They join established older brother Storm Brewing, which launched in 1995 and counts a heady, winter-warming Black Plague Stout among its popular beers.

BBC: Vancouver��s small-batch beer revolution

To the extent we continue to amass debt, our children and grandchildren will be saddled with a burden so great that it will make The Black Plague look like a walk in the park (hyperbole intended).

FORBES: Dear Mr. President: STOP THE MADNESS!!

This nonsensical yearning for the Good Old Days of naturally bleak weather, famine, and the Black Plague has its roots in the near-religious myth that anything humans do to affect the natural course of Mother Earth is evil and wrong.

FORBES: The Black Death: Longing For The Good Old Days

Suspicions are that the dig has revealed a "plague pit" -- one of many mass graves used to dispose of the bodies of those who succumbed to the Black Death, or bubonic plague, in the 14th century.

CNN: London rail excavation unearths suspected 'plague pit'

Though located on a former plague burial site and a figure called the Black Nun, we cannot tell if people are affected by the thought of going to work or supernatural activity, so we will leave it up to you.

BBC: The scariest spots around the world

Only one state, South Dakota, remains plague-free, and it contains about a third of the remaining black-tailed prairie-dog population.

ECONOMIST: An endangered nuisance

Daniel Defoe may have written the first nonfiction novel "A Journal of the Plague Year, " published in 1722, an account of the year the Black Death decimated London.

WSJ: Dear Book Lover: Fiction that Reads Like Nonfiction