Not-the-Mexican flu, as seen from Mexico

Ana María Salazar blogs bilingually from Mexico City. To help contain the flu, that whole country is pretty much closing down until the Cinco de Mayo celebrations. Her view of the ongoing brouhaha over the flu outbreak is interesting:

++ President Felipe Calderón met with former health secretaries Guillermo Soberón, Julio Frenk, Jesús Kumate and Juan Ramón de la Fuente to analyze the situation the swine flu epidemic is posing for Mexico. Jesús Kumate said the epidemic could affect the country for at least a year, since there are relapses or renewed outbreaks… He said that in the case of influenza, the renewed outbreaks occur every two months, or what could happen also is that the virus could mutate yet again over that year. (Comment: What Dr. Kumate is trying to tell us that it is unlikely that children will be returning to school and economic activities will not return to normal by May 6th.)

Read all her posts here. Somehow, the govt down south there will manage to blame this on the gringos (and probably the earthquake also).
The powers have lifted the level of seriousness to a 5 on a scale of 6, with the 6th level being pandemic. Talk of closing the border is fascinating, as it contains an implicit concession that closing the border is possible.

Newspaper plaints

Friend sends along a note with a funny twist:

My buddy … told me this and I laughed so hard I had tears running down
my face:
Editor at the SA E-N told him he got a call from a longtime subscriber
complaining because not only is the E-N fewer pages now, they have cut down
the size of the page. The editor said he gave the guy the company line about
cutting printing costs, etc. The subscriber said, "Well, hell, what's next?
You just going to leave a Post-it on my door?"

The San Antonio paper has pulled back, cut the newsroom drastically, and reduced news coverage.

Papers, still

Former Victorian David Crisp, who runs a little rag up in Montana, is one of my favorite bloggers. He has some cogent points about the direction of the newspaper business:

Just in the last six years, the number of full-time reporters working in the nation’s state capitols has fallen 32 percent. Since 1980, the number of full-time political cartoonists has fallen from 280 to fewer than 90. The government keeps getting bigger, and the number of people paid to keep an eye on it keeps getting smaller.
Democracy doesn’t flow from Washington, D.C. It flows to Washington from thousands of local communities, electing representatives to take their concerns to the Capitol from thousands of cities and school districts, counties and PTAs. For a couple of centuries, those concerns have been reflected in and reported by hundreds of local and regional newspapers.

Read it all here. It is seven or eight posts down. He is right; the death of the local paper is a catastrophe for people who want to know what is going on in their communities.
We got another chapter in the Fatal Funnel series in the Vicad. The big illustration was a pic of the number plate on the door of the motel where some plotting took place. Sure made it all clear to me …

Grins

Cribbed from someplace, a satirical syllabus for course in writing for modern days:

Navigating the ever-changing landscape of Internet http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifslang and chatspeak is essential to creating effective tweets, instant messages, and text messages. Students will practice using emoticons to create powerful dialogue and to establish dramatic irony. They'll learn to gracefully integrate complex expressions into their IM writing, substituting the trite LOL ("laughing out loud") and "meh" (the written equivalent of a shrug) with more-advanced expressions like BOSMKL ("bending over smacking my knee laughing") and HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB ("holy flipping animal crackers, that doesn't even warrant a response; if you could see me now, you would know that I am shrugging like a mofu, biotch"). Students will be encouraged to nurture their craft, free of the restraints of punctuation, syntax, and grammar.

Read it all here.

Dogs

OK, here is the deal: We have been working for the census to get up enough money for a new computer, as the old eMac is choking in its death throes. It must be four years old, which reads like a hundred in people years. We have seen lots of dogs while we were mapping census sites. My observation is that about half the dogs in the Bend are yapping little Chihuahuas or Chihuahua crosses, and half are big, sweet, yellow beasts who are glad have someone talk to them for a minute. The other half are nondescripts, but, like most dogs, good dogs. (Nitpickers, forget the math.) Couple days ago, herself was churning the brush down toward Port O when in the rearview mirror she saw something scuttle across the road. She went back and used dog treats (good census employees carry them) to toll this little beauty out of the weeds.
Obviously a pup dumped out on a country road, the pore little thing was starving to death. She is still showing a lot of rib and hip, despite a couple days of pounding down the groceries. She has not yet revealed her name. You want a nice little dog? We got a nice little dog for you. But wait … there is more. You want a nice big dog? Wife took the pup to the vet,and he says the dog should finish out at 40 or 50 pounds. Vet says the pup is some kind of blackmouth cur mix, about two and a half months old. Think of that folks! Blackmouth cur, the dog that opened the frontier. Old Yeller, hounds sleeping on the porch of the log cabin …
history on the paw.
But wait, there is more! Wife got first shots for the pup. And the price to you for this paragon of a pup? Not a thousand dollars, not five hundred dollars, not even one hundred dollars. This dog -- smart, funny, and full of life -- is yours for the asking. Otherwise, we will have another animal at our house. And that is pretty much OK, too. Dogs are the best.

Weekend stuff

Seadrift, the most inept of the three cats my wife feeds, got lucky a couple of days ago, like that proverbial blind hog that finds an acorn. She caught a rodent, unidentified. A scientist friend said she would have to see the feet of the little beast to know if it was mouse or a young rat. Whatever it was, it managed to escape the molestations of the cat and scuttle up a hibiscus, where we left it to sort out its fate according to the laws of nature.


We did civic duty Sunday afternoon by going to the **Adrift Friends of the Library fundraiser, held in a tent out on Swan Point. There was a good lunch starring étouffée but with other supporting foods of considerable merit. The catering was by Grapevine Cafe of Victoria, a little place up north by the medical lashup on Main just short of the Loop. Music was provided by the CHS jazz group, which had the decency to play mostly old stuff. All the kids wore black, as did the band leader. Reminds that the beatniks were the last attractive hip movement. A musical friend declared them good. We were taken by the coolth of the bassist, a tall slender, and pretty girl jest eat up with 17-year-old sangfroid. She was cute to watch. There is something charming about a luncheon in a tent whence we could look out and see big blue herons scuffling for food in the shallows. The library fund is coming along nicely.

Grumble, mutter, cuss

The NYT has a piece today on hankypanking by Alan Hevesi, the erstwhile state comptroller, with state pension $$s.

But by the time Mr. Hevesi resigned his office in late 2006, investigators for the Albany County district attorney’s office were examining a more troubling problem: allegations that Mr. Hevesi’s associates had sold access to the state’s $122 billion pension fund, using one of the world’s largest pools of assets to reward friends, pay back political favors and reap millions of dollars in cash rewards for themselves.

Read the whole thing here. The Times failed to mention Hevesi’s party affiliation, no doubt a fact unobtainable by the Newspaper of Record. Fortunately, because of my excellent training in investigative techniques at the UT College of Communication and my devotion to staying abreast of technology, I was able to perform a difficult and obscure research procedure known to insider journalism pros as Googling and to determine that Hevesi is a D. Who could have guessed? A pox on both their damn corrupt houses and the mendacious Times in the deal.