A week and a half in, it feels like most people are finally starting to take the coronavirus quarantine seriously. They’re self-isolating, Skyping with friends instead of hitting up a bar, ordering delivery instead of going to a restaurant. But in my experience, there still appears to be some confusion about exactly how wide a berth we should be giving each other in public. The official word is six to ten feet … and yet those jackals at Whole Foods think that just because they rubbed down their carts with disinfecting wipes, they can creep up behind me like we’re in the club when I’m trying to grab a sriracha chicken burrito. Six feet means six feet — public health demands it!
So, as a visual resource for anyone who may need it, particularly the grocery shoppers of suburban Maryland, please enjoy this visual pop-culture guide to what six to ten feet of distance actually looks like.
Six feet is about as wide as the door at the end of Titanic …
Jack Dawson, master of social distancing.
Slightly bigger, seven feet is about as wide as the four Tethered standing in the driveway in Us …
A handy tip for keeping your distance: Imagine your neighbors are not themselves, but are instead their murderous, scissor-wielding doppelgängers. Works like a charm!
Eight feet is about as tall as Ripley in the power loader in Aliens …
If it’s big enough to battle the Xenomorph queen, it’s big enough to keep you safe from coronavirus.
Or Jedi Master Yarael Poof fromStar Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace …
The long-necked gentleman with his back to the camera, Poof was a Quermian from the planet Quermia, which as the Blank Check podcast has pointed out, means George Lucas is almost certainly trying to tell us something.
Nine feet was the height of the late animal actor Bart the Bear …
RIP to a nine-foot-seven king.
What about the recommended ten feet? Well, it’s the width of the room in Room.
Not the room in The Room, mind you, which was much bigger. Also The Room is not a movie you should be using to calibrate proper distances.
It’s also the height of a regulation basketball net …
If you can still remember what that looks like!
And the distance between Kirk and the lava monster in the classic Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark” …
The ten-foot distance is canon!
And the gigantic iCarly Award Spencer made in the iCarly episode “iCarly Awards” …
He was supposed to make ten one-foot trophies, not one ten-foot trophy!
And finally, ten feet is of course the size of two Anna Kendricks stacked on top of each other.
Always remember: If a stranger tries to get within one Anna Kendrick of you, run away!
