Pandemic is a cooperative board game, in which the players work together to fight global outbreaks of communicable diseases. It has become one of the most popular successful cooperative board games, and has spawned a number of expansions and spin-offs.
The game was initially introduced in 2008; its creator, Matt Leacock, has indicated that he based the idea for the game on the SARS outbreak in 2002-2004.
The flu pandemic of 1918-20 is a major event in Life After Life, an award-winning 2013 novel by Kate Atkinson. The novel describes the many lives of Ursula Todd, a spunky young British woman, along successive and varying timelines. She is killed three different times by the flu before surviving.
On February 11, 2013, the Emergency Alert System at five television stations alerted us to a zombie apocalypse. It was a hoax.
Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States on January 20, 2013.
2013 saw major flooding in Colorado’s Front Range. Parts of the town of Lyons were washed into the St. Vrain Creek.
OOP: I would hike up St. Vrain Creek after the flood and saw a ton of household goods and clothes.
Sue Lyon was just 14 when Kubrick cast her in the role of Dolores Haze in Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote the novel and much of the screenplay, described her as the “perfect nymphet.”
“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is a song by the Police, about a male teacher who has sexual fantasies about one of his teenaged female students. It was the Police’s first song to reach the top 10 in the United States.
The subject matter was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (and Nabokov’s name is mentioned in the lyrics); Sting, the band’s vocalist/bassist, and writer of the song, had worked as an English teacher at a secondary (high) school prior to becoming a full-time musician, and over the years, he has given different accounts as to whether the song had any autobiographical elements.
Sting started college at the University of Warwick but left for a couple years then finished at what is now today Northumbria University.
Professional wrestler Sting (Steve Borden), not to be confused with musician Sting (Gordon Sumner), was perhaps the biggest WCW superstar not to join WWE in the subsequent decade after WCW’s demise in 2001. He finally joined WWE in 2014, making his first appearance at Survivor Series to help Dolph Ziggler defeat The Authority’s team and temporarily put The Authority out of power.
He made his in-ring debut for WWE at the following year’s WrestleMania 31, in a loss to Triple H. Triple H was assisted by his old D-Generation X running buddies, while Sting, oddly, was helped by his old adversaries, the New World Order, instead of someone more logical like Lex Luger and Diamond Dallas Page.
Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and first appeared in Action Comics #23, in April, 1940.
A number of actors have portrayed villainous supergenius Lex Luthor in film and television, including Gene Hackman, Michael Rosenbaum, Jon Cryer, Jesse Eisenberg, Nicholas Hoult, and Clancy Brown (who has voiced the character in numerous animated projects).
I was going to play off of arch but was ninja’d. So I’ll play off of number.
In Arches National Park, near Moab Utah, there are quite a number of arches — over 2,000 arches. The arches are relatively delicate and subject to weathering and decay. Due to erosion, eventually they all will fall.
There, Landscape Arch is currently the longest arch. It has an opening greater than 100 yards. It is one of the longest natural arches in the world. In September 1991 it suffered a major rockfall and significant portions of the rock broke off. See the blue oval in my picture. The red oval is a major crack and rock separation, and that rock will soon fall. It is only a matter of time before Landscape Arch collapses.
The tallest arch is Double Arch South which has a vertical light opening of 112 feet. {➜ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Arch\_(Utah) ■ }
The most photographed arch in the park is Delicate Arch. {➜ Delicate Arch - Wikipedia ■ }
These are my photos of Landscape Arch from October 2023, the last time I was there, including a selfie with my wife.
What’s scary is that only a couple of weeks later she had a burst aneurysm in her femoral artery. Thankfully she was in the ER when that happened. Her heart stopped for 20 minutes but immediate and lengthy CPR kept oxygenated blood flowing to her brain. Today she is close to 100% except she is still on full disability from work.
What a scare! I’m glad that she’s recovered.
Jesus God! My aunt was in the hospital for surgery the next morning for coughing up blood. Her aorta burst in the hospital and she was dead before the doctor could get down the hall. Thankfully your story is happier.
But I guess that means I need to give a trivium.
The “arch” in archangel represents a leader of the angels. The number of archangels and their names vary among the Abrahamic religions.
“Arkangel” is the title of an episode from Season 2 of Black Mirror. It’s about a single mother raising her daughter, and following an incident agrees to have her daughter implanted with a device which will allow mom to keep tabs on her. What could go wrong?
Thanks guys. It scares me to think that if it burst while we were on that hike she would have bled out in just a couple of minutes, and there’d be nothing I could have done about it. And she was fatigued on that hike too.
Amen to that. We are extremely fortunate.
Oh no. I am so very very sorry. Sometimes life is so fragile and we don’t even know it. It’s so easy to take each day for granted.
I’ll play off of ark.
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The HMS Ark Royal (91, is her pennant number) was a British Royal Navy aircraft carrier that served during WWII. She was commissioned in 1938 and served until 1941 when she was sunk by the German U-boat U-81 off of Gibraltar. During her years of service, Ark Royal operated in some of the most active naval theatres of the Second World War.
A later HMS Ark Royal, also a British aircraft carrier but with the pennant number R09, appears in the 2015 Guy Ritchie-directed spy movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E, set in the early Sixties. She fires a missile which destroys a smaller vessel bearing an important character.
A Swordfish biplane from Ark Royal dropped the torpedo that jammed the rudder of the Bismarck. The damaged rudder kept Bismarck from reaching the safety of Luftwaffe air coverage from France, and allowed the Royal Navy to catch up and sink Bismarck.
The doomed voyage of the crew of the “sword boat” (swordfish fishing boat) Andrea Gail is one of the stories told in Sebastian Junger’s 1997 nonfiction book The Perfect Storm, later turned into a 2000 movie starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane and others.
Rosemary Clooney was an singer and actress, who had a number of pop and jazz hits in the 1950s. Clooney was particularly identified with her breakthrough song, “Come On-a My House,” as well as “Mambo Italiano.”
Clooney’s sister Betty was also a singer, while her brother Nick was a television host and news anchor, primarily on WKRC in Cincinnati. Actor George Clooney is Nick’s son (and, thus, Rosemary’s nephew).
