Contagion = This blog times a million

Perhaps ill-advisedly, I saw Contagion over the weekend and omg I never want to touch anyone or anything ever again. I spent most of the movie curled in a fetal position, stressing out, and I walked out of the theater with a very strong desire to build a virus-proof underground shelter stocked with food, water, firearms, ammunition, and a BSL-4 grade biohazard suit. It's been a few days and I still have that urge, so perhaps I will spend my 30th birthday weekend (coming up too damn soon) preparing for the next global pandemic. Orrrrr....i'll spend it drinking wine. Only time will tell.

A professor at Columbia, who consulted on Contagion (and actually invented the film's (unnamed) disease (drawing from an real life bat-->pig-->human disease jumping example)) recently wrote an interesting op-ed piece about the film in the NYT that's worth a read. It describes the reality behind the film's fiction, which I think is important to consider, because it's far too easy to dismiss a fictional star-studded film as hyperbole when it's too hard or scary to face the real truths it brings to light.

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Unrelated except in its apocalypse reference: Netflix would like to apologize for the inadvertent apocalypse.