Coffee Break

It's nice for a change being able to sit in my non-air conditioned study without melting. Though rather warm again today, it's nowhere near as bad as it was this week past, nor what they're forecasting for the first part of the coming week. Fielwork today was tolerable, though I took care of it very early in the morning and was on the way back to my lab by ten. The early schedule was kept to both evade the heat and to free up as much of the rest of the day as possible.

I haven't done all that much since coming home around 1pm other than a load of laundry and some reading. I'm currently reading John Hersey's "Hiroshima" and "The Great Influenza," the latter of which I picked up during a brief but delightful trip to Barnes and Noble yesterday. While these subjects are perhaps a bit morbid for summer reading, I am just in the mood to read something worthwile and thought-provoking and not the usual silly summer literary fare. "Hiroshima" I read back in the fall of 2000 and I only rediscovered the book last week whilst sorting though a box of old VHS tapes slated to be thrown out. How it got into that box I'll never know, but I was pleased with the discovery.

"The Great Influenza" has been on my list of aquisitions for a while. Working in the health field as I do, combined with my acadmeic background in epidemiology, I suppose such grim fare has a natural, though surely somewhat disquieting, appeal. It's also a timely subject of sorts, given that the global community is facing the possibility of another world-wide flu pandemic when and if the pesky avian flu virus acquires the capability to jump from human to human. If this happens, we're...well....screwed. The threat to civilization posed by "terrorism," as claimed by certain unsavory politicians, is nothing, nothing compared to what such a flu pandemic could do and yet so much money and other resources are expended for the lesser threat.

But let me step down from my soapbox before I launch into poverty, famine, global health, and the wickedness of consumerism. Otherwise this would be a very long post.