Disease Week: Nosocomial

So over the past six days you've experienced a wide variety of infectious diseases -- smallpox, the plague, typhus, tuberculous, leprosy, and avian flu. Not much left to catch, is there? That's the basic set-up for today's story, Nosocomial, where one man tries to toughen himself up against diseases, to disastrous consequence.

Next week is hell week -- and we don't mean demon week, or regrettably unpleasant circumstances week, or Satanist week, or anything that does not actually involve pits of lava and Brueghelian Boschesque drawings of people in agony.

And Sean should be returning, with his light-blue postings next week. He's home from vacation and over the next week or so you'll start hearing his voice here, not just his words. Not that it sounds too radically different from mine, since we're twins....

Disease Week: Classic Beauty

As we've hopefully made quite clear these last three weeks, each group of seven stories per week is grouped into a different theme. The seven stories in question are all independent stories, but keep the same theme. (As in vampire week, a lot of times the internal consistency is different from story to story, depending upon its needs. So be it.)

So far we've done vampires, ghosts, and now diseases. I can tell you next week is hell week, which immediately brings to mind cramming for finals rather than blazing pits of boiling urine. But the hell week we'll be doing is all about the double-hockey-sticks place, not a dorm.

Although, looking ahead the next couple of weeks, we could probably put together a school week. And a separate college week. And possibly a separate Greek week -- so many rituals, so much beer, the disaster and accidental demon summoning stories write themselves!

Other weeks we've spitballed around: western week, shark week, sea monster week, four horsemen MONTH (consisting of a week each for war, famine, pestilence, and death), witchcraft week, aliens week, BC week, Halloween week, and of course, potent potables week. (Sean actually listed that: between the two of us there are seven stories involving grisly accidents involving alcohol. Our last name being Ryan, many may not be so fictional.)

What all-consuming theme do you want to see coming up? Let us know at dailyscares@gmail.com. And try to guess what disease will pop up in today's scare, Classic Beauty by Sean. Hint: read the first sentence of this paragraph again for a sly teaser.

Disease Week: Passenger Pigeons, Dodos, and Great Auks

My favorite movie right now is tentatively called Cloverfield. The trailer is the best psych-out of the year. My favorite book is Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. My favorite video game is Halo 3, and my favorite album is the new Foo Fighters.

None of these are actually out. All there is for them to experience is hype. Hype in the form of advance reviews, sneak peeks, bits and pieces leaked out (but not spoiled – spoiled would be leaking the ending, or all the album), people talking to each other in anticipatory tones about how great a day it will be when the curtain is raised on their new piece of entertainment.

There’s an inevitable disappointment with a hyped product. Even if it’s as good as it can be, was it worth all the time you spent thinking about it in advance? Probably not. But, me and you and everyone we know thinks, maybe the next one will. Hence the sea of tentpole threequel movies, hence book series with yearly installments, hence rumors of how great and revolutionary a new game will be before the developers even crack open their SDKs.

This ain’t bad, it’s just different. There’s an art to anticipating something great, which is why restaurant don’t slam down plates two minutes after you order it. Reading a book isn’t the same as reading a book you’ve really wanted to read. It’s a form of our creativity and curiosity that has been lashed to product marketing, btu even in that form it can be wondrous.

I tried a number of accents for today’s story, Passenger Pigeons, Dodos, and Great Auks, but none of them worked. So I stripped down as much affect I could from my voice, to sound like a Chuck Palahniuk character describing a car accident. The big happenings hopefully get sold better with the Joe-Friday-on-thorazine delivery.

Disease Week: Typhoid Annie

When historians look back on our era, they may reach for the release of Deathly Hallows as the moment when the spoiler craze ended. Certain people always have -- and always will -- pull a Homer and loudly proclaim that Vader is Luke's father to the line of ticket-holders going into the theater. But the coolness of doing so -- the insidery nature of it -- has hit its high water mark. Or at least I hope it has.

It's all because of the blessed series of tubes that streams information from the wires at my computer to yours, and vice versa, and soon to the wires in our heads. The Internet is a democratizer: anyone can get to any site with equal ease. Anyone who sees a production copy of a script or has a friend who watched reel 9 of Stardust can now inform the masses. This was great! we thought, for a time.

