One year ago today: March 9, 2015, Calgary, Alberta.
Five years ago today: March 9, 2011, I learned, then forgot.
Nine years ago today: March 9, 2007, ballpoint pen? What’s that?
Random years ago today: March 9, 2010, meet Boris, Russian shoemaker.
Yeah, it’s a picture of my dead wagon. Seriously, I was just trying to get the tires to pop back onto the rims, but my compressor doesn’t have the balls. I had some excellent photos for you of my day trip and the camper lit up in the evening, but my old Argus [camera] has a volatile memory. But hey, every other camera has let me down. The majority of this blog’s photos are taken on an Argus, which is a bit of a feat, since this blog was never meant to contain pictures.
It is not certain where the new camper will leak. I didn’t run it through the car wash. But the two-hour trip was “mentally therapeutic” as I like to point out. One does not really spot this relaxing effect until you take a long trip with somebody addicted to TV. And, of course, nobody ever admits to being addicted to TV. They can’t take long hours of not being entertained. Myself, I love the long, lonesome trips.
TV addicts think people who don’t watch TV are strange. Like gossips and morphine users, they are convinced you are lying about never going there. To this day, I still meet people who think I’m automatically lying when I don’t know what is on television. Except for shows that have been around forever, I cannot name you a single program or what day or time it is on. I can only assume the six o’clock news is a news show at six o’clock.
The early spring weather is ideal for motorcycle travel. Careful, waterproofing this design of camper is a much more daunting task than the single shell unit from before. I wanted to carry on to Naples this afternoon, but thought better of it because this month’s budget is for one trip only. I don’t mind cold, but I do not like rain on the motorcycle. Which is not to say I don’t like rain, period.
The trip is possible because the long-range weather report says fine and partly cloudy. Should it rain, I have a backup tarp that covers the entire roof, that’s the reason for those fancy metal tie-downs you’be seen in recent photos. Statistically, a third of the properties for sale are not listed on the Internet, and that seems to be the weak link for whoever is buying up central Florida.
First predicted volcano. (Mt. Redoubt)
I’m going to delay any open-road motorcycle trips another day, yes, I’m already five days behind. I’m aware all delays are costly, but that is supposed to work both ways. It takes individuals like me a little longer than most to figure out how to make delays work against other people. It’s actually easy—most of the time you just wait for them to run out of money. I usually manage to always have a little money left in reserve, even if I can’t find it on demand. I burned up a half tank of gas on the test drive, which was successful. But I’m still waiting the extra day before leaving.
That’s the day. I have mild insomnia and use the time to read. Actually, early retirement has almost entirely cured me, since I sleep only when I’m tired. Not because I have to be rested up for work. And in this instance, I’m making up for falling asleep in my chair last day by finishing the book on virus control. It centers on the ebola outbreak, and that is carefully worded. I’ll explain.
The CDC is actually many different “centers”. They don’t like to call themselves offices or departments or institutions. You’ve got on the same property in Atlanta, George, seven different centers. Such as the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the National Center for Environmental Health. These centers have “offices” such as the Public Health Practice Program Office, and these offices have “divisions” and “programs” and so on, down the line.
A chunk of their annual budget goes to reorganizing everything, so much so that the employees have to describe buildings to get around. You see, over the years the buildings have been renamed and renumbered so many times even the director cannot explain why buildings 12 and 13 are missing. The book is an interesting read and the organization is ripe for President Trump to go in there and start firing people.
Ah, some say, but they are doing a good job. Not really. Even the somewhat sympathetic author writes how there are no longer “epidemics”, but only “outbreaks”. You’ll have to read it on your own for the reasoning. But the ebola scare resulted in less than ten deaths outside of Africa, and many of those were health service personnel who carelessly exposed themselves. As you know, I am against the importation of any foreign species into the continental USA. The CDC stores tens of thousands of containers of infectious material from Africa, including the carcasses of 3,000 animals that have never been identified. What in God’s name is that stuff doing inside this country?
There is also a theoretical side of viral disease presented several times during the descriptions of how the labs detect new strains. One I found curious was that Nature considers humans to be parasites and doesn’t like having five or six billion of them burning rainforests and creating acid rain. It proposes that like all forms of life, not only do viruses evolve, they also go extinct on their own.
Or do they just go dormant? I think you can see why I enjoyed reading a book like this, which otherwise is a dry account of the fact that most of mankind’s most dreaded and persistent diseases originate in Africa. There are still tribes that worship diseases like smallpox. How about that disease that was killing only Navajos. An unusual winter rain caused a bumper crop of nuts that in turn caused an explosion of desert mice, who took up residence in the Indian’s huts and trailers, where their droppings released a hantavirus into the air.
In all, the CDC has had some successes. But look at the cost since 1940. They have essentially eradicated most infectious diseases in the USA. Tuberculosis is gone, so is measles, which was primarily a killer because it led to pneumonia. They identified stress as the cause of most heart attacks. Mind you, they have gone overboard at times, such as trying to label anger as a disease, as in “he had an anger attack”. No, no CDC, it was him doing the attacking.
The bottom line is that these disease outbreaks are no longer occurring, as it were, in the wild. They are spread outward from poorly run hospitals and clinics. Or they tend to spread in families in close contact. There is a school of thought that says the diseases are really curing themselves. In a sense, Nature is too smart to allow a virus to kill all of its hosts.
Trivia. E-mail outsends snail-mail by 81:1.
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