Just under a century ago, following the carnage of WWI, an influenza pandemic swept over much of the planet, killing over 50 million people — more than three times the number killed in the war itself. Soldiers and others moving around globally were a crucial factor in the spread of the flu virus, even though transportation was nowhere near as efficient and far-reaching as it is today.
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
Writers and filmmakers have long liked apocalyptic stories. In the last century the dominant cause of the end of humanity became a nuclear holocaust, but a giant asteroid hitting Earth has also been popular. And then there are those pesky zombies. That's science fiction — so far — but out in the real world, it might well be that the most likely cause of our specie's demise will be a microscopic bug we cannot defeat, and that we vanish, or vastly diminish, not with a bang but a whimper.
It was way over 100°F up in Southern Humboldt. Too hot for most any reasonable human, let alone a furry black dog, so we soaked in the Eel River all we could and contemplated heading…
California Governor Jerry Brown recently moved to restrict the use of some chemicals used as flame retardants, due to their impacts on human health. The ensuing scenario is a now-familiar one — attacks on the…
Chatting with Sierra Nevada World Music Festival honcho Warren Smith sidestage as the weekend was winding down Sunday evening, he agreed that putting on such an extensive roster of musical talent gets increasingly difficult as…
Without music, life would be an error. — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Music (and other) geeks tend to make “best of” lists, sometimes every year. A few years back, I was asked by a now-defunct publication…
Meet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who rarely if ever has mentioned cannabis, Haile Selassie, or Rastafarianism, and who will appear at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Boonville this month.