Possible Effects of the Writer's Strike

In 1973 doctors in Israel staged a month-long strike and during that month, mortality fell by 50 percent. A couple of years later, a two-month work stoppage by doctors in the Columbian capital of Bogotá led to a 35-percent decline in deaths. And during a “work slowdown” by doctors in Los Angeles protesting against the sharp increase in premiums for liability insurance, the number of deaths fell by 18 percent.

I first read this in Dr. Robert Mendelsohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic about twenty years ago. Maybe it's apocryphal, maybe not, but I find it paradoxically amusing. And I post it by way of analogy.

The Writers Guild strike is one of those things that, quite frankly, I don't give a shit about. Movies and television are so execrable that they could disappear entirely tomorrow without any discernible effect on me. Maybe the quality will go up as a result of this strike. It can't get much worse.