I have often gotten ill when the seasons change because folks come out without concern about their own health. AND we used to have a fall convention at a hotel with an, well, questionable atrium. The supports were all wooden, and when all was said and done, they had to condemn that atrium/pool/hot tub area because all the wood was seriously rotten due to the water.

The con moved to a successful spot, though it isn't as much fun as the open atrium hotel. On the other hand, I don't get sick anymore after that convention, so I love the change.

Has anybody smarter than me been looking at the mortality rate versus the infection rate for H1N1 Swine Flu (2009)? I start to, and then I get scared, and then I read that ICUs are running out of beds.

If it's not on the news, it didn't really happen, right?

Happy Halloween.

(Done without Googling, which says something about the junk I carry around in my brain.)

I didn't even know that it wasn't theirs, but you also inspired me to dip into Wikipedia with what threatens to be a morning swallowed up by the Wikisink again.

"I Fought the Law" is a much-covered song originally recorded by Sonny Curtis and The Crickets (post Buddy Holly) in 1959. The song was famously covered by Bobby Fuller Four, who recorded a more successful version of the song in 1965, and by The Clash, who performed and recorded a punk rock version in 1976 and 1977.

Just as the song became a top ten hit, Bobby Fuller was found dead in a parked automobile near his Los Angeles, California home. The police considered the death an apparent suicide; "just about everyone who knew him disagreed",[1] however, believing instead that Fuller was murdered.

The Dead Kennedys, in particular, wrote and recorded a different version as a comment on Dan White's 1978 murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, and White's subsequent use of the "Twinkie defense" to influence the court to convict him of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The song, sung from White's perspective, replaced the line "I fought the law and the law won" with "I fought the law and I won".

In 1989 during Operation Just Cause, when the U.S. Army had Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega confined to the Papal Nunciature, the Vatican's Embassy, and were attempting to flush him out. U.S. Army PSYOPS Units surrounded the compound and used several psychological tactics including flood lights and loud speakers. They played music like "I Fought the Law" loudly and repeatedly from the loudspeakers. The Bobby Fuller Four version of this song is ranked #175 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

"And someone wipe my nose tonight -- chicken soup"
You almost had your hooks in me didn't you dear
You nearly had me roped to drive you home
Bedside-bound, hypnotized
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear
"You're a butterfly
And butterflies get taken home by
Home by cab, tip the hack, bye-bye"

...

"Someone wipe, someone wipe, someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe, someone wipe, someone wipe my nose tonight
Someone wipe my nose tonight..."

On the plus side, influenza rates in the Southern Hemisphere have now returned to normal (below baseline).

Summarised from: http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_10_16/en/index.html

I'm glad that I appear to have only a normal seasonal cold, mainly manifesting as a sore throat, and that even that mostly held off until after I ran my half-marathon the Sunday before last. Still wish it would go away.

Decisions, decisions.

My monkey brain's irrational preference for personal news makes me note that colleagues who work at the big hospital in town are seeing just the same as the WHO reports. There are somewhat more very sick people than in a usual flu season, and a higher proportion of them are young and previously healthy. They aren't currently in any danger of running out of beds or nurses or doctors, though.

I'm pickin up my cold medications
It gives me expectorations
I'm pickin up my cold medications
It gives me expectorations
Good, good, good, good -- 'spectorations

I've gotten my regular flu shot and will be taking Gareth in today to get his.

The researcher who figures out a non-egg method of making flu shots is going to be very popular very quickly.

*"Available" means, naturally, that pretty much all of the current doses have been distributed.

All my sneeze are loud
and my mien is gray
I'm doubled by a cough
on an autumn's day

I'd be safe and warm
if the shots had been this way
influenza dreamin'
on such an awful day

Unfortunately it's my fourteenth this year (I think: I may have missed a few).

Hmm. From this song selection, the demographics skew towards the 35-59 crowd.

And my working team
Sounds like 1918
Stay in bed
Stay in bed
They are whining
With their sniffs
And their coughs
And their coughs
And their aches
Don't come in
Don't come in
You're contagious

Stay in bed
Stay in bed
Zombie, zombie, zombie....

You know, funny thing about Bobby Fuller— there's a blog I read, where the poster's half-brother is Bobby's kid. As his mother was thirteen at the time, it was a big scandal... and his grandfather sometimes claimed to be the guy who killed Bobby Fuller. (Unfortunately, that particular post is 404'd. Pity, that.)

The case was officially left unsolved, as a possible suicide, but one wonders if the police knew or suspected and didn't follow up. (It wasn't the first time Mr. Fuller had a bit of a problem with underage girls, so it might have even been somebody else's dad.)

