Celebrity Mice Threaten to Sue after Release from Hantavirus Cruise Ship Quarantine
Things We Won't Do and Places We Won't Go for Summer Vacation - Music for "The Solitude Étude"
Every lawyer fears the late Friday afternoon telephone call.
It’s usually your opposing counsel who is about to serve a “motion to shorten time” (which translates into an aggressive, unprofessional tactic to make you work over the weekend).
Or it’s an unsolicited prospective client who got your name off the Web and who needs a “good lawyer” to do something slightly shady right away.
Or it’s a call from a vendor of some whiz-bang A.I. product that promises to let you ‘practice law’ for the rest of your career cruising on a yacht and sipping umbrella drinks in the South Pacific while a Web-skimming LLM robot “interviews” your clients, takes and hallucinates deposition testimony, researches and writes random legal motions, makes up nonexistent case law to support its pleadings, argues bizarre and unsubstantiated motions in Court, brushes off Bar Association ethics investigations, and generally ruins (ahem) runs your office ‘intelligently’ while on autopilot.
This one particular phone call rang at 4:51 PM Friday afternoon. The telephone caller I.D. simply read “MOUSE” from Anaheim, California. I looked at the phone like it was the snake offering me an apple in the Garden of Eden.
The advantage of email or text messages is that you can safely ignore them, at least for a while. A ringing phone, however, is more persistent and more annoying, kind of like a mosquito whizzing around your ear. It’s hard to ignore the buzzing.
Brrrinngg!
Brrrinngg Brrrinngg !
Brrrinngg Brrrinngg Brrrinngg!
Yielding to Fate, I picked up the handset.
“Hello?“
No, it was not a snake calling me, but there was a soft, squeaky voice on the line. Actually, two soft, squeaky voices!
“HELLO? HELLO? Squeak. Squeak. Are you a good lawyer? We need to hire a really, really sharp lawyer right away! Right away!!! Hello? Hello? Squeak. Squeak.”
I heard alarm bells in my mind. Yellow caution flags borne of more than 45 years of law practice started to flutter.
“Who is calling?“ I cautiously asked my client wannabes. “And how did you get my name and number?“
“This is Milton and Rita Mouse,“ they answered in unison. “Squeak! We’ve been calling around ALL DAY trying to find an attorney! Squeak! We’ve called nearly every lawyer on the West Coast.” [Hmm. They mentioned another lawyer who I once had defeated in Court and who has carried a grudge against me ever since... ] “This other lawyer said he knows you! He gave us your name and number and he said to call YOU!! We urgently need you to help us right away!
My internal yellow caution flags turned crimson red and flapped like in a Florida hurricane! How’s that? Every other lawyer from California to Alaska has turned them down and they were referred to me by someone who hates me? All I could think about now was how to avoid getting caught in whatever mousetrap this pair of insistent rodentia wanted me to step into.
“Uhh, what’s the problem, anyway, uhh...Mr. and Mrs. Mickey Mouse, you say?” I asked while playing solitaire on my computer.
“NO!“ they squeaked in unison. “Mickey and Minnie are no more than fifth cousins distantly related to the Norwegian Brown Rat side of Rita’s great-great-grand nephew, Topolino! Mickey and Minnie are also kind of squirrelly, you know? That’s the Mickey Rat side of the family! We won’t have anything to do with those cheesy squealers!” exclaimed Milton and Rita Mouse. “And besides,” squeaked Rita Mouse, “Great Uncle Mickey and Great Aunt Minnie weren’t even there when all of this happened!” I could hear Rita Mouse sobbing and sniffling on the phone. [A drama queen mouse! Yet another red flag, I thought.]
I dreaded to ask what “all of this“ was and “where“ it was when “it“ all happened. But, feeling like I was walking headfirst into a mousetrap, ask I did. “Uh... may I call you Milton and Rita... him/his/she/her/they... or something else?... Uhh, what exactly are you talking about and why do you need a ‘really good lawyer’ right away?”
