in which i earn my honorary doctorate from the showtime network

Enough terrified Internet hypochondria, since I've come down with something resembling the flu and am awaiting the sure-to-be-not-awesome results of some tests I had done on Wednesday, has convinced me that I have the bubonic plague. I don't exactly know how my investigation led me there; at first I was just googling symptoms and key words, and the next thing you know I was reading about how I was going to develop bubons, which would burst and spew forth their toxic pus all over my writhing corpse.

And a happy Columbus Day to you and yours!

Today on The Tudors a bunch of people --- let's go with several tens of thousands --- died of the sweating sickness. The sweating sickness was a mysterious, probably viral epidemic that swept across Europe in the late 15th century, and then again in the early to mid-16th century, when the show and its events are set. To this day nobody knows exactly what it was, what its causes were, or what the correlation between its appearances and disappearances was --- except that, interestingly, one of its initial presenting symptoms was fear. During one of the episodes, people are continually exhorting themselves to fucking calm down because they don't have the sweating sickness they're just freaking out. Henry VIII (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and his buttocks) looks into a window at night and sees himself turn into a gremlin. He dreams that he folds back the skin of a roasted salmon to find it's covered in maggots. He dreams he sleeps peacefully at night next to the corpse of his would-be bride, Anne Boleyn (and her corpse buttocks). (There are so many buttocks in this show, I can't even begin to describe.) Together with some of these Tudors, I took a few deep breaths. I mean, it's probably not the bubonic plague. It's probably just syphilis.