Making It Up As I Go Along #367

TUESDAY...
— Work is pretty quiet again. Phil is gone by midnight and the night is pretty non-eventful. Quite tired by the time Bruno comes to relieve me and I’m pretty much straight to bed once home.

WEDNESDAY...
— Up at a few minutes before noon. Watch a bit of TV before going back for the afternoon nap.
— Work is fine. Pretty busy until about 2:30 in the morning and then not busy at all after 3:00.

THURSDAY...
— Not a lot of sleep after work... less than four hours. This means I snooze much of the early afternoon. Get some groceries and then just laze about in the evening.

FRIDAY...
— Chrysler gets government money to live. Canada now owns 2% of the company. Now I know how those people who curse tax money going to the CBC feel. What a waste of tax money... keeping a company afloat when they produce substandard products and try to increase sales not by bettering their product, but by offering Mopar accessories or cash back. Or bring on the extended service plan. If there’s one thing we need to learn from all this, it’s that big business can get too big. When a company is so big that the government has to bail them out rather than let them die, the company gets a free pass to be lazy and inferior.
— Well I think I’m pretty much decided to forget moving. Today, I unsubscribed to the condo for sale e-mail notification set up by my agent. I just don’t care to see the e-mails anymore and feel more satisfied with where I am living. I’ll soon have to tell the agents to forget me. I haven’t been too impressed with these people anyway.

SATURDAY...
— Some hockey on TV and some work around the house... both on the house and on me (exercise).


Human Flu!!!
The world really did change after September 11th. But not necessarily in the way that was originally spoken of. We are one paranoid, dramatic crew. Every event since September 11th has become a terrorist threat. Be it volcano, hurricane, blizzard or flood.... we are on the verge of panic with everything.

Twenty-four hour news networks are at the heart of the problem. Each doing battle with the others. Each wanting to be the first to break the story and the one to be able to point, with pride, to their emblem in the corner of the screen when replayed footage of the tragic events are replayed for years after. I’m sure that producers at CNN and Fox News, if they could go back in time, wouldn’t want to stop the assassination of JFK... instead, they’d want to be able to get their company logo on the footage as Kennedy slumps into his wife’s arms and the convertible speeds away.

The latest extincter-to-be is the dreaded Swine Flu. Within two days of it’s public coming out party, Swine Flu was reaching pandemic status. Don’t go to Mexico! Wear masks! Shoot anyone coming within twenty metres of you! The pigs are going to wipe us out.

In the beginning, comparisons were made to SARS. But for sensationalist media outlets, SARS wasn’t good enough. That pandemic just sort of fizzled out. So Swine Flu, instead, gained comparisons to the influenza outbreak of 1918. For news networks, it’s much better to compare the latest pandemic with one that killed fifty to one hundred million than one that killed 774.

And in this day, when people are getting sick and tired of overblown media stories, the media had experts come in to answer the question “does the media overblow the story?” Well of course scientists and experts are not going to say it’s overblown. In a world where an individual successfully sued a restaurant chain for making their coffee too hot, no expert is going to downplay that which is being tabbed as a pandemic in the middle of the pandemic hysteria. Someone who would miss two days of work with the common cold would sue the expert, saying that they let their guard down after seeing the expert downplay the risk on the news.

Of course, we not only live in a world of over sensationalism... but also one of business. And calling the Swine Flu the Swine Flu was bad for the Swine business. It’s one thing if hundreds of millions will die, but it’s quite another if their deaths bring on the collapse of the pork industry. So Swine Flu got renamed to appease the sensitive oinkers. The pandemic has been renamed H1N1.

But now the tides have turned. And if only we could see the all pig news networks. For it has happened, a person has given a pig the Swine Flu. In fact, one person gave several pigs the flu. An Alberta farmer must have sneezed in the face of an innocent little pig and now there’s a farm of mud dwellers sniffling and feeling general malaise, all thanks to us humans.

And now it seems the Swine Flu just isn’t as bad as was first feared. Today’s news broadcasts have begun to come back to earth. A deflation. Rather than capturing the Kennedy Assassination with the CNN logo in the bottom corner of the video, they captured the crazy woman freaking out in her car on the Grey Power commercials. For a week, they tried to sell her craziness as highly contagious and deadly... but after that week, they seem to realize that she’s just an annoyance you wish you didn’t have to live with.

Yes, some have died and Swine Flu has ruined many lives. But this pandemic talk has got to stop. Yet again, the sky wasn’t falling. For the hundredth time, twenty-four hour news broadcasters have cried wolf. And the problem with it is, when the wolf actually shows up, we’ll be flipping the channel to Wheel of Fortune.