“We were passengers on the MV Hondius, the cruise ship you heard about where people started dying from Hantavirus!” Milton and Rita squeaked in tandem.
“We took this trip to avoid all the noisy rug-rats scurrying around all over the bigger cruise ships that look like amusement parks on the water! But when people started falling sick on our exclusive cruise, the ship’s doctor and officers searched for a scape-mouse, the so-called ‘virus vector!’ So they quickly found US - two innocent, retired old mice - in our stateroom on the cruise ship’s poop deck.
“They immediately started to inspect us... and our poop... and they confiscated everything we had brought on board: our Hawaiian leis; our cell phones; our cheese snacks; Rita’s grass skirts from Polynesia; our souvenirs from Argentina; our bathing suits and snorkels; Milton’s whisker wax; our vaccination records; our sunglasses; our Mouse Ear hats; Milton’s bottles of Warfarin that he takes for his heart condition; and Rita’s portable exercise wheel; and... and... and there was NO END to the poking and probing and HUMILIATION they put us to! And then... to add insult to injury... they locked us in our stateroom and slapped a yellow quarantine sign on the door! They yanked our tails and took blood samples and checked us for fleas. Then we were caged for WEEKS like a... like a.... Yes, just like a couple of disgusting laboratory rats!“ Milton and Rita Mouse whimpered and squealed.
“Hmm hmm,” I said sympathetically as I dealt another round of computer solitaire. “So, uhh, what exactly do you want me to do?”
“WE WANT YOU TO BRING A LAWSUIT!“ The mousy pair exclaimed. “For false imprisonment! For libel and slander! For breach of contract for ruining our vacation! For alienation of affection. For tortious interference with a vacation! For defamation of character and libel of real estate title! For trespass, replevin, and trover and detinue! For malicious prosecution and conversion and invasion of privacy! For intentional as well as negligent infliction of emotional distress (so we can trigger their insurance coverage, of course)! For the tort of outrage! For restitutio ad integrum! For violation of the Jones Act! For violation of our First Amendment Right of Free Squeaks! For intentional and negligent misrepresentation! For violation of our copyrights and trademarks! For veterinary malpractice! For battery, both lead-acid and lithium! For Assault and for Apepper. For quintuple damages under the Consumer Rodent Act! For wage theft! We want you to bring a Qui Tam whistle blower lawsuit! And we want you to sue for nie hix hapset whosit and lèse-majesté and any other old Latin phrase we can come up with...! WE DEMAND JUSTICE... and also several tens of millions of dollars in damages, of course!“
This was clearly a case of first impression and outside my area of practice, I told Mr. and Mrs. Mouse. Besides, I thought to myself, I was beginning to smell a rat. Or two.
I used my tried and true avoidance technique. “You know, Milton and Rita, I work on an hourly rate for interesting cases like this. I normally charge, oh, maybe $1,500.00/hour... but for you... considering all the circumstances... I would agree to represent you at a special rate of only... $2,000.00/hour... with a modest quarter million dollar fee advance deposit, of course...”
“SQUEAK!!!!!” squeaked Milton and Rita Mouse.
“Couldn’t you represent us, like, on a contingent fee? You know, “no recovery no payment,” or whatever they say on television? Or what about bringing a class action in federal admiralty court on behalf of all the maligned rodents around the world wrongly accused of spreading the Hantavirus???”
“Uh, no,” I respectfully replied, “I don’t work for contingency fees and I’d rather not handle a class action in admiralty or anywhere else... But... I can refer you to another lawyer [who I have held a grudge against for many decades] and, perhaps, that lawyer can help you out... hmm?
So with that referral to a not-so-dear professional antagonist - a ratfink attorney I didn’t like at the law firm of Pied, Piper & Hamelin - Milton and Rita Mouse scurried off and I closed my office for the weekend.
* * * * *
Well. Not so very amusing, you think. And you’re right.
