Saturday, February 03, 2007
Bird Flu: A Turkey Speaks Out
Ah, so bird flu is here, afflicting Suffolk Turkeys. But, curiously, this does not seem as frightening as when it wasn't here. An expert on television tells us there is nothing to worry about. But didn't the experts tell us there WAS something to worry about when it was just in the Far East? It's so hard, these days, to know when to be worried. A turkey says, 'I don't get it either, but we have much to be thankful for. After all, I am a talking turkey and Christmas is barely over.'
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I think they should adopt the colour-coded terror alert scheme for all these scenarios, and possibly take on board your suggested personal rerspones to the varios colours or numbers as hte case may be. This is probably a 4 on the terrifying scale so I'm off to try and flush myself down the toilet.
ReplyDeleteClearly, how scared you should be of one particular threat is dependent on other news stories of the day. We have to have a sense of priority. Currently there is lots of interesting news, so Bird flu, again, is not very exciting and therefore not much of a threat.
ReplyDeleteThis bizarre attitude of life has deep manifestations in our culture. 'We' are all terrified of the paedo's who are so few and ok with number of deaths in car crashes.
I'm still scared of the Millennium Bug and mad cow disease, I haven't got round to being scared of bird flu yet.
ReplyDeleteThere's a point to this blogfocussable post and I'm sure one day it will occur to me.
ReplyDeleteVery droll, Byran. When to be worried? What to be worried about? There is so much to choose from. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Chances are we are all worrying about the wrongs things most of the time. Now that's worrying, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteExpanding on Cityunslicker, we should probably have a Cumulative Terror Alert Scale. Just because there may not be one obviously immensely frightening piece of news doesn't mean that one shouldn't spend one's day nervously looking behind one when engaged in the discipline known as walking, or that one shouldn't grind one's teeth in an audible manner. So we could have an individual story such as this bird flew somehwere measuring 4 on the scale, whereas the cumulative terror scale of all the news stories could be 4.3. It is hard to imagine the cumulative terror alert ever dropping far beneath this. Though perhaps during periods of intense Strictly Come Dancing this could be counter-balanced by such forces for good.
ReplyDeleteChances are you'll be alright Brian. It's people in their twenties that are most at risk because our bodies are more healthier.
ReplyDeleteApparently the more antibodies you have in your body the worse you may be. When the body detects H5N1 it goes into overdrive flooding the body with antibodies. This causes the lungs to fill with fluid and the patient slowly drowns to death.
Wouldn't that mean wilful neglect of your body might stave of death? It would make sense; if you poison your body with enough alcohol and kebabs you would dramatically reduce the amount of antibodies in your system.