Velociworld

THE CDC AND YERKES

My earlier post reminded me of my post-grad days at Emory. The Bride and our friends used to eat lunch at the cafeteria at the Centers For Disease Control. Why? They had a good chicken salad, and since The Bride was a radiologist at the dental school next door it was convenient. Plus, it was pretty shaky having lunch in a place where you knew they had Legionnaire's Disease, smallpox, polio, several bizarre strains of venereal disease, cholera, scabies, the 1918 La Grippe, Bubonic Plague, and diphtheria mutating under little petri dishes. Of course, if I had known at the time they were trying to identify a strange virus that was decimating the gay community but couldn't get a handle on I probably would have eaten at Jaggers Pizza.

After lunch we would go to the Yerkes Primate Center because a good friend had a part-time job feeding the monkeys. That place was straight up research, but they had a few rooms NOBODY went into without a National Security Agency pass. Strange shit going on there. They had an amazing number of species of primates there, though. Chimps, gorillas, orangs, bonomos, capuchins, macaques, Gibraltars, you name it. They Had Apes.

They all acted like Democrats. Shit in your own space, pick it up, and throw it at someone else.