Busy, Crazy World

I know I've been a little quiet recently; work's been very crazy, very busy, and I spent most of my weekend helping my younger brother with his job hunt. But hopefully things are settling down a little, so I have time to write again. :)

I've also been following the swine flu news. First of all, stop panicking. The media feeding frenzy on this story is getting ridiculous. Yes, it's news. Yes, it's something to be concerned about, and certainly something worth monitoring. But there's no need to panic. It's still very early in the investigation, and the strain has proven to be responsive to common medicines like Tamiflu. The high schoolers in New York City didn't even need anti-viral medication. So please, don't overreact just yet. Monitor the news, keep abreast of the situation, wash your hands frequently and cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough. But don't break out the little masks just yet.

Instead, pick up a copy of John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. It's an utterly fascinating read about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 100 million people in less than two years. Barry's histories are always excellent (check out Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America - a very prescient work in light of what happened on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005), and this book is no different. It's a meticulously-researched story of medicine, war, and human nature, illuminating a chapter of history that many people aren't aware of. It's also a bit eerie in the sense that the 1918 flu targeted young, seemingly healthy individuals - the only real parallel I can find thus far between the 1918 outbreak and the current swine flu situation. Great book, great read, very informative and timely.

All in all, it's a pretty day and a good start to the week. So stay safe, and don't freak out. May's just around the corner, and here in Charleston, it already feels like summer.

Sleepless Nights & Tweets

To quote Bart Simpson, "can't sleep; clown will eat me." Minus the clown, of course. Just can't sleep. So instead I expound upon the strange inanity of Twitter.

Twitter ... I just ... I don't know. My mixed feelings towards the popular social networking service started during CNN's coverage of Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Now, I'm a hurricane junkie. Have been since Hugo came through Charleston in '89. I don't I slept a grand total of 8 hours during the entire week of the Katrina debacle, and so when another hurricane threatened New Orleans, I was glued to the television set ... which was when I first discovered the journalistic abomination that is Rick Sanchez.

Rick. Fucking. Sanchez. I hate this guy so much. I can't even adequately express why. He just seems so ... so ... dumb. Like the guy in the back of your class who can't stop asking the teacher the same damn question over and over because even though the teacher's already answered it six times this doucher can't get it through his thick skull, but still thinks he knows everything and that's why the aforementioned teacher goes home every night and considers eating a gun. That's how Rick Sanchez makes me feel every time I watch him attempt to conduct an interview. If Edward R. Murrow were still alive to see this assclown, I think he would just start weeping uncontrollably and ask to borrow that fictional teacher's gun.

Anyway, it was during that long, tense night before Gustav made landfall (and, thankfully, spared New Orleans from another inundation) that I first heard of Twitter -- because Rick was tweeting through his broadcast. And reading the asinine tweets of others. Like it was news. And it wasn't. There was nothing newsworthy about catluvr394's opinion on Bobby Jindal. We did not need to hear matt420's commentary on levee fortification, and we certainly did not need dittohead4mccain telling us that New Orleans shouldn't have been rebuilt in the first place (for three main reasons: 1) it hasn't been rebuilt yet; 2) that city is a historic treasure in spite of its precarious geographic location; and 3) this opinion wasn't fucking news).

Now, I know that it's got to be a struggle to fill airtime when you're waiting for a story to develop. But that was a very tense night for a lot of people, and the last thing anyone wanted to hear was the misspelled ramblings of a bunch of armchair anchormen. So my first impression of Twitter -- not so good.

Yet here I am tonight, tweeting. And I'm actually enjoying it. There's something so delicious about issuing those 140-word missives about my boring, inane life: what's for dinner, my reaction to watching Quarantine (which was an excellently scary movie), watching the North Korean missile drama unfold and mocking Kim Jong Il's crazy-ridiculous "biography" (dude claims he was born under rainbows and shooting stars -- that's amazing, even if it's totally inaccurate because he was probably born in a Siberian work camp) ... turns out tweeting is kind of fun and addictive.

So, yeah. I give in. I shall tweet, and follow the tweets of others. Hell, even as a news source, Twitter's proving to be pretty good -- there are a couple of breaking news feeds that have proven to be just as reliable as cable news (if not more so) and have broken stories faster, so that's a definite plus. And some of the celebrity tweets are pretty awesome -- I get to read Colin Meloy's thoughts on the declining quality of the New Yorker's paper, Jimmy Fallon's pizza woes, and Michael Ian Black's general acid humor. All in all, Twitter's turned out to be pretty cool.

But Rick Sanchez is still a massive tool. Even if I do start following him. *sigh* I am such a hypocrite.