With my sister packing up for her imminent move to California, I caught the fever (perhaps not the best choice of words around here) and started going through some boxes of my own. I came across a copy of The Spokesman-Review that I picked up in the Spokane airport on our way to Chicago earlier this Summer. The issue, dated July 3, contained two articles that I had intended to pass along, and they are still just as interesting.
The first, which I could not find on the Spokesman’s website, was reporting on the same data as this story from the Idaho Statesman. They give some insightful speculations on why Idaho consistently ranks at or near the top of the list for new diagnoses of melanoma.
On a lighter note (no pun intended) came this short write-up about a marijuana arrest made in Central Washington. I am pretty sure I began laughing out loud on the plane when I came to the last line. You will have to scroll down to the story titled “Drug enforcers…”.
A couple of weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch literally made headlines when he announced that the web sites run by News Corp will soon begin charging for their content. This revived the debate over what the average internet consumer is willing to pay for: many question whether Murdoch’s speculations will pan out. Then again, he has not become one of the biggest names in publishing by accident.
Whether internet readers will pay for national news remains to be seen, since there is a plethora of reliable options that will remain free. When it comes to local news, however, the rules of the game are different. For example, if I want to look up a story that happened in the Moscow/Pullman area, I have to hope that the campus newspapers covered it. Otherwise, I’ll be turning to the Daily News, which would charge me a monthly rate of seven dollars to access their online content.
Last week, I wrote about my frustration in deciphering the local bus routes after realizing that it was worth neither my time nor my money to utilize the area’s public transportation system. Since I am sure I am not the only one who would take the bus if the routes were more convenient, I had been considering writing an opinion piece to the Daily News. This got me interested in the idea of paying the cheap price for a month’s online subscription.
Yesterday, in Moscow, my sister drove past the scene of an accident that looked serious enough to phone home about. In searching for the story online, the Daily News was the only source with a headline, which was enough to tell me that nobody was fatally injured (in fact, it was a police officer that was sent to the hospital). Radio reports later filled in more of the details, and the print version of today’s Daily News undoubtedly had the full story. Nevertheless, for about a quarter a day, I could have looked up the full report faster, along with a lot of other stories.
Also yesterday, the WSU student newspaper ran a front page story about Pullman’s new buses and routes. That was enough for me to decide I would subscribe to the Daily News just to send in my take on the bus system and see if it got published. In fact, I had already started the process.
“Process?” you might ask. Why, yes – I discovered that there is, in fact, a subscription process. First of all, unlike nearly anything else you purchase online, when I went to the Daily News subscription page, there was nowhere to enter a credit card number. Instead, all they asked for was my name, number and e-mail address, followed by a notice that they would be contacting me within the next two business days. I hardly need to highlight the fact that if I am looking for an initial report on a local news story, making me wait two days is not the way to get my business.
Fortunately, for the Daily News, I also wanted to contribute my opinion on local issues, so I waited to hear from them. After wondering why they would not offer an online transaction, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and concluded that it was to avoid threats like credit card fraud and identity theft.
(At least) two business days later, I got a phone call an email, which read as follows:
…I take that back – I got two consecutive emails, twenty-two minutes apart, both from one Bonnie Curran, which read as follows:
“Daily news online is $7.00 per month, paid in advance. Please call 1-800-745-8742″
“daily news online is $7.00 a month paid in advance. Please call 1-800-745-8742″
Now I have to ask, if you are going to play this game at all, why not just slap the eight-hundred number on your website and avoid the two day wait?
Believe it or not, it was after this correspondence – upon seeing the bus story in the Evergreen – that I decided I would call the number. Until then, I had already considered it too much work to become a paying customer. So, shortly after 5 p.m. yesterday, I rang. Not entirely to my surprise, I reached the voice mail system of the circulation department, where I politely left my name, number and reason for calling.
I have been waiting for Bonnie to call all day. Bonnie has not called. I doubt Bonnie will ever call; and at this point, I am through trying to contact Bonnie. I really want to pay Bonnie my seven dollars, but if it is this hard to get her to take my money, I seriously have to question whether her paper is worth anything at all.
I feel like my piece about the buses ended on a sour note, and that this one has as well. I am trying to be patient, but I am beginning to wonder whether it pays anymore to be a “good citizen,” as a good friend used to call me. What I am learning instead is that, around here, it pays to be a student: not only do the buses cater to them, their newspapers are free as well!
I am paging through Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and stumble upon his discussion of viruses:
“They also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came…
“It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. The First World War killed 21 million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 per cent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu…
“Swine flu arose as a normal, non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow, over the following months – no-one knows how or where – it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and many died. Some succombed within hours; others held on for a few days.
“In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country. Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between autumn 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers in France and Germany. No-one knows the global toll, as records in the third world were often poor, but it was not less than twenty million and probably more like fifty million. Some estimates have put the global total as high as a hundred million.
“In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. The prisoners were promised pardons if they survived a battery of tests. These tests were rigorous to say the least. First, the subjects were injected with infected lung tissue taken from the dead and then sprayed in the eyes, nose and mouth with infectious aerosols. If they still failed to succumb, they had their throats swabbed with discharges taken straight from the sick and dying. If all else failed, they were required to sit open-mouthed while a gravely ill victim was sat up slightly and made to cough into their faces.
“Out of – somewhat amazingly – three hundred men who volunteered, the doctors chose sixty-two for the tests. None contracted the flu – not one. The only person who did grow ill was the ward doctor, who swiftly died. The probable explanation for this is that the epidemic had passed through the prison a few weeks earlier and the volunteers, all of whom had survived the visitation, had a natural immunity.
“Much about the 1918 flu epidemic is understood poorly or not at all. One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges and other earthly impediments. A virus can survive for no more than a few hours outside a host body, so how could it appear in Madrid, Bombay and Philadelphia all in the same week?
“The probable answer is that it was incubated and spread by people who had only slight symptoms or none at all. Even in normal outbreaks, about 10 per cent of people in any given population have the flu but are unaware of it because they experience no ill effects. And because they remain in circulation they tend to be the great spreaders of the disease.
“That would account for the 1918 outbreak’s widespread distribution, but it still doesn’t explain how it managed to lie low for several months before erupting so explosively at more or less the same time all over. Even more mysterious is that it was most devastating to people in the prime of life. Flu normally is hardest on infants and the elderly, but in the 1918 outbreak deaths were overwhelmingly among people in their twenties and thirties. Older people may have benefited from resistance gained from an earlier exposure to the same strain, but why the very young were similarly spared is unknown. The greatest mystery of all is why the 1918 flu was so ferociously deadly when most flus are not. We still have no idea.”
I just watched President Obama deliver an impressive and inspiring speech in Strasbourg, France as part of his G20/NATO itinerary in Europe this week. I haven’t been able to locate a video of the town hall meeting on the internet yet, but if you are waking up to the morning news in the States, I recommend trying to find a rebroadcast of the entire event.
Update: A video of the speech has now been uploaded to the president’s official White House channel on Vimeo:
Filed under: Headlines
It is hard to believe the news from Australia this weekend. After suffering record summer heat, Victoria is now recovering from the worst wildfire in the nation’s history: roughly 100 dead, 1000 homes lost and counting.
If I were to find myself threatened by wildfire, I imagine having enough time to escape. Instead, the reports are reminiscent of the Christmas tsunami of 2004, where victims had little advance warning. Many of the bodies in Victoria have been recovered from fleeing cars that were overtaken by the racing inferno. Perhaps the worst is that some of the burns have been attributed to arson.
