don't confuse the narrator

some corner of a foreign hospital research lab

Having worked hard in the garden on Saturday, not realising just how strong the sun was, I was probably fortunate only to feel slightly under the weather yesterday. Sunstroke can be fatal, of course, and is perhaps more likely to be so for those of us who were brought up in colder, wetter, and altogether greyer, northern climes.

So I was interested to read this story about the Brits in Alicante who have worked out what to do if (when?) they die here. Apparently many of the 350,000 who are resident there are donating their bodies to science.
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two hundred and fifty years

I see from the Google UK page that today is the 250th anniversary of Kew Gardens.

Today it costs £13 to get in. I nearly threw a wobbly at the price on my last visit (just over a year ago, when I took the photo) – the poor lad on the gate didn’t understand my objection, but then, he was too young to remember.
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panics and pandemics

Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?

Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.

But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax.
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lying swine

Well, no, of course, it isn’t the pigs themselves who are lying, and I should probably feel guilty about adding to their bad press, but pigs have had plenty of air-time already on this blog and at least this time the post is about humans dying, not – at least not directly – about pigs being slaughtered.

Looking around the web, swine ‘flu is causing all sorts of reactions, from panic, to ridicule. It’s clearly thought to be important by many, as this screen shot from the BBC site indicates:

the good news or the bad news?

More quibbling of headlines, this time in English news. Today, the BBC website leads with WHO raises pandemic alert level.

Which is all very well, but I glimpsed just the headline on another site and had to go and read the story to clarify if this meant more doom and gloom, or if it meant that things were getting better.

After all, if you advertise a product that “raises spirits”, it would do exactly the same as a product that “lifts spirits”. But “raising the alert level” is pretty much the opposite of “lifting the alert”.
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