Hantavirus is not very funny and the circumstances of what happened recently on the MV Hondius is not a joke. It’s hard to imagine the horror of being stuck out on the high seas, thousands of miles from anywhere, and learning that there is a rampaging, highly contagious, lethal disease spreading among your fellow travelers. Literally trapped like rats! This could have been the script for one of those epic disaster movies from the 1970s like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake,” “Airport,” or “The Towering Inferno.”
Every month, my wife and I receive mailed invitations from our respective alumni associations to join small groups of upscale, superannuated alumni on exclusive and expensive “journeys” to exotic places so we can check off must-see destinations from our “bucket lists.” The brochures depict alluringly beautiful sea and landscapes and architectural wonders of the ancient world. But the brochures show none of the local people except for the “traditional dance groups” performing for other upscale travelers who are also striking must-see destinations off their “bucket lists.” A “bucket list,” by the way, is the collection of places you have to see and things you must do before you die, as in “kick the bucket.”
These exclusive travel programs are designed to allow a select class of people to visit interesting, but economically distressed war zones... without actually coming into contact with any of the poor, malnourished and war-ravaged local people... whose poverty, malnourishment and war-related distress are attributable to the very political and economic policies favored by this self-same select class of people.
It is for this reason that no exclusive travel agency will chaperone its très riche about to kick the bucket clientele to the D.R. Congo, for example, where a new and particularly lethal variant of Ebola - the hitherto incurable Bundibugyo virus strain - has broken out. But the Bundibugyo Ebola virus seems to be spreading rapidly, according to the United Nations World Health Organization, so chances are good that it will come to those whose malevolent policies helped create it, even if they won’t come to the virus.
Were we ever solicited to sail on the MV Hondius? I don’t know for sure because all of the solicitations immediately go into the recycling bin upon receipt.
The only “cruise” I can remember taking was a ten day North Atlantic sailing many decades ago when, as a kid, my family returned to the United States aboard the USS Buckner. Come to think of it, we sailed pretty much the same route taken by the Titanic.
Needless to say, we didn’t hit an iceberg and sink. But, being young and hyperactive, my brother and I kept a sharp lookout for icebergs, pirates, mermaids, U-boats, and sea monsters. Just in case.
The USS Buckner was a large and rather spartan troop transport of Korean War vintage that mainly ran between Bremerhaven, Germany and New York City. A Princess cruise ship it was not. It had no swimming pool, no movie theater, no casino, no water slides, no restaurants (other than a mess hall), no game room, and no gymnasium. I think it had a single shuffleboard laid out on the wood foredeck, but the shuffleboard disks kept sliding into the water because of a heavy sea. Not too long after my brother and I ran amok on the USS Buckner, she was decommissioned and sold for scrap. I wonder whether we had anything to do with that?
Today, I doubt that I would enjoy an exclusive and expensive cruise cooped up with a cluster of potentially infectious upper crust guests. But are the norovirus contaminated mega-cruise ships much better? They look like top-heavy floating amusement park/casinos, with several thousand passengers, many of them suffering from gastroenteritus. The family-oriented cruises often have wild hordes of misbehaving runny-nosed munchkins dashing everywhere at all hours of the day (just like I used to do!), boatloads of fast-food restaurants, cinemas, water-slides, Ferris wheels, people getting drunk, people getting into fights and tossing one another over the railings, souvenir stores, second tier Las Vegas performers, and every imaginable form of X to G rated entertainment. Why call this a vacation if you can see and do the same in Every-town, USA?
Vacation travel certainly isn’t what it used to be.
I remember -- long, long ago -- flying on an Air France Caravelle jet with my family from somewhere to someplace else. The hostesses served full course meals on Meissen dinner plates laid on white table cloths with real silverware. They carved the hot roast beef at our seats, served fresh shrimp cocktails and poured complimentary crystal goblets of Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottled in 1928. And that was the “children’s meal” in economy class!
I remember -- long, long ago -- as a university student riding the local trains of Southern Europe, cutting slices of hard crust bread, cheese and dry salami with a Swiss army pocket knife in the second class compartment. We five- dollar-a-day travelers shared our bread and salami along with a cheap bottle of Chianti with everyone else on board who was also eating bread, cheese and salami.
