Panic! Panic now!
Yes, although absent from this blog for over a week, I am alive.
I myself am somewhat surprised by this fact. After waking up this morning, yet again, to journalists gleefully recounting tales of how swine flu is a global pandemic comparable to the plague, that this particular strain attacks people just like me (i.e. people who are alive and aged 0 – 100) and how 6 in 10 of the population could be dead in 6 months (or something like that) I had to check my pulse to make sure I hadn’t been taken out in the night.
The media loves a good hysterical panic, doesn’t it?
And as my father pointed out just imagine what a perfect story it would be if Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin, our favourite greedy-pig-at-the-trough banker, went down with swine flu. Doom-mongering headline writers would simply implode with excitement at the potential of all those pig synonyms. Perhaps the Shred should be offered a compulsory holiday in Mexico?
April 29th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
The media is falling all over themselves to scare us to death about swine flu. You can’t get a realistic assessment one way or the other from the media.
April 29th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I’m afraid Fred’s the sort of poxy charmed git who could walkblind folded through a mine field full of broken glass, trip wires and discarded needles full of the bubonic plague and walk out the other end with nothing more than a crease in his trousers and probably a couple of thou richer!
April 29th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
You’re right Keith. And funny thing is that EVERYONE thinks that the coverage is over the top so why do the media bother? I know they think people like ‘human-interest’ scare stories (and we do most of the time) but everyone is so cynical about this that it is kind of defeating the purpose.
Don’t spoil my fantasies BLTP!! Although you’re right, and he probably rushed out and spent some more of his exorbitant pension payout on shares in pharmaceutical companies last Friday.
May 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I don’t know anyone who’s taken all this media hysteria seriously. There’s a small (at present) risk that some of us may catch an illness which is (currently) proving largely non-fatal among the general population. Now give me 10,000 words (preferably apocalyptic).
May 5th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I think Andrew Collins has the right approach to this – that the real danger is cynicism about both the media and politicians leading to us not taking this as seriously as we should. But what happens if it is fatal? Well, that’s a good story too I suppose…