People stop and sneeze
I can't see their faces
only the whiteness of their masks

I'm going where the public health is
on everybody's brain
Goin' where the customs suit my health
Bankin' on that herd protection
Bailin' from that bad disease
Skippin' over the swine flu 'cause immume.

Everybody's coughing at me
I won't get the flu inside me
Cause I got the H1N1 jab.

(Well, that and my 2.5 y/o nephew really likes the Nutshell Kids songs.)

Just once, I'd like to see a military adventure named something literal like "Operation Cynical Rationalization".

Cold rowers at the
Head of the Charles Regatta
just want to finish.

But it's gonna take fluids
A whole lot of sipping fluids
It's gonna take plenty of fluids
To do it right, child.

And I'm gonna take Advil
The maximum dose of Advil
To keep that fever down
To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it
To do it right, child.

I've got H1N1 flu, I've got H1N1 flu
I've got H1N1 flu, I've got H1N1 flu....

(N.B. When I had Probably Swine Flu, ibuprofen did nothing at all and only acetaminophen kept the fever down and made the awful body aches go away. So YMMV. Advil scanned better.)

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

That shows me
they were dangerous
frozen
and solid

In spite of her sniffle,
Isabel's chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel's chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle,
But when Isabel's snivelly
She's snivelly civilly,
And when she's snuffly
She's perfectly luffly.

--Ogden Nash

Wake up kids
We’ve got the piggies’ disease
At you age it gets you down on your knees
So polite, you cover up when you sneeze

You’ve got the influenza in you
Don’t let go
You’ve got the influenza in you
One pill left
Not sure you’re gonna pull through
Don’t give up
You got a reason to live
Can’t forget
If you don’t get it you can’t give

This whole damn world can fall apart
You’ll be OK, we have a crash cart
You’re in harms way and I’m right behind
Now we’re all dyin’

You’ve got the influenza in you
Don’t let go
You’ve got the influenza in you
One pill left
Not sure you’re gonna pull through
Don’t give up
You got a reason to live
Can’t forget
If you don’t get it you can’t give
Don’t let go
I feel the fever in you

Like Linkmeister @ #8, I got Jim's without Googling; but these two, although I recognised them without assistance, I needed to Google to find out what they were called.

"Zombie" is the song I've known for years as "that one Cranberries song I always recognise but have no idea what it's called". I was rather surprised to learn the title; I wasn't sure what that repeated word in the refrain was, but 'zombie' wouldn't have been in my top five guesses.

The other one, it might not actually be true to say I recognised - having Googled it, I suspect that what I really recognised was the Weird Al Yankovic version.

My 2-year old is just coming out of a documented case of H1N1--she was diagnosed about halfway through what we and our ped. (originally consulted over the phone) thought was a pernicious bout of croup.

She's fine now, except for the requisite, lingering ear-infections and some fatigue, thought the adults of the family are still reeling from serial sleep loss.

So far, the rest of us are okay, but both my 6-year old and I had a sneezing contest this morning . . .

Just Cause was Blue Spoon but one of the Joint Chiefs decided that wasn't the sort of thing people would want to be known for having been in (recall this was going to be the largest combat operation since Viet-nam; and the first Combat Jump for the Airborne since 1972).

My breath is a portend of doom
I cough and colleagues flee the room.
The snot is flowing down my face
And not a bloody tissue in this place...

It was the grippe of the moment
Coughing my bloody lungs out -
The grippe of the moment - I'm back off to bed.

But no, for sleep eludes me still,
I've lots of evening left to kill.
My aches and pains, a constant friend -
Oh God..."Will this never end?"

Cause it's the grippe of the moment
the grippe of the moment
the grippe of the moment ruined my night...

The rest, the soup, the medications all -
Frankly have done me bugger all.
The dawn is coming, nothing to be done
Oh God here comes the f***ing sun...

It was the grippe of the moment
The grippe of the moment
The grippe of the moment ruined my night.

I remember hearing the joke about "Just 'Cause" during the operation itself. I've got to say, the Bush administrations have given us some very ambiguous names for military operations. Consider also Operation "Enduring Freedom". I took it to mean, "Those wogs are going to endure the freedom we give them whether they like it or not".

It's a world full of viruses
And ill-health
Where Ruplithugs want
Heathcare only for wealth-y
A world of no hope
It's a world full of fear
There's so much that we share
H1N1-aware
We've a worldwide plague.

It's a small world after all
(Influenza!)
It's a small world after all
(Influenza!)
It's a small world after all
And we all could die!

There are lots of viruses
Which spread fast
And this new swine flu strain
Won't be outclassed
Hop a plane and go
And in two days' show
It's a niggardly small world!

