This column will win kudos and condemnation in balanced fusillades. I'm just playing for laughs.

I test-marketed the following item by including it some standup and was resoundingly condemned for my efforts. I predict that somebody's going to pass a regulation banning laughter in the face of adversity. Alas and alack, microbes don't respond to speeding tickets.

DOES SEX PREVENT YOU FROM GETTING THE CORONAVIRUS? In the March 10 New York Times, reporter James Gorman quoted eminent British contagion mathematician Adam Kucharski.

Coronavirus transmission probability is "a measure of the chance the infection will get across during an interaction," Dr. Kucharski said, "for example, during a sexual encounter, the virus won't necessarily get across."

Huh? Consciousness cascades over the good doctor's mind-bending possibilities.

If ever a response demanded a followup question, that one should be taught in school. Alas, nada.

If my late Tribune colleague in columny Jake Highton wuz alive, the old journalism prof would be turning over in his grave.

I wrote the Times asking for a followup. I'll let you know if they reply between now and the millennium.

CAUGHT WITH OUR PANTS DOWN. Understandable given our president. I've contacted Stormy Daniels' agent to see if she might be interested in a porno script based upon the above scientific advice.

READ MORE ABOUT IT — FROM 194 YEARS AGO. I'm going to call Grassroots Books to find a copy of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel "The Last Man." Just as Edgar Allen Poe invented the fictional private investigator, the author of "Frankenstein" thought up the scenario of the last person left alive after a plague. (Poe even followed her lead and wrote a similar story.)

"The Last Man" is set in the year 2100. "The novel's driving conflict is a highly contagious disease," wrote author Eileen Hunt Botting in last Saturday's Times.

"Like the Coronavirus, Shelley's plague spreads by a combination of airborne particles and contact with carriers. In both cases, it has been incubated, exacerbated and left unchecked by destructive human behavior."

Like the poltroon in the White House and his suckups calling it a plot against the czar. (See below.)

At our peril, we consistently disbelieve our prescient artists. Princess Cassandra was ignored when she told her fellow royals not to let that wooden horse through the gates of Troy.

The sci-fi series "Babylon 5" produced a 1995 episode which accurately foreshadowed our plague of today. ("Confessions and Lamentations"; Production No. 218; original air date: May 24, 1995)

IT'S NOT NICE TO FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE. Like the infamous Swine Flu and Ebola, the Coronavirus jumped from animals to people. In the latest case, an open-air market in Wuhan, China, where somebody was selling a little critter that looks like an armadillo but is actually the only mammal with scales.

"Pangolins are highly sought-after in China for their meat and their scales; the latter are used in traditional medicine," Nature.com reported last month. Ebola came from poachers harvesting chimpanzees for meat.

In simpler times, Covid-19 would have taken almost an eternity to go global. Alas, our technology has made it prime time. One of the few good things emanating from all this fear, sickness and death is that we are polluting Mother Earth a little less by using less oil. Remember how the air cleared up when almost all aircraft were grounded after 9/11?

There's a message therein which we will most probably ignore as did the man we elected our monarch, Czar Donaldov, when he fired President Obama's White House pandemic smoke alarm crew.

"I didn't know people died from the flu," he recently stated. (NY Times 3-9-2020) He apparently forgot that this own grandfather succumbed to same during the last worldwide pandemic in 1918.

"Who knew health care could be so complicated?," said the king, later adding that Coronavirus "came out of nowhere" and "blindsided us."

Maybe Wuhan translates to "nowhere" in English.

H.L. MENCKEN LIVES. The great Baltimore Sun writer has oft been paraphrased as stating "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

I've found two cases taking exception to the wise man's axiom. When HIV was finally identified in the 1980s, sales of AYDS appetite-suppressing chocolates tanked. Try to find them at your pharmacy today.

I asked a SaveMart cashier last week if she'd been selling much Corona Beer. She looked at me like I was nuts. Alas, pollsters have found that about four in 10 Americans won't quaff a Corona fearing it will give them the plague.

