Daily Archives: December 8, 2020

Mr Burns is probably The Simpsons biggest villain, having trodden on the town more times than Barney has belched or Disco Stu has burst into dance. He has used his riches to try and get his way on countless occasions, including blocking out the sun, enticing Bart to become his heir and killing animals just so he can wear their fur. So how much is the apple of Mr Smithers' eye really worth?

There are numerous explanations as to how Mr Burns came to be so rich.

The first one goes back to his childhood where he was the second youngest of 12 children to poor but joyful parents.

Due to his cheerful nature as a child, Montgomery Burns was called "Happy" by his loved ones.

However, everything changed when he left his family to live with a heartless billionaire who turned out to be his grandfather and former slaveholder Colonel Wainwright Montgomery Burns.

So when his grandfather died, Burns inherited all of his money and became the cruel tycoon he is today.

READ MORE:The Simpsons: What happened to The Simpsons' pet cat Snowball?

Another theory to explain his wealth is Mr Burns is a shrewd businessman who has owned several companies over the years.

This includes the Germ Warfare Laboratory, Springfield Convert Hall and the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant where Homer works.

In a small town like Springfield, Mr Burns does have the monopoly on some of its biggest and most thriving businesses so it does make sense why he is so rich.

A funnier and more absurd explanation for Mr Burns' riches is that he owns the rights to festive song White Christmas.

He gained the rights after he failed to buy Pablo Picassos Guernica but White Christmas ended up making him billions in the end with money undoubtedly still seeping into his pockets as a result.

In 2006, business magazine Forbes listed the world's richest fictional characters.

Mr Burns came in at number two with a whopping net worth of $17billion (12,752,890).

He was pipped to the post by Daddy Warbucks from the classic musical Annie who is worth around $36.2billion (27,156,154).

This has massively decreased over the years though as Mr Burns lost a lot of his fortune.

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From losing money through a market crash, to wild and unnecessary spendings, Mr Burns hasn't been the most economical.

So in 2010, Forbes revealed the wealthy Springfield resident's net worth had gone down to around $1.3billion (975,221,000).

This still makes him by far the richest person in town but Mr Burns is nowhere near as well off as he once was.

Like the majority of the cast, Mr Burns is back for the new season of The Simpsons.

The Simpsons has started airing its 32nd season on Fox in America.

UK fans sadly won't be treated to this new series until next year on Sky One.

But so far, no release date has been announced so UK viewers may have to wait some time until the comedy crosses the pond once more.

The Simpsons is available to watch on All4, Disney+ and Sky One.

Read more:

Mr Burns net worth: How much is The Simpsons' Mr Burns worth? - Daily Express

In October 2018, Davide Tanasi was off the coast of Italy, pulling teeth. His dental patients were 34 Sicilians who had been dead for the better part of 2,000 years. These Roman Christians were buried in the catacombs of St. Lucia in Syracuse, an underground city of some 8,000 dead stretched across an area about the size of the White House. Concealed among their no-longer-so-pearly whites was Bartonella quintana, a bacteria that causes a disease called trench fever, and which arrived in Roman mouths via the guts of lice.

The bacteriaits name a reference to the recurring, five-day fevers it is known to causehad likely sped some of its hosts to their graves. Tanasis subjects were just a few of the infected chronicled in a recent paper tracing the history of trench fever, published in the open-access journal PLOS One.

The vernacular name (trench fever) was coined for the diseases prevalence around the unsanitary battlegrounds of World War I. In the trenches, lice and rats capitalized on a dense concentration of humanity, and soldiers constantly got infections. The ankle-deep exposure to muck didnt help, and thoughts of a shower may as well have been fever dreams. Trench fever had a reprisal in World War II, as well, but the Sicilian cemetery precedes those conflicts by 15 centuries. World War I was the perfect storm for a major outbreak of trench fever, but the bacteria was always very much prevalent, says Tanasi, an archaeologist at the University of South Florida and a co-author of the paper.

