The Model City Times
On January 26, 2020, a helicopter carrying former pro basketball player Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others crashes in Calabasas, California, roughly 30 miles north of Los Angeles; everyone on board dies.
Bryant’s death sent shockwaves through the American sporting world.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2, a pandemic. The announcement followed a rising sense of alarm in the preceding months over a new, potentially lethal virus that was swiftly spreading around the world. A year later, we look back on one of the most challenging periods in recent memory.
It has been an emotional time marked by startling daily counts of new cases and deaths that multiplied rapidly. More than 100 million people around the world have been infected by COVID-19 and more than 2.5 million people have died of the disease.
On May 25, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, after a convenience store employee called 911 and told the police that Mr. Floyd had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived at the scene, Mr. Floyd was unconscious and pinned beneath three police officers, showing no signs of life.
Video shows officers taking a series of actions that violated the policies and turned fatal by pinning Mr. Floyd to the ground and keeping their knee on his neck for at least eight minutes and 15 seconds leaving Mr. Floyd unable to breathe, even as he and onlookers called out for help.
New Cache Order welcome Geocaching Vlogger, Joshua Johnson, to become an honorary member of the group. His charisma and enthusiasm towards geocaching can be contagious on film. He’s quirky, funny, relatable, and expressive. While most of us are excited internally when we find a cool cache, Joshua’s extroverted enthusiasm expresses what we all feel but don’t always show.
Joshua began caching 10 years ago when some friends mentioned the game to him in passing. He purchased a Garmin eTrex GPS device and tested it out on a geocache across the street and thought to himself, “I drive by here everyday and never knew this existed! It was like a whole new world was opened up to me, and I have been hooked ever since.”
A few years later, Joshua purchased his first Flip camera, recorded a geocaching adventure, posted it online, and never looked back. From 2011–2018 he has not missed a week of uploading at least one entertaining video of unique and awe-inspiring geocaches. Since there are so many cool hides in the archives of his YouTube channel, we wanted to ask him what makes a quality geocache and what words of inspiration he has for future cache hiders to make caches worthy enough for the big-screen — among a few other questions.
The 2019–20 Los Angeles Lakers season was the franchise’s 72nd season, its 71st season in the National Basketball Association (NBA), and its 60th in Los Angeles. The Lakers were coached by Frank Vogel in his first year as team head coach. The team played its home games at Staples Center as members of the Western Conference’s Pacific Division.
On March 6, 2020, the Lakers clinched their first playoff berth since the 2012–13 season. Five days later, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the season was suspended. On July 5, the NBA announced a return of the season in the, with 22 teams playing eight seeding games followed by a full postseason. Play resumed on July 30, with all games being played in Orlando, Florida. On August 3, the Lakers clinched both their first Pacific Division title since 2012 and the top seed in the Western Conference playoffs for the first time since the 2009–10 season.
The Lakers finished the season 52–19. They defeated the Portland Trail Blazers, Houston Rockets, and Denver Nuggets to advance to the NBA Finals. There, they defeated the Miami Heat (LeBron James’ former team) in six games to earn the franchise’s 17th NBA championship. With this championship win, the Lakers tied the Boston Celtics for the all-time record for most championships in NBA history. The team dedicated the season to retired Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, who was killed in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020.
The 2020 World Series was the championship series of Major League Baseball’s 2020 season. The 116th World Series was a best-of-seven-playoff between the American League (AL) champion Tampa Bay Rays and the National League (NL) champion Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers defeated the Rays to win the series in six games for their first championship since 1988.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire series was played at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, from October 20 to October 27 with the ballpark’s seating capacity limited to 25 percent (11,500 fans). The pandemic resulted in the regular season being reduced to 60 games, and the postseason being held at neutral sites instead of at teams’ home stadiums. Thus, this was the first World Series to be played at a neutral site, as well as the first since 1944 to be held at only one ballpark and the first since 1993 to be played entirely on artificial turf and the 5th all-artificial turf World Series. Further, it was the first ever World Series to be played entirely on second generation artificial turf. It was also the first World Series since 1984 to use the designated hitter for all games. With 2020 being the inaugural season for Globe Life Field, it became the first ballpark to host the World Series in its first year since Yankee Stadium in 2009.
