Archive for May 2007
Man With Deadly TB Strain – I am not making this up – Flies
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10554040
But this case reveals that preventing someone from traveling is not easy to do. By the emerging accounts, county public-health authorities in Georgia were apparently reluctant, uncertain and unclear about when and how to stop someone with a particularly dangerous infection from traveling. They advised the TB patient not to travel, but CDC officials say the man left before they could put it in writing.
Why is it that every arrogant little bureaucrat with a fancy-ass TSA badge knows that I can’t bring my goddamn toothpaste on the plane, but nobody knows that someone with fucking tubercufuckinglosis should not fly? Why, instead of harrassing passengers who forgot to move their Chapstick from their purse to their Ziplock baggie, aren’t the Transportation, y’know, Security Administration asking us if we might possibly have any deadly airborne illnesses?
Add comment May 30, 2007
Followup – Unclear on the Concept #3
I’m a bit relieved to learn this:
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/0525Goodwill25-buzz-on.html
It’s interesting that the details in this article do not match the ones in the original article. However, I am glad that the employee who found the dough got to keep it.
Add comment May 29, 2007
Unclear on the Concept, #3
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/0510cash-buzz-10.html
This is just wrong on so many levels. Somebody hides a huge wad of cash in a pair of pajamas with a note saying, in effect, “This is a gift for the person who finds it,” and everyone involved assumes the cash is lost and is waiting for the “owner” to step forward?
If the “owner” had wanted the money to go to Goodwill as a donation, wouldn’t he have, you know, given it to Goodwill?
And Goodwill “rewards” the employee who found it with – a few gift certificates and a measly party? Just imagine – a nasty cake from the local Piggly Wiggly washed down with some warm Sprite drunk out of a Dixie cup. You go, girl!
Then again, I have to wonder about her intelligence – “I’m an honest person,” Owens said. “I was brought up that way. I’m always going to be that way.” Well, maybe – but can you read?
Add comment May 11, 2007
Than Longen Folk to …
What do we actually want in the Spring, anyway? Chaucer says we long to “goon on pilgrimages,” and having just come back from a short road trip, I can’t disagree. But he also hints strongly that we want to make like the “smale foweles [that] maken melodye, … [and] slepen al the nyght with open eye.” I can’t disagree with that, either.
But if what I’m observing in myself and my friends is any indication, we also have some strong desire to honor what is best in our past.
There seems to be a nostalgia bug in the air. Another nostalgic blog entry from Eric, just as I was thinking about writing about my experience at the blood drive yesterday.
Giving blood itself is commonplace for me, thanks to the regular blood drives at my office. Afterward, as I sat and drank a couple of way-too-cold drinks, I noticed the radio was playing Bryan Adam’s “Summer of ‘69.” A song, itself about nostalgia, which was crazily popular when I was in high school, and therefore elicited a flood of memories and desires about my own high school summers. It was nostalgia topped with nostalgia sauce with a nostalgia salad on the side.
Never mind that my own high school days were not the best days of my life (close to the worst days of my life, if you want the truth); never mind that I generally pity people who think that they were, because, well, what is there to look forward to then? Never mind even that the best I can now say about “Summer of ‘69″ is that it is not Bryan Adams’ worst song. As I sat there drinking 33 degree F tomato juice, I felt myself tearing up a little, and it wasn’t from the cold.
I wouldn’t trade where I am now for any moment in my real past, but once in a while I have to confess to being a little sad for the past that never was and can now never, ever be. I never got to be the kind of 16 that the song describes, and never will be.
Why does this still make me sad?
Add comment May 2, 2007