Tanasis team was looking at 13 civilian and military sites from the last 5,000 years to study the prevalence of trench fever in different populations in France, Italy, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Russia, and see how the bacteria that causes the infection may have changed over time. The researchers didnt notice much difference in prevalence among civilians versus military groups, despite its association with warfare. The fact that the bacteria showed up on the teeth of those 34 civilian Roman Christians buried in the catacombs suggests that their living conditions were squalid, Tanasi says. When a louse starts feeding on an infected host, the bacteria proliferates in the parasites intestine. Then, when the louse moves on to a new host, it poops the virus into its host through the skin. The bacteria easily moves through the bloodstream of the infected, which is how the Romans ended up with telltale bacteria in their teeth.

Trench fever wasnt officially identified until after germ theory developed in the late 19th century, according to Carol Byerly, a historian of U.S. Army medicine who was unaffiliated with the recent paper. Besides the hallmark fever, symptoms include headaches, abdominal and shin pain, dizziness, and more.

Trench fever had been around, it was in the environment, but it was just one in a whole suite of fevers and diseases that people couldnt identify very well, Byerly says. No one wanted it, but people werent terrified of it.

Among the near-800 American soldiers in World War I who were confirmed to have the fever, two died, according to a U.S. Army medical department report. Of greater concern to troops were the other illnesses plaguing the Great Wars battlefields, including typhus, dysentery, and the flu pandemic of 1918. Trench fever has hardly gone the way of the dodo: the last outbreak in the United States was in Denver this July. Its one of several old-school bacterial infections that crop up now and again: Elsewhere in Colorado this July, a squirrel tested positive for bubonic plague.

Once the connection with unsanitary conditions and trench fever was clear, militaries made efforts to clean up their acts. The United States Army began routine delousings for their troops, Byerly says, which likely helped keep the American caseload at a fraction of that of their European counterparts, whose cases topped half a million.

The thread from the Sicilian catacombs to the wartorn fields of Europe is simple: Cleanliness is key. You put two million men in trenches and dont let them do the laundry, Byerly says. Thats how epidemics happen.

Read the original post:

Found: Cases of Trench Fever in Ancient Rome - Atlas Obscura

In the best scene of any California pandemic-era entertainment to date, a middle-aged man named Roy (played by J.K. Simmons) sits in his Irvine backyard and advises Nyles (Andy Samberg) on coping with an unthinkable apocalyptic reality.

I mean, it doesnt get any better than that, Roy says, surveying his suburban idyll in Orange Countys great master-planned community. Youve gotta find your Irvine.

Nyles, who is in existential despair, is dubious. I dont have an Irvine.

We all have an Irvine, Roy says.

The apocalypse, for Roy and Nylescharacters in the genre-bending sci-fi comedy film Palm Springs -- is the result of wandering into the wrong cave in the Coachella Valley, after which they find themselves stuck re-living the same day over and over again. Roy, who bitterly blames Nyles for their Groundhog Day predicament, at first spends this endless time loop traveling from Irvine to the desert, where he tortures and kills Nyles, over and over again.

But late in the film, Nyles for the first time goes to Irvine, where he finds Roy unexpectedly content. Roy explains that he has overcome his homicidal impulses and learned to accept his strange existence. His peace of mind comes from embracing the chance to re-live the same day with his wife and twin children.

Do we all have that place, our own Irvine? And if so, how can we access it?

Those might be the great questions of this moment. What does it take to find some space and contentment as the world collapses around us? How does one find solace as basic social structures melt down?

Its hard to be optimistic. After all, few of us could afford the real Irvine -- where the median home price is north of $900,000, and the average monthly rent is approaching $2,500 -- even before COVID scrambled our lives, jobs, and schools. For Californians, the struggle to hold on to whatever meager piece of this state we currently have is an exhausting one.

Indeed, the version of the human predicament that Palm Springs offers usstuck in a never-ending day of anxiety, phony love, violence, and bad weddingsis frightening, but nowhere near as scary as Californias future prospects.

Earlier this fall, the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, constructed four future scenarios based on workshops and extensive study. The visions are pretty dark.

