Rhode Island - Page 12

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: North America; Published: 28 October 2023; Hits: 13637

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Providence, the capital of Rhode Island, is a pretty city that, like others in the New England region is both prosperous and and politically liberal. Generally 'nice'.

And one can get a Guinness in a pub.

Rhode Island is a small State, so Newport, world famous for sailing. is not far away as the crow flies, yet further by road.

There were some very nice residential areas along the way. And some very patriotic ones, judging by all the flags; and the red-white-and-blue centre-line.

The weather was variable that day.

The following day was spent driving down the coast to New York, mostly in Connecticut.

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Travel

Burma (Myanmar)

This is a fascinating country in all sorts of ways and seems to be most popular with European and Japanese tourists, some Australians of course, but they are everywhere.

Since childhood Burma has been a romantic and exotic place for me. It was impossible to grow up in the Australia of the 1950’s and not be familiar with that great Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson’s rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 'On the Road to Mandalay' recorded two decades or so earlier:

Come you back to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
Can't you hear their paddles chunking
From Rangoon to Mandalay

On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the Dawn comes up like thunder
out of China 'cross the bay

The song went Worldwide in 1958 when Frank Sinatra covered it with a jazz orchestration, and ‘a Burma girl’ got changed to ‘a Burma broad’; ‘a man’ to ‘a cat’; and ‘temple bells’ to ‘crazy bells’.

Fiction, Recollections & News

Getting about

This article contains a series of recollections from my childhood growing up in Thornleigh; on the outskirts of Sydney Australia in the 1950s. My parents emigrated to Australia in 1948 when I was not quite three years old and my brother was a babe in arms.

Opinions and Philosophy

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.

Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.

It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.

In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).

Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution.

So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.

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