Mortal Kleanliness

By now, I'm sure you're tired of all the usual COVID-19 cliches... stay home, stay safe, cough into your elbow, avoid direct human contact, etc. All that's important, yes, but you're probably sick of hearing about it. So let's approach the subject from a different direction. You already know to wash your hands thoroughly, but do you know what it does specifically to protect you? This video from VOX explains it all.

See, viruses (and this virus in particular) are coated in a skin of oil, which is naturally water-resistant. If you put water alone on a virus, it slips right off, and you've still got a virus. However, add soap and thorough scrubbing, and something fun happens. The soap bonds to both the oil covering the virus and the surrounding water, and the soap and water molecules pull at either end, ultimately tearing the virus apart. The "guts" spill out and wash down the sink, meaning no more virus.

Put in simpler terms, washing your hands thoroughly lets you perform thousands of gruesome micro-fatalities on the COVID-19 virus. Don't feel too guilty... it would have done the same thing to you!

In related fatality news, I've learned that Mortal Kombat 9, the game that rescued the long-running series from its brief, misguided journey into 3D gameplay, has been delisted from Steam and other online stores. Nothing's been made official yet, but apparently it was Freddy Kreuger who dealt the killing blow. The character used to belong to Warner Bros. through its New Line Cinema division, but the rights recently returned to Freddy's creator, Wes Craven. 

What does Craven have planned for the popular slasher villain? Probably not much, all things considered. Regardless, with the character under new ownership, it's unlikely that Freddy will make a return to Warner's Mortal Kombat series. I suspect that Mortal Kombat 10 will eventually make its own vanishing act from online stores, now that two of its guest characters have been absorbed by Disney Studios.