Welcome to a Mother’s Day edition of Laugh Through The Payne. In my unbiased opinion, this may be my the best week yet. Let’s get to it.
What The Hell Happened This Week?
On Wednesday, an unmasked President Trump took a visit to a Honeywell plant in Arizona that’s currently manufacturing critical N-95 masks. As the president went on his tour, some found it ironic and less than coincidental that “Live and Let Die” played over the loud speakers of the factory. Despite what some perceived to be a jab, Trump was thrilled to hear the song, and is such a big Beatles fan that he even based his Coronavirus response plan off of “Here Comes the Sun”.
In this week’s edition of What Weird Thing Did Joe Biden Say?, the former VP went on MSNBC and criticized President Trump’s handling of Covid-19 and accused him of being out of touch in global politics, saying that Trump doesn’t have enough “intercourse” with the rest of the world. While technically correct, the word intercourse certainly felt odd given its connotations, and it felt especially sexual since Biden kept showing the interviewer his orgasm face.
While members of the White House have been dismissive of Covid-19 at times over the last couple months, the effects were impossible to ignore this week as President Trump’s personal valet who delivers him his meals tested positive for the virus. While scary in its own right, the news is especially frightening for Trump considering he has the valet deliver his meals “mama bird style”.
Since someone he’s been in contact with has tested positive for the virus, according to CDC guidelines President Trump must now quarantine himself for the next 2 weeks. After a stressful couple months, Trump is actually looking forward to his isolation and hopes to catch up on last year’s Oscar nominations, and said he might even start that YouTube channel he’s always talked about.
Mother’s Day is especially wonderful this year for Tesla’s Elon Musk, who welcomed a new baby boy into the world this week with his partner, Grimes. Musk earned some bonus dad points by ordering Grimes a massive bouquet of flowers online for Mother’s Day, but quickly lost all good favor when he accidentally copied the promo code he used for the flowers onto the boy’s birth certificate.
If there was ever a sign that things are bleak right now, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brookner said he’s not working on a new season right now because the real world is already sadder than anything in the show. Not all artists were in agreement with Brookner’s stance though, “Art is a reflection of our times. The world needs us now more than ever” said Walt Dohrn, director of Trolls: World Tour.
After the state’s stay-at-home orders ended at the beginning of May, many expected Texas’s stores and restaurants to boom, but that hasn’t been the case - traffic has been significantly lower than expected. As for why the Texans are choosing to stay home, many have said it has nothing to do with doubts about their health and safety, they just can’t get enough of that damn Korean Baseball league on ESPN.
As parts of the UK began to reopen this week, temporary mandates were set for businesses including a requirement that restaurants could only open if they were at 50% capacity. But, the wording of the mandates was evidently less clear than they’d hoped for. While the intention of the rule was for restaurants to host half as many people as usual, some poor residents took drastic steps as they misunderstood the rules and thought that each person in the restaurants had to be half as large.
The travel industry has obviously been hit remarkably hard by Covid-19, and Airbnb was the newest victim this week as they were forced to lay off 25% of their staff. The executive team did their best to take care of all employees financially as they parted with them, but many of those being laid off were rubbed the wrong way when they found out a $65 cleaning fee would be taken from their severance package.
On Thursday night, for the first time since 1904, the New York City Subway closed down entirely as the city worked to do a round of deep overnight cleaning. Several other trains in the Northeast closed for similar reasons this week as the region was hit hard by Covid-19, but a TMZ report has confirmed that in Baltimore, trains were still running.
Major League Baseball sent a more concrete plan for starting its season to its players this week, and it’s evident that the league is very concerned about the players’ health. Many players, on the other hand, are less worried about potentially contracting Covid-19, largely because of the high-tech, health-boosting necklaces they wear.
A shortage of meat across the United States has hit grocery stores hard, and is now causing issues in restaurants’ supply chains as Wendy’s announced that 1 in 5 locations currently does not have any beef. Founder Dave Thomas was so committed to his company and foresaw an issue like this coming prior to his death, and while he hated that it and to be frozen, he left his restaurants with a couple days’ supply of meat in case of emergency.