Category Archives: news

the shot heard hardly at all

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I have reconsidered my last post, about H1N1 vaccinations being hard to get. I was wrong.

The fact that well- educated, hard-working scientists were able to devise a vaccine for a new strain of influenza, and get millions of doses into the hands of physicians and nurses, in a matter of months, is a helluva lot to be proud of. It’s not easy, I’m sure, and everything takes time.

The important thing is that there is a vaccine which can be provided to the most vulnerable among us. Because Death, left to it’s implacable devices, just loves to weed out the weak.

Vaccination vacillation

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I’ve been wondering whether I should look into getting a shot for the new flu this year. I got my regular seasonal shot last week, as I do every year. But I think some of the furor over the swine flu is nothing but that – furor. Emotion, panic. It’s a virus, not the black death. Almost everybody who gets it gets better; it’s no more likely to make one seriously ill or seriously dead than the regular old flu. In fact, it’s probably less likely, from the stats I’ve read in the news. In any case, I guess this answers my question: 

“If you’re generally healthy and come down with the H1N1 flu this season, staying home and riding out normal flu symptoms is probably your only option.

A limited supply of vaccines in Santa Barbara County are being targeted for those who are especially high risk: If you’re a pregnant woman or a medically fragile child or young adult, those vaccines are for you.”
[Noozhawk.com]

The H1N1 virus has been a major issue for months and months. This isn’t a sudden disaster. But it hasn’t been possible to make enough vaccine for the people who might want to have it to protect themselves and their families from suffering, and to keep themselves on the job so that this illness doesn’t cause yet still again another major glitch for the staggering economy.

It was ever thus; it’s not the fault of the individuals currently in authority at any level. This is a systemic failure of public policy priorities. It goes back a generation, and it ain’t no way to run a railroad.

That being said, I’d like to ask what the hell is going on with the price of a flu shot. I paid $30 this year, $20 last year, $10 in 2007, and $5 in 2006. Seriously, WTF?

do something

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All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause — there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once.

– Joss Whedon, writer and film director (b. 1964) 

Now how could anybody disagree with that? I would add one caveat: do a little reading and thinking first.  Try to clear off a small plot of mind for the task at hand. Stupidity is one of the most contagious diseases threatening our species. Here’s a particularly serious case, by the name of Mark Williams. Seriously, wow.

A Long Time Gone

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On June 10, 1991, a man in the Lake Tahoe area watched as his 11-year-old daughter hurried to catch a school bus, at a bus stop just a block from their home. He heard her scream. He looked up to see her grabbed and dragged into a stranger’s car, and for 18 years he did not see her again.

I read the story of her abduction in the newspaper, here in Santa Barbara. I remember I thought it was shocking, terrible, that her family must be heartbroken, destroyed. I remember thinking other things, including that the poor child was probably already in Heaven.

Back in those days, I kept an icon corner in my home, as many Orthodox Christians do. I cut out the girl’s photo and placed it with my icons, to remind myself to pray for her. This is the photo I had, I think, though it was grayscale and grainy. In time, I lost it or tucked it into a book … I don’t know.

I wonder how many other people out there – besides her family – were praying for little Jaycee Dugard.

I hope her road of recovery will not be too hard or too long, but I suspect the rest of her life, her children’s lives, her family’s lives, will be dedicated to that journey. And that’s not fair.

The news that’s coming out, about the 18 years that have passed since then, and the horror … I understand that there will be outrage, anger, as well there should be. There is no prison cell deep and dark and dank enough. I hope the kidnapper lives a very long time in the worst we’ve got.

But also, I’m thinking God is merciful. I am not a man of sufficient wisdom to say that I see or understand a necessary plan at work in such things. Such ponderables are beyond my ken. Just thank God she is alive today. As for tomorrow, I suppose prayer is still needed.

thunder, intoxication, and discontent

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Well, that was a pretty productive day, for a Saturday.

I got new brakes on the pickup truck.

Reinstalled Windows XP on this geriatric Dell desktop.

Did my volunteer thing to help a doggie in Florida get surgery.

Which is all nice and good, but I didn’t do any writing. I’m a writer. Writers write. So I sure wish I could get motivated in that direction. It’s been hard lately.I get home from work and I just want to zone out.

I recently, finally, finished a chapter in the novel. It’s pretty dramatic. Thunder, intoxication, and discontent abound. Want to read it? OK, if there’s any interest maybe I’ll post it. Leave a comment on this post. But I’m not going to post it if no one is interested.

I feel like I ought to have something to say about the fires. Over 200 homes lost here in my own backyard, and many hundreds more across southern California. All that comes to mind is Why? What on Earth has changed to make these firestorms happen? Again. I mean, besides the drought and the winds. There has to be a reason. Or not. If you know, please share.

come on, guys

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This is an open message to all the weather forecasting professionals out there:

Would you guys please, for cryin’ in the mud, put your little heads together and straighten out your act?

Look at this screen shot from today’s Google News. You may have to click it to make it big enough.

Cooler weather, and a heat wave, at the same time in the same place. Oh dear.

All of my life, I’ve been watching you guys predict the weather. You’ve never been right more than a few days in a row. I look at the prediction, say 72 degrees, and then I look at the thermometer the next day. 78 degrees. That night, the prediction for the next day, 70 degrees. And on and on. No! You got it wrong, and it’s really warmer than that out here!

Never any adjustment in thinking based on empirical evidence. Isn’t it supposed to be a science?

I get stuff wrong all the time, but like most people I try to learn from my mistakes, get a little closer to correct the next time. I’m just sayin.

could eat the earth

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The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. [NY Times]

Makes Global Warming seem a bit less dramatic, doesn’t it?

I was just wondering, do you suppose, after they finish the Collider, that they’ll make a few more, then start mass producing them and dropping the price so we can all have one? You know, like PCs and cell phones.

I wouldn’t mind having a small, personal black hole, into which I could throw things. For example, my snail mail, a few of my noisier neighbors, and war.

Strange matter indeed.

Obama, Clinton stress job creation

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Yahoo! News: “Obama, who is on a six-day bus tour through Pennsylvania, also toured a factory that makes the wires that eventually become Slinky toys.

The Illinois senator played with a Slinky through the visit, meeting with a small Saturday work crew.”

Oh, those presidential candidates get to have all the fun.

I think you probably need to hear the Slinky song at this point, don’t you? Here you go; don’t say I didn’t hook you up.

open note to the wrtiers and producers

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Hey guys, as you know The Los Angeles Times has this recap on how private overtures led to a breakthrough in the writers’ strike:

“Poor communications, they all agreed, had helped trigger a strike that had shut down TV production, thrown thousands of people out of work and threatened to turn next fall’s TV season into chaos.”

Pretty ironic, don’t you think? You guys communicate for a living.

Hey, here’s an idea: before the SAG contract expires, script the negotiations. I mean get some good writers working on the screenplay now. Throw in a couple of plot twists, a little drama, a few jokes, but make sure the denouement is: everybody gets rich.

I’m available for such a project. E-mail me.