North Coast Cafe, South

Influenza Pandemic 1918

 

Chances are every family has a member, or two, who was sick or died in the great influenza pandemic that swept around the globe and across America in 1918-19.

More deaths are attributed to the great pandemic than any other disease, more people died of influenza in a single year than the four year Black Death Bubonic Plague of the 14th Century, or of the “Great War” (WWI) that raged at the same time. Estimates of the number of deaths range widely, 20 to 100 million. Most historians believe 40-60 million most likely. By comparison, there were 9.2-million combat deaths in WWI. 

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Joseph Epstein: Snob

William F. Buckley, Jr has reviewed Joseph Epstein's 2003 book  Snobbery: The American Version, which for me is a double-dip of pleasure because, while I don't always agree with these two men, I admire and enjoy their writing.

Epstein's chapter on name dropping is especially amusing and gives me a chance to display my own snobbery by mentioning that I've had an exchange of e-mails with him about contemporary 'slanguage' prompted by a column he wrote for the Vocabula Review.

In this review Buckley writes eloquently about the chapter on good taste.

Good taste, he summarizes, is really “good sense.”  Good sense in friendship, “represented by tact, generosity, and above all kindness; in possessions, by comfort, elegance, utility and solidity; in art by beauty, harmony, and originality,  in culture, by a discriminating tolerance for tastes at odds with one’s own.”

“The other way—taking pleasure in cutting oneself away from the mass by the criterion of ostensible good taste, and putting down others by the standard of what one takes to be one’s own exquisite taste is, of course, the way of the snob.”

I Love These Guys

Some of the best writing these days appears on the Web,  often what I call  personal writing as opposed to the current and trendy 'memoir' genre.  Two writers I think are outstanding, among others, are Andy Burrows and Chris Corrigan.  Treat yourself to this introduction.

Tricks of the Trade

Mathew Baldwin has a clever and amusing article over on The Morning News. Despite it's brush with trendy cynicism, Tricks of the Trade is a splendid human interest feature article. I wish I'd thought of it.

Nurse

Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.

Newspaper Headline Writer

If you can’t think of a headline for a story, use one of these three magic verbs: “weighs,” “mulls,” or “considers.” They’ll work for pretty much anything from court stories (“Hamilton mulls plea deal”) to government stories (“Governor weighs Paseo extension”) to entertainment (“Colvin considers new album”) to features (“Benson mulls those who consider weighing Kasey’s artwork”).

Photographer

When taking family portraits that include a dog, don’t use the dog’s name or say “doggie, doggie” to get its attention, because it might trot over to you. Instead, call out “kitty, kitty, kitty.” The dog will perk up and look around for a cat, and you can get a great shot if you time it right.

Hypergraphia

This one's for Fred.

Like me, have you ever wondered where the drive to write comes from? The compulsion to compose? Some comfort may come in knowing, once again, we are not alone. I first heard about "The Midnight Disease" on Diane Rehm's NPR program. It's worth listening to again. The following is from the Boston Globe.

In her new book, "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain," Dr. Alice Flaherty, a Harvard neurologist, lays out all that neurology has discovered about the artist's brain, from the strange profusion of literary giants with temporal lobe epilepsy to the composer Dmitry Shostakovich's certainty that musical notes radiated from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain.

Hypergraphia -- a term used by doctors to describe the overwhelming desire to write -- and its agonizing opposite, writer's block, are the focus of Flaherty's research. The drive to create, Flaherty concludes, is not the same thing as literary talent

Being deprived of creativity is actually very painful for a lot of people. It's a horrible feeling. They're like border collies that can't chase sheep. They're so full of this energy that can't go anywhere.