Sunday, January 27, 2008

"Summer Colds are the Worst!"

Like some other people in the class, I now get very excited when I hear references to viruses in pop culture. So the other day, I was pretty excited when I heard a GREAT viral reference in a movie. I was watching the movie Chinatown with Jack Nicholson, where he plays a private investigator. In one scene, he is questioning a very suspicious character. Jack asks the bad guy what he was doing the night of the murder of so-and-so, and the man answers, "I had a cold." And Jack answers (very menacingly), "Those summer colds are the worst." (And we know why -- because they're caused by enteroviruses and not rhinoviruses, like the milder, winter colds are!) No one else understood why I was so excited about this, but I thought this class would be able to appreciate.

-Claire

1 comment:

Tui Snider said...

Hi Claire,

I was just cruising around the web trying to find a clip of Nicholson uttering that classic phrase.

Instead, I found your blog and have now learned that there is a reason that summer colds are the worst!

But now I wonder: what is it about summer that encourages the proliferation of enteroviruses?

Thanks again for a very interesting blog post!

Ciao from Naples, Italy!
~Tui