WORSE BLACK HUMOR. In the early 1970s, a serial killer named Juan Corona was caught after burying his victims in an orchard near Sacramento. Local sports jocks termed it "Gov. Reagan's recycling program."

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE. The State of Alabama may finally decriminalize yoga in public schools. That retro state once banned Red Rover, tag and dodge ball. Along with hypnotism and meditation, yoga has been illegal in that corner of the Confederacy as a "non-Christian belief system."

If Gov. George Wallace wuz alive, he'd be turning over in his grave. These days, he's probably turning on a very hot spit anyway.

BUSTED RIGHT WINGS. Fox Noise Network shills have painted the plague as some kinda liberal plot. "Yet another attempt to impeach the president," said their latest bubble-headed bleachblonde.

The yahoo who runs the oft-delisted InfoWars website has been busted by the New York attorney general for stating that his toothpaste can act as a "stopgate" against the virus.

Another guy is selling a book of ancient remedies which includes "why you should put garlic in your ear before going to sleep." (Count Dracula, call your office.)

I got an e-mail from heaven knows where offering surgical masks, reproduced here verbatim: "Do you want a trail (sic) order? I hope i (sicker) can (sickest) hlep you."

BAD ADVICE DEPT. French drug dealers are peddling the idea that cocaine prevents Coronavirus. Pretty soon, somebody is going to offer goggles which make it safe to stare at the corona of the sun to cure what ails you.

REAL HEROES. Last week, I sent kudos to the staff of the Reno Gazette-Journal for yeoman work serving their community with pandemic news. That appellation applies to all first responders, which now includes all my courageous colleagues in the hated fake news media.

Be careful out there.

Andrew Barbano is a 51-year Nevadan, executive producer of Nevada's annual César Chávez Day celebration, first vice-president and political action chair of the Reno-Sparks NAACP, superannuated labor/consumer/civil rights advocate, member of Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO and editor of NevadaLabor.com and BallotBoxing.US and SenJoeNeal.org and DoctorLawyerWatch.com and Protect Our Washoe.org and ChantalCoalition.org/ He is a withdrawn-in-good-standing member of Culinary Local 226. As always, his opinions are strictly his own. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us. He has lived in both northern and southern Nevada during his half-century+ in the Silver State. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988 and received its 10th Nevada Press Association award (6 of 10 first-place) at the 21 Sept. 2019 NPA annual convention in Ely. In 1996, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a six-month investigative series. His multi-media road construction zone safety campaign for Laborers' Union Local 169 won a first-place award from the National Safety Council in a nationwide competition. (Such ephemera and about six bucks will get you a Latte Mocha Cotsafracas Chingade at just about any Starbux worldwide, guaranteed.) His work has appeared on CNN, in The New York Times, The Guardian of London/UK and more important publications.

WEB XTRAS & SMOKING GUNS —>

Veni, Vidi, Jockocracy?
Locker room rules: Caesars goes commando, union vows resistance to Eldorado empire
By Bryan Horwath / Las Vegas Sun 6-28-2019 / Reno Gazette-Journal 7-8-2019

Eldorado-Caesars merger means labor union battles far beyond Reno & Las Vegas
Culinary Union leader D. Taylor: "Where are they going to cut?"
Building trade union campaigns continue
By Ed Komenda / Reno Gazette-Journal / 6-27-2019

[4-20-2019] — About 100 demonstrators from almost all the region's unions, local community service organizations and political activists joined Culinary Union members picketing Circus Circus in the late afternoon of April 18. A couple of CC suits came out to see what all the fuss was about, as if they didn't already know. In addition to the familiar union "contract now!" chants came calls for a strike against the Carano jocks. ¡Viva Huelga! ¡Sí se puede!

REAL NEWS DEPT. In January 2019, Culinary Union Local 226 defeated an attempt by Circus Circus-Reno to decertify (terminate) the union's representation of its workers. No word on whether management plans to appeal the result to the National Labor Relations Board which was recently put out of business for 35 days. Thank you, Czar Donaldov.