Zinc Lincoln turned round Jefferson to Roosevelt in time

Still sick. Brain AWOL. Sleep a joke. I ran half an hour's worth of errands on foot yesterday afternoon—post office, bank, library—and it wiped me out until the evening. Long after it had gotten light out, the temperature finally started to drop and I dreamed of introducing a recently restored film from the early 1930's, a pre-Code proto-noir adapted from a now totally obscure mystery novel whose importance to film history was the unusual combination of a female author, a female screenwriter, and a female director who must have been fictional because she wasn't Dorothy Arzner. I can't remember anything about the cast. The plot had something to do with stolen jewels and phony jewels and at least one body, of course. By the end of the dream, it had bled through its own metafiction until I was in the position of the director, introducing the film at its premiere. On waking, I had to double-check with the internet that there really was no such novel as The Ten-Cent Emerald and no such film as—I was really surprised by this one—Nobody's Lady. I appreciate that some part of my brain still understands how creativity works, but I wish it were the one that operates while I'm awake.

I know this article is basically reassuring, but any time public transit is found to be less gross than the human body, I feel it is less of a victory for public transit than a rather serious statement about the human body: "Boston's subway cars hold fewer harmful microbes than our guts."