Boats and ships scare me. That dates back to a particularly difficult English Channel crossing in the 1960s, when my dad thought it’d be cool to take the train to Dover from London, then the Dover/Calais ferry, and the train to Paris.
The google word significance score is always a fun tool to play with. I’m glad it’s not part of my profession, though, because I’d insist on something better and I’d want to know more about how the metric is generated.
The New York Stock Exchange trading room floor is a flurry of activity from the minute the bell rings until the second it closes. People are running everywhere, jammed together, in a single large room.
Edgar Allen Poe was part of the landscape of Baltimore, when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure every high school English class had to read The Tell-Tale Heart. My favorite story was The Masque of The Red Death.
There’s no way I’m the only person who has had this idea. But I don’t see a lot of talk about it, so it seemed like it was worth exploring.
I’m becoming fascinated by the current moment in history: we are heading into a genuinely unknown situation and it feels like we’re paused on the edge of something, about to slip and go careening violently down into an abyss – or, perhaps, not.
[Warning: medical models and vintage tools]
It is, sort of. The thing is that it’s a “flu” nobody has resistance to. Usually the flu comes through every year and a few people die – more than have died, so far, of the coronavirus. The difference is emotional – it’s the difference between squirting blood from an arterial wound, and having a bloody nose. We’ve all had bloody noses and we know how to handle them and mostly, we’ll be OK.
In 1999, I was returning from teaching a class at Arthur Andersen University in Downer’s Grove near Chicago. At the time, I lived in Baltimore; it was a short flight.
My posting about the coronavirus and the cruise ship as a “terror movie” was not a suggestion for how to reenact an actual terror movie. [stderr]
Fortunately, the coronavirus is not as bad as it could be; certainly it’s nowhere in the league of SARS or the 1911 swine flu. Which is a good thing, because it does not seem as though humanity’s response to the virus has been super effective.