Snails are done for… Centipedes will do very well in the upcoming weeks

It is hardly necessary to say (but for your convenience I’ll say it anyway) that the rapid spread of coronavirus around the world is rather concerning.  What seemed, however, even more concerning to me a couple of days ago was the apparent impossibility of avoiding contracting the illness.  And this for the following reason: it was recommended that one should maintain six feet between himself and his neighbor to reduce his chances of catching the virus.  But in what shape or form, may I ask, is this sort of thing possible?  It does not take a Ph.D. in applied mathematics to see that between two people there are only four feet.

It would seem that an easy way out of the problem is simply to ensure that people move around in groups of three.  This would appear to fulfill the “minimum feet” requirement.  This proposal falls to the ground, however, when we recall that the requirement was to have six feet between a person and his neighbor.  What we have here is six feet among a group of three.  Besides this discrepancy between prepositions, if we observe that four feet is not enough for two people, neither will six feet be enough for three.  Having made these calculations, it seemed to me that all was lost—that all are doomed.

Then walking across the lawn one afternoon, I suddenly realized that all was not quite as hopeless as I had thought.  It is a most fortunate thing that people have yards around their houses.  If we observe that one person stands in the middle of his yard, and his neighbor stands in the middle of his, this leaves a total of one yard between the two of them.  Now, a yard amounts only to three feet, which by itself would not be sufficient for the purposes of “social distancing”—but once we add in the four feet that already lie between our two neighborhood protagonists, we see that the net result is seven feet, which is just one foot above the six-foot minimum.

In conclusion, thanks to our nature as bipeds in conjunction with our landscaping preferences, we are saved.  The current state of affairs seems very bad indeed, but as long as we are responsible about spending a good deal of time enjoying the fresh air out in the yard, we will come out just fine.

The Spicemaster can be reached for comment at aganahl@nd.edu.