Friday, May 1, 2020

Live music is not permitted

Today, as expected, Governor Holcomb issued Executive Order 20-26.  As much could be said about this new executive order as about its predecessors (the executive orders to which it is meant to be an update), but for tonight, I will only write: What is Paragraph 10(d) supposed to be?

Later this month (though precisely when that will be depends on the location), this new executive order will finally permit restaurants in Indiana to reopen ... under certain restrictions.  Paragraph 10 of the order identifies those requirements.  It is easy enough to see what the purposes of most of the requirements are, but I do not yet understand what Paragraph 10(d) is supposed to accomplish.  It reads, "Live music is not permitted."  This, keep in mind, is one of the COVID-19 suppressing measures that is to be imposed on restaurants in Indiana once they have been suffered to reopen.  Though restaurants will be open, live music there will not be permitted, so as to better restrain the spread of the virus.

Perhaps someone has discovered that COVID-19 thrives in the presence of live music.  It is a novel virus, after all.  Maybe I should not find it so surprising to consider that it might have such an unusual characteristic.

I will allow my imagination to continue searching for answers.

After all, that may in fact be the true purpose of Paragraph 10(d): to offer the people of Indiana a mystery -- a challenge, just to keep things interesting.

I think I would respect that.


An Additional Thought (May 2, 2020): As strange as 10(d) may appear, and as much fun as it was to let the state of intensely amused curiosity (in which the experience of reading 10(d) left me) "take the wheel" in writing this post, I still will admit that it is possible that there is a reasonable explanation for 10(d), though I do not know what it could be.  That explanation could involve someone having made a reasonable mistake.  It could also involve someone having been forced to make some sort of editorial judgment call and ultimately chose the option that avoided the necessity of restructuring (and largely rewriting) the entire document, even though that choice ultimately did produce a document in which Paragraph 10(d) would make no sense to anyone reading it.  (In writing about all of that in the abstract, I had in mind the theory that the restriction imposed by Paragraph 10(d), "Live music is not permitted," was in fact meant to refer to live music in a venue having no connection whatsoever to a restaurant, but that the subject of live music was a late addition to the document, and it just would have been a big headache for some staffer to alter the document properly to create a more fitting place to insert the "live music" prohibition, if enough time remained before the deadline to accomplish that at all.  Consequently, the person who was responsible for inserting the "live music" language, who may well have been in a state of panic at the time, placed it in the paragraph covering the subject of restaurants, where its apparent meaning is not what was either expected or intended.  If true, I expect to see this bug fixed in the next update.)

Another Additional Thought (May 2, 2020): Though I expressed amusement and a certain measure of bewilderment at what I found in Paragraph 10(d), I ask readers not to interpret it as "ridicule", as I did not write it with the intention of it being in that spirit.  I further ask that readers make it a goal to either avoid or abandon (whichever would fit the reader in question) altogether the practice of taking pleasure in ridicule.  Everything will just be better that way.

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