Yes, BOOJUM! Is Back With A Theme
Here is proof, should you need it, that Your Humble Scribe overthinks things hugely. This activity used to be carried out when waiting at the bus stop, which is in abeyance now that I'm working from home. Why, only last night I accidentally watched "Day Of The Dead" again and - immediately began overthinking about it. Don't worry, you'll get to read the fruits of that brainstorming session soon enough. Art!
Don't worry, it was all a dream
Well, there is a tenuous connection between DotD and "The Last Of Us", the latter being a post-apocalyptic thriller about a teenage girl, Ellie, and her guardian Joel, as they trek across a ruined and devastated South Canada. Conrad has only seen clips on Youtube, not the actual television series, and has no intention of going anywhere near the game. Bear that in mind. Art!
As they travel along, Ellie asks Joel a question: "Did it all come crashing down in one day?" Joel's response is along the lines of "Pretty much". He clarifies that if you scoffed enough spore-contaminated food, then you got infected. He then goes on to claim that the tainted food hit the shelves at the same time on Thursday and by Monday everything had collapsed.
NO! NO! NO! THIS IS NOT HOW EPIDEMIOLOGY WORKS!
<thirty second pause for blood pressure to fall>
This is grossly inaccurate and is simply not how diseases spread. Art!
Ground Zero would be the Bogasari Mill in Djakarta, and local environs. The initial impact on mill personnel would be limited, as ingested spores take time to infect and 'hijack' victims. Whilst this process is ongoing, the bulk supplies of flour would be trucked, flown or sailed to destination. Truck deliveries to bakeries or food production plant in Indonesia would cause the quickest and nearest outbreaks. Air freight - and Conrad is unsure how often bulk flour is transported as air cargo - would carry infested flour across the globe within days. There might well be local 'hot spots' at bakeries and food processing plants as well as destination airports if handling is lax. These imported flour cargoes would need to be transported, distributed, sold and consumed, a process lasting several days. NOTE THIS IS NOT INSTANTANEOUS ACROSS THE GLOBE! Art?
When you absolutely, positively have to spread disaster as fast as possible
Bulk transport by ship would be the slowest method, at it's longest taking many weeks, with additional delays on arrival as the very large amounts of flour are off-loaded and stored; again possibly creating hot spots at docks and ports. NOTE THIS IS NOT INSTANTANEOUS ACROSS THE GLOBE!
Another factor would be the export of infected food from Asia across the globe, e.g. Ramen noodles. These would be effective 'time bombs' in supermarkets and on shelves, able to infect even years after being distributed. Art!
DEATH IN A POT!
"Tainted food hit the shelves around the same time" is woefully inaccurate thanks to different foods and the sheer logistics of transportation across a continent. Art!
Why is this here? Because Ol' Steve gives a compelling description of how rail logistics work across South Canada. Believe me, "at the same time" is horribly wide of the mark.
<mind you, the television scriptwriters couldn't have imagined a pedantic hair-splitter like Conrad going into depth on this subject>
Distribution by road and rail takes place on different scales and timetables. There is just no comparison in terms of time-criticality between freshly-baked bread and a Hostess Twinky. Art!
Go on, taunt me! Taunt me with what I cannot have!
What I, Conrad The Epidemiologist, would predict is a rapidly growing infected zone in South East Asia, with a lot of local hot spots elsewhere across the globe, not necessarily large ones - to begin with. A lot would depend on the Indonesian government's speed of response, and we're - or at least I - am not privy to the lag between the spores infecting flour and the first serious signs of infection. If this is more than a few days then the spread is probably unstoppable, as described above.
Why is this so? Well, duh, because of how deadly this mutated fungus is, with "No treatments, no preventatives, no cures. It's not even possible to make them." Thus there is no way to cure the infected, who will in fact become vectors to deliberately spread the infection as much as possible.
Or at least so say the scriptwriters. Conrad is rather skeptical about their qualifications in mycology. In fact, there very well might have been a way to create a cure OR render people immune - which is why the immune Ellie is such a hot ticket item - but societal collapse and the limited number of experienced mycologists would prevent this from happening. Art!
It was probably Ruffian
What's the upshot of all this? O I thought you'd never ask! Firstly, that the outbreak of fungal infection would be staggered across the globe. Secondly, that the nations furthest from Indonesia might well realise what was happening. Thirdly, that unless said nations resorted to tactical nuclear weapons to destroy infection sites, they were still doomed, although they might have time to create refuges. Art!
My notes
Less Text - More Pictures!
I did say we had a theme today, so let us continue to promote it. Art!
Frankly, Lee, I'd be wary about attaching my name to anything like this, extremely wary. Unless that's a pseudonym. Next!
"The Voice In The Night" By William Shakespeare Hope Hodgson
This is an unsettling short story, narrated by a third party. The protagonist and his fiancé are shipwrecked upon an island that is overgrown with fungii, and they rapidly run out of food. In desperation they eat the fungus and find it delicious. Art!
Unfortunately the unwanted side-effect is that it turns them into fungus creatures themselves. Thus matey begs for food from the passing ship, sight unseen until a fleeting moonbeam reveals him to merely be a huge mass of fungus, rowing back to Fungus Island.
Too Dark! More Froth!
Wellllll I dunno if this can be classed as anything remotely like 'frothy' but let us recall one of '2000AD's more macabre moments. Art!
The unfortunate above is ex-Mayor Jim Grubb, being consumed by a mutant Cursed Earth fungi he stumbled across. He eventually croaks it, of course, with his last words being "Please don't eat me."
Was that light and frothy enough for you?
"City In The Sky"
The Doctor has discovered an interesting anomaly in New Eucla's cemetery.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Bogus Man
A slow trot across the
From a slight rise south of the nearest buildings, he could see the
whole array of ruins, perhaps forty of them that ran in a semi-circle of a few
hundred metres, with what might have been a school or chapel in the
centre. Everything blackened, collapsed,
destroyed. Sad and lonely carcasses of
carts or wagons lay on the tracks that served as roads, and the roasted stumps
of a few pathetic trees could be picked out.
Nearby, close to the scorched bushes that ringed the dead town, a grimy
metal delta looked abandoned, sitting in ruts that ran back across the
landscape for half a kilometre: Dart One.
The destroyed shuttle, sitting on the aged remains of a decayed
landing-strip.
With a sigh, and not really knowing what he was looking for, the Doctor
headed down into town. His mount
displayed signs of distress when they got near the first burned-out house, so
he stopped and tethered her to a nearby bush before walking over to Dart One.
Sorry, you'll just have to wait until whatever it was is revealed.
Finally -
It has now rolled around to Beer O'Clock!
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