Italy Kicks the Bucket: Rising Seas
Oh crap. This can’t be right. It’s upside down.
Well, no wonder. This is New Zealand, come to think about it. I write too much about too many disparate subjects.
I should have taken the hint: they do everything upside-down, down there. Can I say that?
Why the hell do I have this picture? They say, you know, when you write . . . Have a good headline. Check. A good sub-head. Check. A catchy high res image that has nothing to do with anything. Triple-check.
Sorry. I get too much writing advice. I’m just wasting this white space so I can add a catchy subhead right here:
When you talk the usual ignorant bullshit about Pandemics and Quarantine, you need to skip New Zealand unless you really know what you’re talking about. And it’s clear you don’t.
I must be the only living human who knows what the words “pandemic” and “quarantine” even mean. Because after I finished my four years of Latin, I studied Greek and . . . well, everything. Hell, I was almost 18 by then. Now I’m near 68, and never stopped. кириллический? What did I just say, Ivan?
Look, I’m just practicing with this article. But I’ll politely throw in a quick commentary on the two words, pandemic and quarantine.
Pandemic is being (somewhat improperly) used as an adjective for describing a disease or plague or pestilence. But as a noun, it points to a place or a selected set of people. It’s inclusive. If used in its naked state, it refers to everybody in the world. Except New Zealand. They’re just a demic, so to speak. Now an epidemic, which they just avoided because they used quarantine, well, hmm . . . See “epidemic” means kinda “over the heads of these people only.”
Okay. Study your own Greek, or epidemiology if you can do better.
Quarantine comes from Latin. It means isolated for forty days. No, not the whole country or world isolated! The guys on the ships or in the caravans with plagues, pestilences, and all that stuff. Headcolds.
Except in New Zealand and some other islands, we all need to be exposed to germs, viruses, fleas, mosquitoes, plagues and pestilences. We gain cross-immunities and good things like that, given that we survive. But if you’re reading this, then you probably did.
See, like the aboriginal Indians in America, the New Zealanders don’t have built-in immunities for these communicable diseases. So in a weird way, they don’t count.
Fred . . . direct email is . . . Literate.andNumerateScientist@protonmail.com
