Quiz #106. These Things Don’t Just Happen
"I'm on Fire," "Sausage Girl" and giving out vaccines in a snow storm. Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for Saturday, January 30, 2021.
Give me 2-and-a-half minutes and take a look at this.
This is an acoustic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” I can’t get it out of my head and I’ve watched it more than a few times since I first saw it on Thursday morning, January 28, 2021.
Just two guys sitting next to one another on a couch, right? On the right, a standing light that you might find in any living room. The guitar player to the left in bare feet, his toes visible though maybe not seen on first watch. The second time I watched this music video from my laptop, I was sitting up in the bed of our guest bedroom and my home office since March in our stay-at-home life. The laptop was a little further away than usual, the video smaller and what I saw was the harmony of motion between the two guitar players. Not surprisingly, their hands playing each guitar, in sync with one another and the rhythm of the song.
YouTube being YouTube, after I watched this video again the next morning, a different video popped up. It was a guitar teacher breaking down this performance. This video is 9-minutes long and most of it went way over my head with a very technical discussion of changing chords while noting that the guy on the left was playing with a pick, the guy on the right without. To me, it was just two guys on a sofa with guitars, playing a song I now can’t get out of my head.
I found out about this performance from my friend Ryan. Months ago, as noted in Quiz #94. “… It Glows,” Ryan recommended that I read the weekly newsletter from Tommy Tomlinson which comes out each Thursday morning.
The newsletter arrived in my in-box at 10:03AM. I opened it soon after, reading Tomlinson’s opening essay and then clicking on the various links he includes of things he’s written, read, heard and watched over the last week. One of them was the “I’m On Fire” cover by a duo known as “The Other Favorites,” Carson McKee and Josh Turner.
At 10:43AM, I texted the link of their performance to Ryan. 3 minutes later, he texted me a link to a Bruce Springsteen podcast interview with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin, also recommended by Tomlinson. I’ve yet to listen, but here’s a description.
Bruce Springsteen is a national treasure. Since his debut album nearly 50 years ago, Springsteen has helped define the American working-class psyche through a collection of world-renowned hit songs. In this interview with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin, Bruce talks about how listening to “Born To Run” 45 years after it was released made him realize just how good he really is.
For the next few hours, Ryan and I traded lines from the poems and essays listed on Tomlinson’s site. One of the most prominent was Tomlinson’s own tribute to Henry Aaron who died this week.
Aaron was a hero for Tomlinson, especially growing up in the South. Beyond Aaron’s battle with hate and bigotry, Tomlinson’s central point was that the greatness of Aaron was in how easy he made it look to become baseball’s home run king. I texted the last paragraph of the essay to Ryan.
I’ve worked as a behind-the-scenes producer in TV news for almost 40 years now. For 15 of those years, I worked on the overnights for different national morning shows. It’s hard to explain to outsiders how you can work on a live, TV news program when your shift ends two hours before the show goes on the air--and when the show starts, you’re usually home and asleep in bed. I’m not here to detail the work that I did alongside countless other overnight workers from stagehands to video editors. The point is simply this: a morning TV news show doesn’t just happen. It’s part of a 24/7 machine, a well-choreographed dance of around-the-clock workers. As Tomlinson notes, some things in life doesn’t just happen, “It takes so much effort to look effortless.”
Again, I’ve worked for decades in TV news, many of them in morning TV where the nation’s focus can often be on the strangest things. The twists of fate that put unexpected people in the news. In 2003, my first year as the overnight producer for my current network, a baseball sausage mascot was tripped in a mid-inning race around the diamond by an opposing player who stuck his bat out and clocked the sausage’s foam head, knocking the 19-year-old woman inside to the ground—and setting off a booking war in morning TV for the first interview with “sausage girl.”
True story: I helped track down “sausage girl” in 2003. We found her at her day job. She worked in the deli department at a grocery store. You can’t make this stuff up. “These things happen.”
We often marvel at the strange twists and turns of life that can make ordinary people seem, at least for a moment, extraordinary. My long-time newsroom refrain to the unusual and unexpected is “These things happen.” As noted in Quiz #29. “These Things Happen,” that’s also my first refrain when people tell me about the unusual things that have happened to them. I try not to be surprised by whatever happens in life. Good or bad, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. My daughter Annie even got the phrase printed on a T-shirt for me.
The truth is we love stories about twists of fate. The luck--or misfortune--to be in the right place--or maybe the wrong place--at the right--or wrong--time.
Maybe you heard the story this week about some people who got Covid vaccines after getting stuck in traffic in a snowstorm. Some health workers were also stuck in that same snowstorm and had some unused vaccines which would go bad if they weren’t given out. Imagine being stuck on a mountain roadway in a snowstorm, stopped for hours in your car behind a jackknifed truck when someone knocks on the door and says, “Hey, do you want a Covid vaccine?” Talk about a twist of fate. Better than a winning lottery ticket with a vaccine shortage and a raging pandemic.
This one’s going to take you 6 minutes, but it’s worth it. Watch as Chris Hayes on MSNBC interviewed two of the health workers who gave half a dozen shots to stranded motorists in Oregon.
What struck me about this interview is that it wasn’t with the people who got the shots. The interview focused on the people who gave them the shots. Maybe you heard this story as an uplifting mention in your news feed this week. I’d heard about it as a passing tidbit and was surprised to learn new details from this interview.
Trapped on this mountain road was a caravan of county health workers who’d shut down an earlier vaccine clinic because of the approaching snowstorm. They had a doctor, an ambulance and all the paperwork you need to process a vaccine. The longer they were stuck in traffic on the mountain road, the more concerned they became about the ticking clock of the already-opened vials of vaccine. Before knocking on car doors, the health workers checked with the doctor to make sure that he agreed it would be safe. The ambulance was on standby for adverse reactions. The workers had the forms needed to certify the vaccines and track people for their second dose. Some of the drivers they approached were wary and some even refused the vaccine. Others did not, but their luck didn’t just happen. Yes, they were in the right place at the right time, but they were surrounded by well-intentioned, well-organized government workers doing their job. Giving out vaccines still in short supply but produced by scientists in record time based on a lifetime of education and scientific research.
These things don’t just happen.
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What did NOT happen?
A. Friday morning, Ted sent a text on the family text chain about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
“Not a single person who got vaccinated, and had illness after four weeks, ended up in the hospital," Dr. Mathai Mammen, global head of pharmaceutical research and development at Johnson & Johnson, told NBC News. This "leads me to believe that this vaccine will stop this pandemic."
100% effective at preventing hospitalization. Make this vaccine available to everyone ages 18-55 and end this pandemic now.
This should be the headline for every article on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine yet the everyone will be talking about the 66 percent effectiveness;
B. Friday afternoon, on the family text chain, I predicted that Tampa Bay would win the Super Bowl. Why? “Don’t bet against old guys,” I texted. “We know what we’re doing;”
C. Betsy’s taken a job as the girls’ JV volleyball coach at our local high school;
D. Annie’s social media this week included profanity from an adult coloring book;
E. This week, a co-worker recommended reading the complete defamation lawsuit filed against Rudy Guiliani. I did and texted it to Sara and Will. I was surprised to discover, among other things, that Guiliani sells cybersecurity systems on his podcasts with the promo code, “Rudy.”
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Answer #106. These Things Don’t Just Happen.
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #107. Cheater.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #105. Still Standing.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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