It's a small world after all
(Let 'em die!)
It's a small world after all
(No money, why bother?!)
It's a small world after all
(Influenza!)
It's a small, small world
(And greedy one, too....)

Now there's that vaccine being made
In batches late and small
And looking out the window now
It might be back to fall,
But with the weather bad last week
And with that snow the freeze
The world is full of nose drips, coughs, and sneeze--

And spread around H1N1
And sick the people get
But in the Congress hear the pols
Who speak with no regret
Healthcare's no right and should no be
Replicans all say,
I guess they want us dead and gone away--

And we who watched with horrror
Back eight years ago and more,
The lies were spreading thick and fast
To start an unjust war
A rathole with a million dead
And trillions wasted--why
As neocons' agenda drained us dry.

And then the crashed economy and bailing rich banks out,
The new poor homeless in the streets
The wealthy get more clout,
The rich keep getting richer and the Congres has health perks,
Who the hell is voting for those jerks?

Hypocrisy is in the House and in the Senate more,
Republicans protecting rape* and torturing and war,
But they hate single payer and the taxpayer who's poor,
Or unemployed, disabled, young, it's sure

Republicans in office have their healthcare public paid,
But the ones who pay for it
For us there is no aid,
The hypocrite Republicans yell "Private Enterprise"
And that is just another of their lies--

Not everyone who has a job has healthcare for a perk,
And what happens to the healthcare when employees lose the work?
Their jobs have gone to India or China or just gone,
But the Congresscritters' coverage stays on--

And there are those who cannot work
Or no job have they found
Or have a job with pay too low for staying above groud
Or maybe costs for healthcare go beyond what they can pay,
And hope they can survive to the next day.

Baby, you know you break my heart when you drip away (You still have to blow)
I said, I said, I said I'll wipe you some other day (You still have to blow)
I said, baby, baby, sneeze, then blow (You still have to blow)
Then blow, blow baby, blow baby
I love you so (You still have to blow)

After SGI, he went to Microsoft to run MSN.

WINNAH!

After SGI, he went to Microsoft to run MSN.

WINNAH!

Fast working drugs could solve my pain
Like an embrace of insurance claims
No breathing [4x]

With every form that came to pass
More phlem appears until my lungs went black
And now there's
No breathing,
No breathing.
And now there's
No breathing,
No breathing anymore.

You disappoint with every claim
The idealistic things i believed
The libertarian died inside of me
No breathing [4x]

You disappoint with every claim
The idealistic things i believed
The libertarian died inside of me
No breathing [7x]
No insurance anymore.

By George, you've got it! We'll outsource Congress! Let's hire some Mongolian herdsmen who have been put out of work by desertification to replace them. We'll set up a call center in Ulan Bator where they can ignore calls from their constituents, and they can vote on bills that won't affect them. Just like Congress today, only cheaper.

So I, I turned around
Oh baby, I know the score
It's swine flu for sure
I'm walking out that door

Well, I've been asleep for, oh, fifteen minutes this week
Oh baby, I could drown
in my own snot
I keep spreading the virus

See people, they don't understand.
No girlfriends, they can't understand.
Your grandsons, they won't understand.
On top of this, I ain't ever gonna understand.

By George III, would that be?

I meant to say before, thanks. I took my last Tamiflu today, and seem to be okay to go out in public (no symptoms for more than 24 hours). But that wasn't any fun at all. Yuck!

Fortunately I haven't actually gotten the flu for a few years. I've had my Seasonal Flu shot, and eventually the flying-swine shots will get here.

Angiportus - 50's about the borderline for the nasal flu vaccine, which is how much of the supply in the US is getting shipped so far, so you'll probably have more trouble finding shots. I had the nasal version a few years ago for seasonal flu, and felt mildly fluish for a couple of days, which I don't get with the injected form. (It was a vaccine-shortage year, and it did mean that I didn't have to feel guilty about taking vaccine away from little kids and old people because the nasal version's not approved for them. But now I'm too old for it, unless they change the rules, which is unlikely for the first year's swine flu experience.)

Any suggestions muchly welcomed.

I'm in the early stages of a head-cold myself. Anyone here know how you're supposed to use a CPAP machine when you can't breathe through your nose? Alternatively does sleeping sitting up avoid the apnea problem?

Mary Aileen:
If you can prop yourself up so that you maintain a good airway (snore free) while sleeping, yes. The problem would be keeping your head in a good position. I use a bead-filled pillow that mushes into a stable headrest when I can't sleep on my side (like in the early stages of my broken shoulder). A position where your head is tilted slightly back and gravity pulls your chin down would probably give you the best chance. I take it that nasal decongestants are out of the question? I suspect that you get to choose between different methods of not sleeping well.

