What I’m Blogging

I‘m in the back of the bus, or more accurately, the back of an Airbus 319. Seat 29F. The last seat in the last row of a flight into oblivion. It’s not that the plane is in any danger of crashing or other mechanical mishap. No, the danger is much more insidious and diabolical.

…the modern passenger jet is a breeding ground …

Modern air travel has unwittingly created a biological WMD (Weapons of Moderate Discomfort). Essentially, you take about one hundred people or so, stick them in a completely sealed environment for three and a half hours and let incubate. The modern passenger jet is a breeding ground for all kinds of household plagues; runny noses, coughs, sneezes. The self contained air circulation of the jet ensures that at twenty-five thousand feet, all will get exposed, all will be contaminated, and all will become MIRVs (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles) for illness and suffering… I can already feel two or three days of sniffles and sneezes on the sofa coming on.

…his village thought he was odd because he always carried a book…

It’s the birthday of poet Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). The son of a poor farmer, he followed his father’s example and spent the first half of his life engaged in the backbreaking labor of premodern farming. People in his village thought he was odd because he always carried a book, and they disapproved when they saw him reading as he drove his wagon slowly along the road. He got into trouble with the family of a girl named Jean Armour, who had become pregnant. He’d left another woman after she had become pregnant, but he loved Armour and didn’t want her to suffer the indignities of being an unwed mother. He eventually married her, against her father’s wishes.

Burns pursued a career as a poet and became known for his conversational poems about Scottish life in books like Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). He and his wife had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns’s funeral.