More Belated March birthdays
Broncho Billy and Elton John, JS Bachand Leonard Joseph (Chico) Marx, Fannie Farmer and Gail Clark Fleming, Harry Houdini and Saint Catherine of Siena.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
The Athenian Plague witnessed by Thucydides, Part One
Thucydides account of the plague that struck Athens during the war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League is among the most cogent and relevant descriptions of a pestilence.
Quarantined in the City of Light
While Paris started the year in the midst of a transportation strike that the strikers by and large lost in the end, there was only a brief respite for the hospitality industry as the specter of the global panic pandemic landed in Europe and then worked its way west.
Take Five: Muddling Through the Crisis
Sane Americans are getting on with their lives. This means living with the knowledge of death.
The Literature of Plagues, I: The Plagues of Egypt
This is a story that requires no retelling. Anyone who is not very familiar with the account in Exodus (basically chapters 5-12) will at least have seen the Cecil B. De Mille movie.
Corona Corona 5
More good news: You’re probably not living in New Orleans and do not have to face the reality of its mayor, LaToya Cantrell, who is predictably blaming the Federal Government and President Trump for her costly decision not to cancel Mardi Gras.
The Literature of Plagues: An Upcoming Discussion
Since there is no sign of this plague letting up—I am referring to the plague of hysteria that has descended upon the world—we may as well make the most of it by considering what we can learn by reading great literary accounts of previous plagues.
More March Birthdays
Torquato Tasso, and James Taylor, and Shemp Howard, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Hart Benton, and Roger Taney, Albert Einstein, Jerry Lewis, and Neil Sedaka, George Berkeley and Wyatt Earp, Fustel de Coulanges and Ovid ….
Corona, Corona 4
A close relative, in a comment “by the way,” hoped I was taking COVID seriously, since the problem was becoming acute in her part of California. It was a reasonable remark, and I responded: I take all potentially fatal diseases seriously, but the media are as usual lying to the public almost as badly as the Chinese government has been lying. Looking at at the Italian situation—far more drastic than here in the States—99% of the people dying have been old—average age 79 years nine months—and with underlying conditions, cardiac, respiratory, diabetic. Telling athletic young people to fear death is...
Wednesday’s Child: Sicilian Defense 3
The word “weather” (in German, Wetter) is by etymological transmutation the Russian for “wind” (veter), and as it happens a Sicilian scientist has just come out with what to me is a very plausible explanation of why northern Italy is now the global epicenter of the Chinese plague. Hubei, the man suggests – the region where the virus first spread – is geomorphologically analogous to the Pianura Padana, if only in that both are windless enclosed flatlands, now under cloudy winter skies. Let us not laugh before we take aboard a few more suppositions. Wind and light are the reasons,...
