on it goes. But I actually did tell someone that I expected the government to come up with a program where we, in the all-consuming attempt to clean everything and sterilize it might be told to put our cell phones into a brown paper bag and wave them over our heads and scream like chickens as we stood in the front porch of our houses with our masks on. I was trying to be funny and satirical but guess what. I just heard on the news that somebody has invented an app that you put on your phone. Once you’ve downloaded the app you can actually sneeze into your iPhone and the app will tell you whether or not you’ve had or are having the coronavirus.
The day is coming when you may have stand in a line and put your cell phone in a bag and sneeze into it. Just remember to take off your masks.
