Ah, Morbidity ... I missed you !

[Note: If you don't know sarcasm when you see it, you are the ideal audience for reading the following post.]

Slashdot is reporting that SciAm is running a story about whether the world is prepared for a flu pandemic. Here's a little excerpt: One day a highly contagious and lethal strain of influenza will sweep across all humanity, claiming millions of lives. It may arrive in months or not for years--but the next pandemic is inevitable. Are we ready ?

Now picture these exact same words on a Star Wars style crawl. Cool, isn't it ? So, if the now infamous avian influenza strain (with the menacing technical name H5N1 ... hmm, I don't know about you but that does sound cooler to me than R2D2 !! A coincidence ? May be, may be not !!) mutates into a lethal strain and becomes capable of being passed from a human to another human, it might prove to be twice as deadly as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed about a 100 million people.

My reaction to this story was actually three-fold. Here's my first reaction with my Calvin hat on :





Here's the second one with my George Carlin hat on :


Imagine that I am saying something like "Well, we deserve it !!" in a much funnier way.

And, finally, this one with my Homer Simpson hat on (which, I gotta say, is my favorite hat) :




So, you got great Star Wars tie ins, edge-of-the-seat suspense, a touch of helplessness (can't make a vaccine before the virus mutates and by then it's too late !!) and a pretty diverse range of emotional reactions. I smell a blockbuster !

And if nothing else, at least we got SciAm to sell more copies, right ?