[conspire] "immunity" (COVID-19, ...) Re: Numbers racket

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> I don’t have the energy to dig out a pic from Montserrat with a tree
> growing out of the second story of a house (not the first!), but that
> was one of the more bizarre things that stuck in my memory from my
> travels. That despite the fact that the environment was acidic enough
> to put holes in corrugated steel roofs.

Deirdre's reference is to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a British
Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands -- about a 16 km x 11 km oval,
of which the southern half is now usually off-limits to people after
severe volcanic activity starting in 1995.  

This isn't the example Deirdre has in mind, but it's a famous one -- a
three-story house, mostly covered by a lahar (mud) flow, is in the basin
of the Belham River on the west side of the island, near the beginning
of the Volcanic Exclusion Zone as you head south from Little Bay (in the
inhabited north) towards the destroyed former capital, Plymouth.  

Deirdre's example is even more striking, and further along the road to
Plymouth.