That time may be passing, and if we make a concerted effort it will pass. Advance info on entertainment will always be out there, but it won't have the paramount value it has now. I mean, it's not a right world if you see The Simpsons Movie a week early and someone offers you below-the-fold to comment on it.

The spoilers in today's story, Typhoid Annie by Sean, exist in the title and your grasp of history. The name suggests Typhoid Mary, so go read about her, and obviously (since we play fair: if a disease in in the title of a disease-week story that'll be the disease) it's about typhus. More than that I say not, other than Sean sees the story one way, which is horrific and what he intended. I see it another way, which is much worse. Email us at dailyscares@gmail.com and find out the alternate take. (We'd post it here, but holy smokes would that be hypocritical after the above diatribe.)

Disease Week: Abracadaver

I’ve listened to audio books for about a decade now. It still seems like a loophole I found just a few weeks ago, some clandestine conspiracy. Psst, buddy. I found a way to read without a book. You can be driving or walking or doing the dishes and reading. You can be blind and have you hands cut off and still be reading. And all you need is a $10 walkman.

I didn’t know who audiobooks were for: I hadn’t considered them much at all. I thought and still think it’s a bit of a cheat to listen to a 2-hour abridgement and say you’ve read Pride and Prejudice, but these cheap cassingle pamphlets have been chased out of most respectable libraries.

But I’m fully hooked now. I love listening. I love having a completely different set of requirements for listening to or reading a book. (I won’t read any novelistic nonfiction book when it’s available for a listen, and I won’t listen to any thriller good enough to have me stay up reading.)

That decade of aural experience I thought would translate to the oral level more than it has. But for reading out loud, I’ve relied much more on the improv work I did in college. Developing voices that match a character, suggesting accents rather than Jim Dale-ing them, trying to put some life into the stuff between the lines, knowing what I can’t do and working around it.

That being said, I tried to have a quiet carnival barker sound for Abracadaver. That's a contradiction in terms, possibly.

Disease Week: Flea Circus

I knew some people who were passionately into Ren Faires. I've been to a couple, wandering through in jeans and a T-shirt, smiling politely at the people that have sunken months of paychecks into velvet dresses, medieval weaponry, and Stormtrooper costumes. Show me a Ren Faire that does not have some guy in full Stormtrooper garb walking around. If I had any sort of garb, I'd wear it, but I don't, so I don't. (I was as surprised as anyone to go to my first one and realize I DIDN'T have something that fits from the 15th century in my closet.)


The Ren Faire rules get stretched around. Some people are adamant about not having a Human Chessboard, because chess wasn't introduced to Europe from India until some time after their official period. Human chessboards are a lot of fun, but authenticity is paramount above all. This firmness of temporal temperance often comes from the same people walking around in Stormtrooper uniforms.


Today's story (and one of my all-time favorite Daily Scares, let me tell you) is Flea Circus. Both Jeff and I have ideas bubbling out of our heads like clogged toilets. Some of them would fit as longer stories, but can work in this shortened format. Others (more rare) are fully explained in 30 words, and need fleshing out so you don't think the podcast skipped half the download. Others just fit perfectly in 300 words or less. This one fits like a glove. A chainmail glove, as it were.

Disease Week: A Pox on You

Diseases: we can't live with them, we'd live forever without them. They are often real-life monsters, small instead of large, killign not but stalking and slashing but by devouring your body from within, turning your defenses in knots so completely by the time you know you're sick, it's too late.

They're too miniscule to see, so small that they were considered science fiction for generations of respectable science. They come in many types: behavioral, psychological, chemical, genetic. Those have a tragedy to them, but the potential for dramatic tension is not always charged.

Communicable diseases, though--now we're talking. Now thoughts about being stuck on a Cessna with someone bleeding out with the telltale vomito negro of Ebola disease emerge. Now every cough is a gunshot, every doorknob a landmine, every itch a tick passing on its saliva.

Each entry this week will feature a different infectious disease. (Collect all seven!) The title of our first entry, A Pox on You, should make it a bit clearer which disease today's is. Plain old varicella, aka chicken pox. Or...maybe not.