What if we could have put on our Facebook page a link to Monday afternoon’s announcement of three days of remote learning for Wiscasset Middle High School due to COVID-19?

We could not, because Facebook could not, for several hours Monday. And according to CNN, for much of that time, Facebook did not know what was causing its and other social media’s outages or when its would end.

Fear not, for multiple reasons: First, as a workaround, we put out the school department’s announcement on our breaking news email that occasionally goes out to subscribers of our free, daily Morning Catch. Second, any frequent checkers of wiscassetnewspaper.com would have seen the news there, shortly after we received the announcement.

Third, WMHS families with whichever form(s) of contact they have given the department would not need to hear the news from us. The department provides those items directly to them and, as with Monday’s, at wiscassetschools.org

But the announcement of a temporary move to remote learning for WMHS has news value, for anyone interested in the schools, the pandemic, or both. So we still wanted to get the word out to those who don’t have children in the school system and/or are not on the department’s list. And we did.

* * *

What if Sunday night’s New England Patriots-Tampa Bay Buccaneers had been a blowout for Tom Brady and his current team? It would not have been a huge surprise, nor was Tampa Bay’s closer win. But the narrowness made a good game and felt better for Patriots fans, or at least this one, than a wider score would have.

And no matter the outcome, it was nice to see Brady back in Foxboro. When I took my glasses off, the teams’ colors were similar enough to create the illusion he was still a Patriot. Maybe he still is, somewhere in there. But when I took my glasses off, I could not see him as well, or anyone else, of course, so I put them back on.