Listening to the news… I already posted some random inspirations it led me to this morning. Between some reports I heard yesterday and some more reports I heard today, put them together and this is what you get:

• The H1N1 flu shot is now available for nearly everyone in the GTA today, and tomorrow will be fully available across the GTA.
• This is because the testing is done and they have concluded the swine flu shot is safer than the normal flu shot.
• So far over 2,500,000 people in Canada have received the H1N1 flu shot this year.
• So far over 30 people have been hospitalized due to serious complications from / reactions to the H1N1 flu shot this year.
• So far this year, only one person has dropped dead due to serious compications from / reactions to the H1N1 flu shot.

So the H1N1 flue shot has a 1 in 2.5 million chance of killing you within a few minutes of having it. And better than a 1 in 83,000 chance of making you seriously sick.

You have less chance of winning the lottery than you do of dropping dead from the H1N1 flu shot. In fact, you could die 5 times from the flu shot before winning the lottery just once. And people still buy lottery tickets. And are lining up to get flu shots.

And this is ’safer than the regular flu shot’. I don’t know the figures but I wonder how many people per million die every year from the regular flu shot?

See, this is why I don’t like needles.

My strategy is, once everyone else has had their flu shot, I will be safe since nobody else will be able to infect me with it.

And incase you’re wondering – these aren’t madeup numbers, these were from some guy at the Ministry of Health giving a press release – he’s pleased with the performance of the vaccine. The same guy who is pleased with the performance is the one who said that only one guy was killed by it, that only some 30 or 35 people were hospitalized by it (I think the exact number was 36). He also mentioned that if you are  going to react to it, this usually happens in the first few minutes so it’s ok since you’ll be right where the medical people are already at.

I was listening to the news this morning on the way in to the office. Mostly it was the usual stuff – blah blah blah traffic blah blah weather blah blah economy blah. But there were two stories that caught my attention and made me think a bit.

First up, it seems that the pressure is on to be green and eco-friendly even after we’ve expired. Planting dead people in the ground isn’t very good, for one thing it renders large expanses of land unusable (*) plus as they decay, all the toxins and poisons that they absorbed over their lives leaches back into the environment and can potentially enter the water-table and surrounding ecosystem.

Cremation is chosen by roughly 50% of all Canadians, but this doesn’t solve the problem, it merely takes all the toxins and poisons out at once and sends it up the chimney to enter the environment immediately – plus, the process uses a large amount of energy (both fossil fuels and electricity).

So there is now a company that has pioneered and is offering a ‘green’ and ‘eco-friendly’ alternative. They will liquify the dearly departed, and then pour them into the municipal water treatment system to be purified and re-enter the environment that way.

Still, the thing that hit me was there is an enormous difference between “Let us scatter our loved one’s ashes…” and “Lets all gather round the toilet and flush the dead guy.”

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(A new TV show that I’d like to see.)

Not long ago, someone told me about a “reality tv” show called “Survivor”, where a bunch of “contestants” have to do made-up challenges and eventually someone wins some money. From how it was explained to me, it’s not really about survival so much as watching average people act like goofs on television, while saving the studio loads of money they’d otherwise have to spend on scripts and writing and quality.

This gave me an idea for a new television show, one where people were in actual life-and-death survival situations. This is the survival show I’d like to see:

You take two teams, 12 people per team. They are average people, just a random selection from whomever applied to be on the show. The directors can pick the ones that will give the most ‘drama’ or be the ‘best tv’ or whatever. As long as none of them are trained survivalist professionals. Once the two-dozen contestants are selected, they get divided into teams by luck of the draw (or by the director setting up who they think will make for good tv.) Then we assign three ‘experts’ to each team. Each team will get two cameramen who are experienced in wilderness survival and wilderness photography. Then each team will be assigned a ‘captain’.

The first team gets Les Stroud, from the Survivorman series. The second team gets Bear Grylls from the Man vs Wild series.

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My little golden snail, whom I have been worried about for some time now, finally passed away. In the six or seven weeks I’ve had her, she seldom ate, and had not grown at all. For the past fortnight she almost never ate and was growing visibly weaker.

Although I hardly knew her, I’ll miss her. Goodbye little cutie.