geek holidays gone wrong...

Yes, I get "May the Fourth be with you..." as a rather horid pun, but I really do tire of great films/concepts being celebrated on the wrong day.

Star Wars day is May 25th: the anniversary day of the release of the first (and most of the others) film.

Towel Day should NOT be May 25th (see above, and it is also the anniversary of Tubular Bells).

It should be March 11 (DNA's birth), May 11 (DNA's death), March 8 (date of first episode broadcast), or December 24 (first broadcast of the 7th episode, which is the first to mention towels at all - I can understand if the collective "they" choose not to use this one, of course).

echoed from elsewhere

I'm (almost, but not really) sorry that we in the west have gotten so used to good health and easily controlled diseases that we've forgotten what it was like to live where you could go from no symptoms to downright dead in a matter of hours, with nobody able to tell you how you caught it. But that threat remains as it always has and I admire the CDC's vigilance on this, as well as their learning from mistakes make when this last showed up in 1976.

If it doesn't explode into millions of deaths, call it a victory, whether by nature or by our attempts to contain it.

If we don't try to contain it, we only have ourselves to blame for what destruction it may eventually cause.

Please please PLEASE read about the outbreak of 1918: try to imagine a disease that killed more people in a matter of weeks than the entire 4 years of the horrid war that preceded it.  We don't know if this can turn into that, but better to act like it can AND WILL than to do nothing in response to the "hype" and watch it spread and mutate...