Do we all have that place, our own Irvine? And if so, how can we access it? Those might be the great questions of this moment. What does it take find some space and contentment as the world collapses aroundus?

The map and documents produced by the institute describe California, and American society more broadly, as stuck in its own endless loop. Our public spaces have been privatized and commercialized, undermining the civic sphere. Our educational institutions may produce some skilled workers, but not well-informed citizens. Our culture has been consumed by celebrity and polarized. The health system is wasteful, expensive, ineffective, and unequal. Skepticism has been weaponized against science. And our political system is devolving into authoritarianism.

The pandemic has exposed these failures, and deepened them, laying bare the underlying fragility of our institutions. Our economic losses have erased the last decades growth, and our job losses are likely to be worse than other states. Inequality is growing under COVID and our social fabric and supply chains are breaking. Californias ability to recover is deeply dependent on a robust and thoughtful pandemic response from our politically divided national government.

Even the more optimistic of the Institute for the Futures four scenarios are dark.

The Growth: Saving Capitalists scenario shows fiscal stimulus restoring much of the economy, but without badly needed structural change. Employment would be slow to recover, in part because companies would turn to job automation rather than re-hiring workers. Educational and income divides would grow, and the benefits of the recovery would predominantly go to rich people and politically powerful sectors, like the tech companies and airlines. Low-wage workers would be shadowed by greater debt, mental illness, and unstable employment.

A Constraint: Germ Pods scenario envisions the reorganization of society around data systems and algorithms that entrench existing wealth and racial inequalities and introduce new inequalities. This would be a segregated health dystopia. Under the guise of protecting people from disease and new pandemics, society would segment into geographic and digital clusters, or germ pods, separating those with access to testing and treatment from those without. The resulting discriminationwith separate schools, jobs, and public facilities based on your health statuswould be justified on the basis of protecting public health and safety.

That sounds like paradise compared to the darkest scenario, Collapse: Ungoverning, in which military-style confrontation becomes routine in our streets. COVID-19 triggers more systemic collapses across the country, and the battle lines are drawn: Red Hats against Blue Masks, militant police against unprecedented numbers of protestors, armed vigilantes against all calls for unity and a new order. Mass deaths becomes acceptable, and with Red Hats dominating government, every city sees blue geurrilla warfare. Police and military organizations divide and fight each other.

rBy 2030, the union is mortally fractured along political lines: cities, states, and regions are governed not by a single sovereign nation, but by a thicket of tenuous inter-jurisdictional agreements and looming violence, the scenario map document reads.

The only ray of light comes from the Transformation: Social Solidarity scenario, and it feels improbable. Under this scenario, systemic breakdowns during the pandemic inspire a renewed public commitment to broad social agendas, and to greater collective well-being. The mutual aid arrangements of today evolve into new income and health supports, and society begins to transform and redesign its broken systems. Public education is reinvented around experiential learning, while new digital governance structures, including data unions, protect privacy and marshal digital power for civic purposes.

By 2030, a Global New Deal has emerged around universal basic assets -- every humans right to the core resources that are essential to well-being.

All four scenarios suggest that the future will turn on how we address our broken systems and faltering institutions. And the Institute for the Future argues for replacement over repair of systems.

Whether we simply shore them up as best we can or make major structural changes, will largely determine whether we see a decade of renewed growth or collapse, a reckoning with long-term limits to growth, or a deep shift in both economy and culture, reads the Institutes map of the scenarios.

The next decade, the map adds, will call on us to find our way through the multiple collapsing systems. And as these systems fail, they also open pathways to something newto truly bold visions of transformation that reinvent the way we work as a society, as an economy, and as friends and neighbors.

California does have success in creating master planned communities, like Irvine. Now we need a plan for recreating essential social systems. In other words, our Irvine isnt just sitting out there waiting for us to find it. Instead, well have to imagine and build new Irvines for ourselves.

(Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zcalo Public Square.) Photo: Courtesy of Hulu. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

Continued here:

We All Have an Irvine - City Watch