gullybogan

Flickr photo by Solitaire Miles.

Dear Reader,

Ever read a book called The Hot Zone?

It’s pretty old now, but you may have heard of it. I’m talking about the one by Richard Preston, just in case you go to your librarian and she hands over something about erogenous stimulation techniques.

To a pathophobe like myself, The Hot Zone is a pretty challenging read. It’s about the ebola virus which – let’s face it – if you had to be a virus, ebola would be the virus to be.

Ebola is not quite as cunning as Variola (Smallpox), which carries around with it a copy of human DNA so that it can check up on our blueprint like a plumber. But ebola is still a pretty impressive disease.

It infects the host, destroys the host, and then, as the host begins to fail (i.e. die), it liquefies the host’s internal organs which then exit the host principally by mouth as vomita negra (the black vomit), but also by spraying like a fountain out of every other orifice in the body (including the eyes), in the hope of landing on a new host and carrying on the merriment…

I could go on for hours about viruses, but i won’t.

This picture that i’ve borrowed from Solitaire Miles is of hybridised influenza. Some lab dudes were mixing human flu with bird flu, to see if they could come up with a new, tastier topping for pizzas, and it almost escaped into, well, the world. Which would have resulted in a lot of tasty pizza toppings, for sure, dear Reader.

The thing that puts me into virus-contemplation mode is that at the widgeteria this week we had an outbreak of a particularly nasty computer virus that transmitted itself by USB drive.

Turns out that someone had forgotten to tick a box in a setting console and our network wasn’t automatically updating its virus definitions. The one we were using dated back to the second Moon landing, so it wasn’t much good.

There’s something vaguely and unsettlingly evocative of sexual mischief, this sticking your USB into a slot at work, having it infected without your knowledge, and then taking it home to stick into your slot at home, which gets likewise infected, resulting in a lot of trouble and strife and questions that are more often screamed and accompanied by thrown objects than asked in a civil tone over the dinner table.

I wonder what Freud would have had to say about this.

Something misogynistic, no doubt.

Anyway, my point is, i had all these ideas for posts, but the rough work and research is all sitting on my thumb drive, and we’ve been told not to go sticking our thumb drives into anything until we get the all clear, so those ideas are going to have to wait.

What i liked best about the whole situation was that the network gurus had an idea that there was a fan-faeces convergence occurring on Monday, but they didn’t tell anyone until Wednesday.

Still, i’m sure it’ll all turn out for the best.

One thing, we all have nice new virus definitions now.

Yours,
Gullybogan