Walking on the Moon

Rich and I were blogging back and forth a little about the flu and I realized I hadn’t put up this link, which epitomizes my concerns about this whole hubub. I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about the possible sudden spread of an infectious disease, like the flu – though I think Ebola’s more theatrical – and we should be taking reasonable steps to be prepared for it.  But the whole thing is still very speculative, and we have real problems that are much less speculative.  There are going to be more hurricanes this year, whether you believe in global warming or not, and I think those are a more pressing concern that the flu.

But the issue of the link is also pressing – opportunists will be taking their best shot at using this to further their own agenda.  I’ve heard Bush call for the same kind of martial law.  All this about a disease that has killled <100 people in 5 years.  Shouldn't we be more concerned with the continuing suck-ass distribution of AIDS assistance to Africa?  I mean there's a disease with a track record of killing people in large numbers.  30,000 people are going to die this year of other flu strains in America.  That's a factor of  1200 more (America's 1/4 the world population).  More than that will die of car accidents.  Hell, more have been struck by lightning. Yes, being unprepared for bird flu could lead to a lot of deaths, but the hype is way out of proportion to the assesable threat.  And a bird flu pandemic is not the only bad thing that could happen.

I know that’s not news, but the thing that made me realize this today was walking through Manhattan Beach with friends and hearing a fellow playing with his cell phone. It was beeping out short and long beeps like: … – – … . You may be way ahead of me here, but the fellow had rigged his phone to spell out SMS in morse code when someone texted him.

Now, it’s geeky enough to figure that out. What disturbed me was that I didn’t work at it, I just reacted to it.
It disturbed me even more that my next reaction was “I’m so blogging this.”

I learned many things this weekend, and what’s a blog for if not to share trivia:

• One should not try to rip CDs with a cat tapping you on the forehead
• Restoring all my mp3s by loading them from my iriver takes about 50 minutes
• Some people are confused about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
• Timing and an understanding of public opinion are not required to be on the Supreme Court.
• ekr‘s working a strange audience in his food reviews

So…

I’m going to try this blogging thing out and maybe get a nice stream info going out with some regularity.