I remember -- long, long ago -- looking forward to the border agents at any national boundary to stamp our passports with some quirky and collectible foreign language visa. But back then they were just going through the formalities, unlike the torture rituals of today. Today you might have to endure hours of invasive scrutiny, present your biometric identification, give blood and urine samples, provide a retina scan, confirm your national and religious heritage back five generations, share your social media posts, swear allegiance to the flag, pay unknown import duties and then get deported nevertheless if you don’t know the secret hand shake or haven’t obtained the proper (and secret) admission papers.
Does travel have to be the way it is today?
Obviously not, because the world’s plutocrats don’t have to put up with any of this. Of course, they don’t fly or sail with the rest of us. The pluts also don’t live or work like us. Actually, I am not sure if any of them work at all... or whether what they do work at is as useful, legal, ethical or moral as what the typical working stiff does to make ends meet.
In any event, our problems are not the problems of the Übermensch. The Übermensch have their private planes and pilots. They have their private yachts and crew. They have their private retreats like Davos in the Swiss Alps and secretive New Mexico ranches and child-trafficking islands in the Caribbean where lawless lords exercise seigniorial privilege with their serfs’ children. They have their own personal security services. Customs? Private doors open for them and remain shut for you.
All of which is similar to the gilded lives and carriages of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as they rolled out of Versailles through triumphal arches to their summer and winter palace ballrooms. The people have no bread? Let them eat AI IPOs issued by Wall Street! Until, not long after the storming of the Bastille, the King and Queen were imprisoned and, ultimately, beheaded at the Place de la Révolution.
Some of our 21st Century grandees, I understand, want to travel to the Moon, to Mars and beyond. I encourage them to go. All of them. Maybe they can travel on one of the exploding rockets owned by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin or Mr. Musk’s SpaceX. I’ll even chip in to a “Go Fund Me” campaign for their fare.
One way, of course. The sooner the better.
* * * * *
Vacations are a bit of a racket. You’re supposed to work your tail off employed for someone else 50 weeks of the year and then “relax” for two weeks. No matter how stressed out and weary you felt before you left on vacation, you return even more stressed and weary. To the extent that you do feel “re- energized,” it’s for the benefit of your employer who expects you, again, to work your tail off for the next 50 weeks.
Quite possibly, you will return from vacation infected with God knows what disease you incubated while flying steerage for hours in a sealed aluminum cigar tube that recycles the air breathed in and out by hundreds of strangers.
We’ve all had that experience: you can hear the incessant hacking, coughing and sneezing just a few rows away. The cabin is too cold or too hot and you know you’re going to catch something horrible from that guy who sounds like he has tuberculosis. Or does he have Ebola? It’s only a matter of when and how bad it’s going to be. The person next to you keeps falling asleep on your shoulder. The toilets are stopped up and the bathroom floors are sticky. Your back hurts because the seat won’t recline and there’s not enough space to stretch.
Babies are screaming.
Adults are screaming.
You also want to scream.
Soon, they will be jabbing you (again) with dubious mRNA “vaccines.”
Two weeks, of course, is the measure of an American-style vacation. The average vacation for German and Italian workers is four weeks while in France it’s five. I think that European vacations used to be even longer than that before their respective “elected governments” decided to privatize everything American style. The relatively short vacation is what makes the U.S.A. “great,” of course... but great for whom?
In any event, the longer European vacations explain why, when you fly to Paris in August, the City is mostly empty except for tourists. And ditto for Venice, where you’ll see nothing except millions of tourists gawking at other tourists gawking back at you.
* * * * *
My home town Seattle is currently on a tourism binge. This is because the economy is bad, the residential and commercial real estate markets have tanked, tech companies are laying folks off left and right, and the office vacancy rate has been stuck for years at more than 30%.
Thus, in an effort to mask and meliorate the problem in the short term, the downtown business association and the local pols tout Seattle as… a cruise ship destination city!
Hmm.
