David J. Sencer CDC Museum and the Winchester Mystery House

David J. Sencer CDC Museum Let’s suppose that one day this month you come down with the ebola virus—perhaps from your pet bat named Ralph.  A day or so after you’re infected from some snuggling on the couch with Ralph, you begin to experience some rather unpleasant symptoms: fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, blood gushing from every opening in your entire body, and oh yeah, hiccups. In a health crisis like this, who you gonna call?  Ebola-busters!  Actually, there are no ebola-busters in an official sense, but there is a highly-organized, efficient organization that lives for challenges like this: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, or CDC.  The CDC is the governmental organization tasked in part with researching, preventing, and solving outbreaks of ebola and other awful viruses that can not only kill you, but also give you hiccups.  We’ll talk today with someone from the David J. Sencer CDC Museum which educates the public on what the CDC does. Website: www.cdc.gov/museum Winchester Mystery House Grief can cause people to react in different ways: some cry and get everything out of their system quickly, some fixate on the person or thing they lost but gradually come to some resolution, and others, well, kind of go nuts.  And if you happen to be a billionaire with a penchant for grief, the possibilities of creatively expressing your grief are almost endless.   Sarah Winchester was a griever of the last category.  Heiress to the vast Winchester Rifle fortune, she suffered the pain of losing both her young daughter and her husband. To somehow find relief, she headed west to San Jose, California where she bought a huge parcel of land and then—on the advice of a spiritualist who advised her—began to build a massive, sprawling, bizarre house with the idea that her workers needed to be working around the clock on that house to put off the ghosts of the many people whom the Winchester rifle had killed.  The huge Winchester Mystery House is the result of the multi-decade toil of Sarah Winchester and today we’ll discuss why the house is so fascinating and so absolutely bizarre. Website: www.winchestermysteryhouse.com