I had a housemate in college who said that the only cold remedy that ever worked well for him was bourbon. It may not actually work any better than the other stuff, but you don't care.

John Houghton @ 69, David Harmon @ 70 Thanks for the suggestions. Codeine was all the doctor prescribed. Yes, I've been using cough drops but once the cough-irritate-cough cycle really got going yesterday, nothing seemed to help. Luckily the various medications did presumably reach a sufficient concentration last night (three doses each of codeine and dextromethorphan hydrobromide, taken alternately during the day) that I was able to get to sleep (the cask-strength single malt probably assisted as well). Eight hours or so without coughing has greatly reduced the irritation, thankfully, although my ribs and diaphragm are sore this morning. Hopefully I'm now over the worst.

Mary Aileen @ 68 Thanks for the sympathies, and mine to you, although I can't offer any suggestions to help.

Glad to hear things are improving. I have found old-fashioned sedating antihistamines to be helpful for an irritated cough (partly by helping me sleep through it).

John Houghton@69:
The failure of codeine to work as an analgesic for some people wouldn't necessarily be relevant to it working for cough. The issue for analgesia is that a lot of the effect of codeine comes from some of it being metabolised to morphine, which has much more effect on the mu-opioid receptor. Some people don't do this metabolic step, so codeine doesn't work for them. The effects on cough are not through the opioid receptors -- dextromethorphan, which works just as well, doesn't have any opioid effects -- and codeine should work without being converted.

I suppose the opioid effects of codeine may help with not worrying about the cough and being able to sleep through it, rather than actually with suppressing the cough.

Results vary. Dextromethophan doesn't do much for me. It's not completely useless, but it's close. Codeine works better, but it makes me *extremely* groggy, and also extremely nauseated unless I'm lying down flat. Useful at night, but that's it. (When I was in the hospital with pneumonia a few years ago, I refused the offered codeine because I couldn't breathe while lying flat. The nurses were not happy with me.)

And, yeah, there's some alcohol content in there too, but if they were just getting high off the alcohol, they'd ACT like a whiskey drunk; they don't, and they DO act like someone who's had some codeine.

Oh. Yeah. And it also doesn't suppress coughs as well as codeine does. Proved that last year with the kid's post-flu bronchitis.

Seriously -- I actually tried that once, when "Robo" hit the news back in the early '90s. I couldn't get hold of any real hallucinogens just then, and that's what the effects were supposed to be like.... so I downed four ounces of Robitussin.

Someone who'd never actually taken LSD, 'shrooms, or such, might well have thought that's what they were supposed to be like... but no. I did indeed get "interesting visuals", notably rainbow halos around everything -- but those weren't hallucinations, they were blatantly side effects of a toxic overdose! There was none of the "softening of the mind" which true hallucinogens produce, no sedating effects either (admittedly, I'm a codeine non-responder), and the whole time I could feel my liver screaming for mercy....

Obviously, I never tried that again, and I've been downright leery of "re-purposed drugs" ever since.

Weirdly, I get that same message even when the "error" is "you have been posting too many comments in a short period of time" -- that is, I had a couple or three comments waiting in preview, and I tried to go through the tabs posting the lot of them.

If you're a codeine non-responder, it's not surprising that you don't get any codeine-like effects from dextromethorphan, either.

I haven't tried large doses of dextromethorphan, only as-directed cough suppressant doses. It's SLIGHTLY effective on my coughs. As-directed doses of codeine cough syrup are notably more effective. I can't report on the psychoactive properties of larger doses of codeine, either, because the amount in a Tylenol 3 will reliably make me toss my cookies, as will Vicodin.

Oddly, this effect does not seem to obtain from opiates administered via other routes.

I knew someone in my local SCA group once who was a field medic. Another acquaintance asked him what he did when people needed to sleep in the field and couldn't; his answer was "Benedryl". Alas, they didn't ask him how much, and were at the point of needing to be towed by a string around the bog toe, like a balloon, metaphorically speaking, when they finally fell asleep. They did sleep very well, though.

That makes it a more-tolerable allergy medicine, though. When I was a kid, Benadryl was pretty much the only one around. Prescription only, but my family kept a stock on hand for emergencies (three of us had severe localized reactions to beesting).

If you're talking about Jim Macdonald's very informative flu post, your teachers probably won't be pleased with you. That's a secondary (possibly a tertiary) source, which is to say Jim pulled information together from a bunch of original and/or authoritative sources and put it in a more convenient and/or entertaining summary format. Your teachers would no doubt prefer you went to the kinds of sources from which Jim learned his stuff originally.

If you're talking about the poetry here in this thread, most of it is pastiche, works of parody derived from copyrighted material (the original songs). I'm very curious as to what sort of school assignment it would be useful for.