They are also flogging Seattle as one of several North American hosts for the FIFA World Cup soccer games. I like sports, but not the big-money boys of the professional (and collegiate!) athletic associations. The World Soccer Federation, in my humble opinion, is just slightly more corrupt than the IOC, the International Olympic Committee. Neither one of these sports bodies is anything your town should get in bed with when sober, and both events leave huge debts and a lot of garbage when their curtains fall.
In a similar vein, Seattle and the State of Washington are also preparing to prostitute themselves (once again) to attract a professional basketball team courtesy of the NBA. It suffices to say that my opinion of the NBA is little different than my opinion of FIFA, the IOC or any other professional (or collegiate!) sports body.
* * * * *
When vacationing, 5 star multinational hotels offer pretty much the same cookie-cutter accommodations all around the world. Their magnificent lobbies differ from place to place, but the rooms, more or less, are the same. In fact, this type of hotel looks a lot like the floating mega-cruise ships.
If your travel accommodations resemble what you left behind, you should ask yourself why you bothered to go. Rather, consider extended sojourns in remoter places where you can stay in small pensions, bed & breakfasts, family-owned inns and last century guest houses. Unless, of course, you normally live in an inn or last century guest house... or in a tent on a city sidewalk... in which case, indeed, you should stay in a 5 star hotel.
Travel is a broadening experience and, when done right, can lead to insight, a sense of community, occasional wisdom, adventure and good plain fun. When done wrong, travel leads to the Hantavirus.
Avoid the rat race of the usual tourist traps in the usual big cities. In any event, you can see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus more closely and in better detail on Wikipedia than you will see them in Paris or in Florence rushed past in a herd of rubber-necking sight-seers. But you can’t meet new and interesting folks on your computer, except the artificially intelligent kind who might be spoofs or bots.
Talk to people where you travel. Inhale the local smells, the good and bad ones alike. Eat at restaurants where locals, not the tourists, eat. Learn to use chopsticks. Make new friends. Renew old friendships.
There are places and peoples in the world I would like to visit before I “kick the bucket,” so to speak. Unfortunately, my own government forbids me from visiting them, at least, until they are overthrown and parasitized by another round of “democratic” regime change. After which, I won’t want to visit them anymore.
In the circumstances of our times, my “don’t go” anti-bucket list is lengthier than my “must-see” bucket list. The list includes places that I boycott or that I refuse to visit or where I won’t spend my money. My “anti-bucket list” includes the usual suspects: The Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Israel and its allied satraps Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the EU, and Bahrain.
Nor am I inclined to patronize countries that engage in military Keynesianism, that is, those that try to spend their way out of their crappy economies by buying bigger and badder and more expensive weapons systems. Unfortunately, that includes nearly every western nation (Except for the tiny ones like Iceland, the Republic of Ireland, San Marino, Andorra and the Hobbit Shire).
The list of military Keynesianists, alas, includes the United States which is setting breath-taking records spending money we do not have on military stuff we do not need to defend against an enemy that doesn’t exist. But that’s the essence of military Keynesianism and every capitalist country does it.
Thus, however broadening the travel experience might have been, I am afraid that the current Zeitgeist will lead to less travel and greater feelings of isolation. Or, as Milton and Rita Mouse would understand, our sense of isolation is beginning to feel more and more like institutionalized social quarantine. At least for we little mice of the world.
* * * * *
Ergo, music for the little mice.
I call this The Solitude Étude. In line with the rest of this story, I could have called it The Cruise Blues.
Anyway.
This song is for all of us who feel like the bucket of our bucket-list has been tipped over our heads. Someone mean also keeps playing the spoons on the bucket while its resting upside down on us.
I composed this song at the tail end of Covid as a kind of restorative for a pulverized, quarantined world. I wrote and finger-picked The Solitude Étude (or The Cruise Blues) on my Gibson SJ200 fitted with “lite” DR Rare phosphor bronze strings. DR strings hurt to play, but they have an extremely full sound. Bronze strings played on a dreadnought guitar are also a little “squeaky,” but Milton and Rita Mouse would approve.