Foot, Pleasure for Pleasure, the Tudors and Sweating Sickness

1. MD and my folks have convinced me not to overdo, just because I can stand on my foot without pain does not mean it is healed. This I believe is sound advice, especially considering CW broke her foot twice in the same place I broke mine. Eh rainy and overcast day anyhow...so sort of glad I'm stuck inside. I'm thinking - if and when I retire, I'm moving out of NY and to a cheaper state, near the water (is there such a thing? Eh, maybe Florida...that's where half my relatives are, but I'm not a fan), or the mountains, without the need to do too much driving or going up and down steps. Hmm...maybe the mountains is not such a great idea.

2. Pleasure for Pleasure is an exceedingly odd romance novel, I can't figure out who the hero is. I'm pretty sure who the heroine is - it's the only female character whose pov we've been in. Also unlike most of these books, it should be noted that she is decidedly plump. Usually the heroine is thin as a rail. (Which doesn't make sense in historical romance novels - since people who were wealthy tended to be plump and not thin. Full-figured was considered attractive back then - or have you not looked at the paintings from the period.) But.. the male points of view are shall we say a bit more scattered. And the most likely prospect is currently enamored with a rather likable and quite intelligent French woman who is advising the heroine on how to deal with a rather despicable rake who has ruined her season. So is it the despicable rake...because that would just be odd.
Tempted to spoil myself by reading Amazon and Good Reads reviews. If you want to spoil yourself on a book or tv show - you can, you just need to know how to find the right sites.
I'm exceedingly good at this sort of thing.

You can tell that I've been reading too many of these things. I'm starting to write like them. Blame Georgette Heyer for the word "exceedingly" - her verbage sort of stuck in my head. On "words with friends" - I was actually considering "peon" but decided "rowan" would give me more points. "Words with Friends" is odd too - some words such as QUA are allowable, while QUE is not. Or "JOE" is fine but not "OZ". Very odd and inconsistent game.

3. Finished watching another episode of S1 the Tudors, I think it is the 7th Episode of the Season, where the kingdom is plagued by The Sweating Sickness. I looked it up on Wiki and it had this to say about the Sickness in fiction:

The 1528 outbreak is depicted in the 2007 episode of The Tudors titled "Message to the Emperor". William Compton is killed by the disease and both Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey are stricken. In Season 1, Episode 5, Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the king's officially recognized, illegitimate son dies of The Sweat at about 3–5 years old. The real Henry FitzRoy died about one month after his seventeenth birthday, probably of tuberculosis.

A small outbreak in 1527 kills Liz, the wife of Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey's advisor, in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. In 1529, the disease also claims the lives of Cromwell's daughter Grace and stepdaughter Anne.

The 2012 mid-season finale of Warehouse 13 titled "We All Fall Down" uses sweating sickness as a plot device. Agents of the eponymous warehouse are seeking a quasi-mystical artifact, a Chinese orchid, which within the fiction of the series was the cause of the 1485 outbreak. The episode ends with the artifact releasing the sickness, potentially infecting the entire world.

Sweating sickness is also featured in the British television series Merlin, though the illness historically did not show up until centuries after the events depicted in the show were supposed to have taken place.

But they don't appear to know what caused it - except that it came and went mysteriously.
Called the English Sweating Sickness - because started in England. They believe it may have been caused by the poor sanitary conditions of the time - sewage in the water, etc.

Further research uncovered the following information -

Here's what the Encyclopedia Brittanica states:

sweating sickness, also called English sweat, a disease of unknown cause that appeared in England as an epidemic on six occasions—in 1485, 1506, 1517, 1528, 1551, and 1578. It was confined to England, except in 1528–29, when it spread to the European continent, appearing in Hamburg and passing northward to Scandinavia and eastward to Lithuania, Poland, and Russia; the Netherlands also was involved, but the disease did not spread to France or Italy.

Ah, in 1997, two London researchers hypothesized that the Sweating Sickness is the same as the hatna virus that plague the Southwestern US in the late 1990s.

Medical historians have never known what caused the sweating sickness. That the disease was neither plague nor typhus was clear from contemporary accounts. Its victims bore neither the boils typical of plague nor the rash of typhus. Now physicians Vanya Gant and Guy Thwaites, both of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, think they may have identified the killer. Sudor Anglicus, they say, may have been an early version of a disease that has made headlines in recent years: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which erupted in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest in the summer of 1993.

The similarities between the two are striking, says Gant. First, there is hanta’s rapid course. Basically, you’ve got a headache in the morning, you’re short of breath in the afternoon, you take to your bed at teatime, and you’re on a respirator by midnight, he says. Second, sweating sickness left its victims breathless. Hanta also leaves people gasping, filling their lungs with fluid.

Perhaps most suggestive of a common identity for the two diseases is that each epidemic of sweating sickness appeared in the summer and often in rural areas, meaning that a rapidly breeding rodent may have been its primary host; hanta’s main refuge is the deer mouse.

And from...The Lumnarium Encyclopedia Project: England Under the Tudors - a more detailed description of the disease and its symptoms and probable causes:

( Read more... )

The Bridge - Review

Just finished watching the pilot for the new F/X series The Bridge, which like The Killing is based on a Swedish series of the same name, except this is...wickedly good. Best thing I've seen in a long while. Certainly the most suspenseful and compelling. And considering it's yet another gritty cop series investigating a serial killer (a trope I've grown incredibly weary of and despise) that is saying something. Best written one I've seen since the days of Prime Suspect and Homicide Life on the Streets.

Don't know if it will stay that way. But right now it's creepily good. The acting, writing and production is riveting. My only problem is it is about another gory serial killer.
But I'm over-looking that because I'm riveted by the characters.

The plot? ( vague spoilers for the pilot )

This is everything the AMC series The Killing should have been and wasn't. Check it out, on Wednesdays, F/X, at 10 PM. The pilot is reshowing at 12:30 am on Sunday on F/X.

In other news? I wonder about the reference library industry. Just the other day, heard from an old work colleague and friend - about EBSCO. And how bad it was. I've heard horror tales now about every single one of the library reference providers in the US. Worked for one, which is now out of business - H.W. Wilson. EBSCO who acquired it - basically gutted Wilson. Fired 5,000 employees, screwed over the employees they hired (30 in all), and resold Wilson's products to libraries at a higher rate. Reed Elseiver is just as nasty - my second cousin tells me horror tales. McGraw Hill ...oh dear, the tales a lawyer told me about them.
This is just sad. So glad I got out of that industry ten years ago. Was incredibly painful, but the smartest move I ever made.