Contagion

“Blogging is not writing–it’s graffiti with punctuation.”

And in my case, bad punctuation at that.

So, about last night. The good news is that my wifi proved fast enough to watch shows available on Amazon Prime. And I was primed to watch Burn Notice. Alas, when I clicked on Season 1 I got a different kind of burn notice–“this program is not available for free viewing in your country”. Well, shit. I was further advised I was welcome to watch the first episode for $4.99 or the entire first season for $24.99. No thank you! So then I scrolled through the shows that are purportedly free here in the PI and they were mostly Amazon Prime original series. I just wasn’t feeling anything listed, so I went down to the movie category and grudgingly paid $3.99 to be entertained.

I settled on a film from 2011 called Contagion. Given the current circumstances that have me sitting in front of the TV instead of on a barstool, it seemed like a timely choice.


The plot concerns the spread of a virus transmitted by respiratory droplets and fomites, attempts by medical researchers and public health officials to identify and contain the disease, the loss of social order in a pandemic,[2] and the introduction of a vaccine to halt its spread.

I’m not going to write a review, that’s the Big Hominid’s job (and yeah, I just did a quick search over there and apparently Contagion didn’t warrant his attention back then). I found the movie mostly entertaining and it was chilling watching the parts where the virus was being spread around the world. I thought some of the violent responses to the quarantine rules, including looting and robbery, were a bit over the top. And of course, the portrayal of the WHO and CDC as competent organizations was unbelievable in light of our current real-world situation. I got a good laugh when an “independent journalist” attempted to interview one of the CDC experts. The quote I used at the beginning of this post was the CDC official’s response to the would-be interviewer’s claims to be a writer. I actually had to rewind the movie so I could see that part again and get the quote right.

Anyway, no spoilers other than this: The virus originated from a bat in China. Who says life doesn’t imitate art?

WHO knows what danger lurks?

Back here in the real world, I woke up to this:

So, my province is in the “may change by April 30” category. Whatever in the hell that means. I guess the best that can be hoped for is that Zambales will be lowered to “General Community Quarantine” level. Again, I’m not sure how much difference that will make (i.e. I don’t really expect the bars and restaurants will reopen) but we shall see.

I’m on the cusp of the total lockdown weekend, but hopefully, I have plentiful supplies of necessities like beer. Oh, and food too. In that regard, I incorporated some shopping on my morning walk.

I hit up Bretto’s, the meat market I missed yesterday. They did, in fact, have beef but they were selling it at inflated prices. I didn’t like that, but I bought it anyway. The steaks, beef roast, pork roast, potatoes, and BBQ sauce pictured above came to a whopping 2700 pesos–almost fifty bucks! I got the sausages and buns down the street at Angel’s bakery.
At least the boys seemed to enjoy the overpriced treats I brought home from the vet’s office yesterday.

The “interesting” photo from my morning stroll was this roadside graffiti:

You talkin’ to me?

Later on today I’m going to go visit my friend on his rooftop to partake in some pre-curfew/lockdown beers. And in case any of my readers may be concerned that I’m developing a drinking problem–I took a test to find out:

I’m pretty sure I passed!

That’s about it for now. I do find the hypocrisy of the left a good source of amusement. I’m loving the whole “me too” dilemma with Biden. And I smiled when I saw this today:

Whatever Trump does, we want the opposite!

And life goes on.

6 thoughts on “Contagion

  1. I’ll be stealing that final image. Thanks in advance.

    Yeah, I never saw “Contagion.” I’m so behind on most movies, and there are just too many movies in existence for me ever to hope to catch up on all of them.

    The geographic restrictions on Amazon Prime Video don’t apply if you purchase your videos, so if you’re willing to shell out for “Burn Notice: The Complete Series,” then you’re set. But if you’re gonna be a stingy Scotsman, then I guess that means no “Burn Notice” for you. (Or you could try to snag videos through a VPN. My ancient VPN sucks; Amazon picks up on the fact that I’m using one.)

    You got off easy, paying less than $50 for all that meat. Got off easy by Korean standards, I mean. I’m no longer in touch with meat prices in the States. Anyway, that looks like a decent haul. You’ve got enough protein to last you a while.

    Good luck as you hang tough until the end of the month. May your silly, misguided lockdown end soon.

  2. You got me interested in Burn Notice. Never heard of it. Looks great. Also found I had to pay for it. Oh well. Since I don’t sleep well I enjoyed Kiss the Girls again. Morgan Freeman one of my favorates.

  3. There’s a line between stingy and stupid, paying 25 bucks per season crosses that line for me. I’m not sure how a VPN would work on the Smart TV. I can barely navigate getting to the movies. I have a VPN on my laptop, I’ll see if I can score Burn Notice that way.’

    Yeah, that was probably 25% more than I usually pay for my meat at Brettos, but still a pretty good deal actually.

    I’m so far behind on movies I’ve never even heard of most of them, including Contagion. The current situation is what led me to watch it. Apparently lots of others too. I saw on Wikipedia that it has been one of the most-watched movies on Netflix since January. And as I said in my post, eerily prescient.

  4. If you’ve got Apple iTunes, you can buy “Burn Notice: The Complete Series” (hi-def quality) for $70. The series ran for seven seasons, with a different number of episodes per season. If you do the math one way, $70 for 7 seasons means only $10 per season. If you do a per-episode calculation, then $70 for 111 episodes comes out to 63 cents per episode, which is not bad at all. $25 per season, by contrast, means you’re paying around $2 per episode, which is quite a difference. I’d buy the complete series. I don’t know whether that package is available on Amazon Prime Video, though; Prime seems to offer only season-sized chunks, which is too bad. Go for iTunes if you can.

    Or not. If shelling out $70 for video entertainment isn’t your thing, that’s understandable. Simply going out for a walk can be a hell of a lot more entertaining than any TV show.

    I just finished Season 4 and will start watching Season 5 later tonight. Some of these are episodes I remember watching, but a lot of this has been new to me. I guess I must not have been a consistent watcher of the series back when it was on TV. I have to say that the quality of the writing, thus far, has been consistently good. Of course, it’s easy to maintain consistently good quality when each episode follows roughly the same formula. (Then again, the writers did break away from that formula in the final three episodes of Season 4.)

  5. What really irks me is to be paying a monthly fee for Amazon Prime and then to discover that most of their content is not available (without additional charges) in my country. So yeah, I need to find a better option it looks like. For now, I’ll probably just do Burn Notice on my computer with the VPN.

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