Evening In? Remember To Sanitize – FEMCOMPETITOR MAGAZINE

April 18, 2020,

Could he have been right all along and we were the ones who were wrong?

We saw him as eccentric but we’re we the ones a little oblivious and foolish?

Due to the current pandemic, we now see the television detective Monk in a very different light.

Monk is an American comedy-drama detective mystery television series created by Andy Breckman and starring Tony Shalhoub as the title character, Adrian Monk.

It originally ran from 2002 to 2009 and is primarily a police procedural series, but also exhibits comic and dramatic tones in its exploration of the main characters’ personal lives.

The series debuted on July 12, 2002, on USA Network.

It continued for eight seasons, with the final season concluding on December 4, 2009. The series held the record for the most-watched scripted drama episode in cable television history from 2009 through 2012.

How eccentric was he?

Adrian Monk was a detective for the San Francisco Police Department until his wife, Trudy, was killed by a car bomb in a parking garage. He believes that Trudy’s death was part of a larger conspiracy that she had uncovered during her time as a journalist.

Trudy’s death led Monk to suffer a nervous breakdown.

He was then discharged from the force and became a recluse, refusing to leave his house for three and a half years. Until the final episode, Trudy’s death was Monk’s only unsolved case.

He is finally able to leave the house with the help of his nurse and assistant, Sharona Fleming.

The breakthrough allows him to work as a private detective and a consultant for the homicide unit, despite limitations rooted in his obsessive–compulsive disorder, which has heightened since Trudy’s death.

Now for the disorder.

Monk’s numerous compulsive habits and a number of phobias compound his situation, such as his fear of germs.

Get this, Monk is afraid of 312 things, including milk, ladybugs, harmonicas, heights, asymmetry, enclosed spaces, foods touching on his plate, messes, and risk. (He has a breakthrough from claustrophobia later in the series.) The OCD and phobias cause problems for Monk and anyone around him as he investigates cases.

Okay, so eccentric he was, but in all fairness, is it possible that the world as a whole have not been eccentric enough when it comes to germs?

This whole crowd thing was probably never wise. We now have football stadiums that can house close to 100,000 people at the same time.

Get the feeling that Monk never liked going to professional sporting events.

Just sayin’.

Yet, with the recent pandemic it seems like we should have been taking social distancing a little more serious all along.

fciwomenswrestling.com femcompetitor.com, fcielitecompetitor.com, pexels.com-Andrea-Piacquadio-photo-credit

Just look at the growing world’s population and how we are all huddled together with these growing Mega Cities.

According to worldometers.info, “Population in the world is currently (2020) growing at a rate of around 1.05% per year. The current average population increase is estimated at 81 million people per year.

Annual growth rate reached its peak in the late 1960s, when it was at around 2%. The rate of increase has nearly halved since then, and will continue to decline in the coming years.

World population has doubled (100% increase) in 40 years from 1959 (3 billion) to 1999 (6 billion). It is now estimated that it will take another nearly 40 years to increase by another 50% to become 9 billion by 2037.

The latest world population projections indicate that world population will reach 10 billion persons in the year 2057.”

We’re happy to see it tapper off but when we see that it will continue to increase by 81 million people a years, that doesn’t feel all that comforting. Now if the planet was increasing in size proportionately, that would make it more palatable.

This phenomenal annual growth can only mean one thing.

Mega Cities will continue to grow. When you think about it, they are ideal incubators for viruses to flourish.

A megacity is a very large city, typically with a population of more than 10 million people.

A very modern status.

For almost five hundred years, Rome was the largest, wealthiest, and most politically important city in Europe.

Its population passed one million people by the end of the 1st century BC.

Rome’s population started declining in 402 AD when Flavius Honorius, Western Roman Emperor from 395 to 423, moved the government to Ravenna and Rome’s population declined to a mere 20,000 during the Early Middle Ages, reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation.

That will probably never happen again.

Precise definitions regarding today’s Mega Cities vary: the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in its 2018 “World Urbanization Prospects” report counted urban agglomerations having over 10 million inhabitants.

The total number of megacities in the world is varied: 33 according to the UN, 37 according to CityPopulation.de, and 38 according to Demographia.

Many of these urban agglomerations are in China and India.

Remember where research indicates the Corona virus started?

The other four countries with multiple megacities are The United States, Brazil, Pakistan, and Japan.

African megacities are present in Nigeria, Egypt and the DRC, European megacities are present in Russia and France, and megacities can be found in Latin America in the countries of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina.

Mega Cities are everywhere with more on the rise.

So the notion that we should become more careful about hand washing and social distancing makes a lot of modern sense.

We may also have to get used to the idea that sheltering in may become the new normal. The globe is so connected by travel that in a way, the earth houses one massive Mega City and virtually every country that engages in free trade and travel is a part of it.

So it appears that Detective Monk was ahead of his time.

We might start to watch reruns of the series without our rose colored glasses of skepticism.

Please pass the soap.