Howdy, bloggerinos!

I'll be substituting for David over the next few weeks while he's off in Central America touching the monkeys or whatever.

I am not located in Manhattan like David normally is. I am writing from beautiful, cosmopolitan, SARS-ridden Toronto. I hope all of you are wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks right now. If not, you may as well just quarantine yourself immediately. I hope your wills are up to date.

That's totally silly of course. Even though many newspapers from outside of Toronto seem to have portrayed this city as a plague-ridden necropolis - like Camus' Oran except without all those adorable little rats (why hasn't Disney made The Plague into an animated movie-musical yet?) - it really hasn't been like that at all.

First of all, most of us who live here know that your risk is near zero unless you're (a) a healthcare worker, (b) an overnight patient in a hospital, or (c) some kind of weirdo who likes to sneak into ICUs and lick old ladies while they're asleep. If you're in that last category you deserve anything you catch, you sick, old-lady-licking freak.

Next, the bulk of the outbreak was in one of Toronto's "outer boroughs" - a remote and suburbanish part of the city called Scarborough (once popularly known as Outer Scarberia, now more often called SARSborough - ha, ha). We downtown sophisticates would barely notice if Scarborough were sucked into a mysterious space-time vortex, never to be seen again. Being worried about a plague in Scarborough would be like Manhattanites being worried about a plague in Staten Island.

Finally, we haven't had a new case of SARS up here for weeks and weeks and weeks. The WHO has even taken us off the "active transmission" list. It's perfectly safe to read this blog. It's perfectly safe to visit Toronto. In fact, the city is begging people to visit Toronto since the entire tourist industry is teetering on the edge of total bankruptcy. Come visit! Come visit sunny Oran…um, I mean Toronto!