Stupid Hand Washer
One of the most effective methods for preventing the spread of many infections such as influenza and coronavirus is the simple act of hand washing with regular soap and hot water. Only recently, however, have we embraced hand washing as a means to prevent disease.
In 1846, Hungarian physician and scientist Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that disinfecting the hands prior to assisting in childbirth reduced the mortality rate from something called childbed fever, which was an infection that was almost always fatal to the mother, to less than 1%. Believing he had made a major breakthrough, he published his findings in a book, as well as several scientific papers. Unfortunately, his observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. In fact, doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, a colleague had him committed to an insane asylum, largely due to Dr. Semmelweis spending nearly twenty years trying to convince the medical community about the importance of disinfecting the hands prior to engaging in any medical procedure. Soon after being committed to the asylum, guards viciously beat him. He died 14 days later. A mere few years after his death, the medical community finally embraced the importance of hygiene in medical procedures when French scientist Louis Pasteur confirmed the impact of germs in infections and in the spread of disease.
Dr. Semmelweis’ tragic story serves as a cautionary tale about how scientific facts are often disregarded due to firmly held opinions of those in positions of power. Tragic also is that the same is true today.
So, wash your hands, wear a face mask and stay healthy.
It's la COVID-19, You Ignorant Swine
The French are a stubbornly proper folk who take their language seriously. The Académie Française, the official guardian of the French language, strives to ensure the French language is not butchered, or otherwise sullied by the ghastly inarticulate. The academy's latest act of parlance heroism has defined COVID-19 as a feminine noun. As such, “the COVID-19” is properly expressed as la COVID-19, instead of le COVID-19.
How serious are the French about their language? According to Radio France Internationale:
The members of the French academy are mostly elderly men who, on official occasions, wear an ornate uniform and a sword and are known as "the immortals.”
Some of our Southern brethren have unofficial language guardians. They typically have names like Billy Joe Bob or Earl Wayne Leroy. Instead of a sword and ornate duds, they're often seen with overalls, rifles, a pouch of Beech Nut, a hound of some sort and several empty cans of Busch or PBR. They're known as the immortal Rednecks.
Wee Oui
French elementary students returned to classes today, but with numerous safeguards in place to protect students and staff from the virus. Among those safeguards is washing hands at least 10 times per day.
Having 6-year olds wash their hands 10 times a day might reveal some of those pesky unintended consequences. I can see the number of pee breaks increasing due to the frequent occurrences of running water. Or, a mischevious little Jacques might figure out a way to weedle out of class for a few minutes by taking advantage of the situation. For example, “Pierre breathed on me. May I go wash my hands?”
At least that's something I would have tried.
Gender Bias
As alluded to earlier, some languages assign masculine, feminine or neutral genders to their nouns, which determines the article used with a given noun. For example, fork is a feminine noun in German. So, “the fork” is die Gabel (die is pronounced dee). Spoon, however, is masculine, so “the spoon” is der Löffel. As you can see, “die" and “der” both serve as the article “the,” but which to use depends on the gender of the noun that follows it. Don't ask why a fork is feminine and a spoon is masculine; it will only lead to an argument. And, to keep the gender police smiling, knife is gender neutral in German - das Messer. Oh yeah, all nouns are capitalized in German. So, that's fun.
Now think about this: The average native speaker of English knows about 20,000 words, and about 40,000 for university educated speakers. Granted, I knew a guy named Rudy in South Carolina that managed quite well on about 12 words, a wink, his middle finger, and a well-defined collection of nods, shrugs snorts and grunts; whereas one of my college professors seemed to know about 100,000 words and I never had a clue what the hell he was talking about. But I digress. Approximately half the words we know are nouns. So, if the English language assigned gender to nouns, and used a different article for each gender, then we'd have to learn the gender and correct article usage of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 nouns.
The Danes have a much better way of dealing with the gender of nouns in the Danish language. Acccording to Julie Broberg's husband, a native Dane, “they did at one time have a gender, but no one in Denmark remembers which is which.” My admiration for the Danes grows each time I visit with Julie.
And I really admire Rudy's method. I don't know which gender Rudy's middle finger would be if he ever used it in France, but I'm quite sure they'd get the message regardless.
Stupid Tests
On Wednesday, May 6, Trump said from the Oval Office,
“So, in a way, by doing all of this (coronavirus) testing, we make ourselves look bad."
The point he was making was that the more tests we administer for the virus, the more cases of COVID-19 we'll have in the U.S. And that makes us look bad. Not as bad as the rat's nest on top of his head, but bad nonetheless. Instead, he'd rather scale back the testing so it doesn't look so bad.
It's really a brilliant solution to a major public health crisis. The only real problem I see is explaining the tens of thousands of deaths caused by the virus, but technically left unclassified since the victims didn't get tested for the virus. Sluggo's got a few ideas to explain all these deaths:
Killed by a Chinese computer virus.
They're Canadians.
Rosie O'Donnell did it.
The mountains of body bags are actually Hillary's missing emails.
Have Attorney General Bill Barr state that the deaths were constitutionally justified.
Deny. Deny. Deny. Eat two cheeseburgers.
They were killed in the Great Mexican Invasion of 2019.
They're fired administration officials and Cabinet members.
They're mistresses who refused to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Plead the fourth. (Can't plead the fifth if you can't count that high.)
Stay safe, distanced, connected and well.
Sluggo