Couple SF updates:
Swine Flu Name Change?
Do You Have Swine Flu?
Listening: Stromkern, "Nightriders"
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
+ NEWS: AHOGOLYPSE +
"World Takes Drastic Steps ..."
So this drunkenly escalating swine flu epi/pandemic has apparently become big enough for me to not only click on a yahoo news link, but in fact want to post something (an unfortunately rare event) ...
Two Things
1) All this killing of pigs around the world when the only link to the hog is in the name - and like the article notes, THEY are contemplating changing the name to avoid all this madness. I only note it for the apparent surprise that people would take a name to actually denote some connection to reality (avian flu in fact being connected to avians), rather than as some arbitrary signifier. Go fig.
2) I've been doing increasingly more work with the idea of quarantine in (science fiction) film of late, so it's spooky to see all these biological security measures being put into place - particularly when the usefulness of so many are unknown, like those bio-scanners (covering The Host in my class this week, and yep, US bio-scanners in there too ... for a totally fictional virus to boot).
"'You can't protect yourself — not in the way that people are traveling nowadays,' said Karin Henriksson, 56, of Stockholm. 'Then you would have to put the entire population in quarantine. And you can't do that, can you?'"
Can you? I've got a paper on Doomsday underway, and they certainly do there, with horrific results.
Listening: Noisuf-X, The Beauty of Destruction
So this drunkenly escalating swine flu epi/pandemic has apparently become big enough for me to not only click on a yahoo news link, but in fact want to post something (an unfortunately rare event) ...
Two Things
1) All this killing of pigs around the world when the only link to the hog is in the name - and like the article notes, THEY are contemplating changing the name to avoid all this madness. I only note it for the apparent surprise that people would take a name to actually denote some connection to reality (avian flu in fact being connected to avians), rather than as some arbitrary signifier. Go fig.
2) I've been doing increasingly more work with the idea of quarantine in (science fiction) film of late, so it's spooky to see all these biological security measures being put into place - particularly when the usefulness of so many are unknown, like those bio-scanners (covering The Host in my class this week, and yep, US bio-scanners in there too ... for a totally fictional virus to boot).
"'You can't protect yourself — not in the way that people are traveling nowadays,' said Karin Henriksson, 56, of Stockholm. 'Then you would have to put the entire population in quarantine. And you can't do that, can you?'"
Can you? I've got a paper on Doomsday underway, and they certainly do there, with horrific results.
Listening: Noisuf-X, The Beauty of Destruction
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