News of the Day

Lenten thanks, Day 9

I thank God for the prolific orange trees in the back yard, which despite being battered by hail and hard frost still provide enough vitamin C to kill an army of rhinoviruses.

Too diseased today to write anything original. So let’s entertain ourselves with a cruise through a page of the endlessly entertaining Google News.

Tragedy strikes in Appleville: writing for The Telegraph, British columnist Christopher Williams bemoans the shortage of iPad 2 parts, some of which emanated from Japan. Needless to say, the dwindling supply of Japanese compasses and ultrathin batteries threatens the future of personkind. One commenter on this effete little piece remarked drily, “Until iPads become edible, they are of no real importance in the current circumstances.”

BBC observes that the doctrinaire demagogues in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted to cut funding to National Public Radio. Public media being s-o-o-o-o-o-cialism and good investigative reporting invariably being LIBeral (nevermind that it’s scarcer than fur on a chicken’s egg these days), we should all be grateful for this heroic effort to get rid of all that, so more voting Americans can cast ballots without bothering their sweet heads with things like facts. It might be noted that public broadcasting is not just for the intelligentsia; more than half of Americans access it every month. The Senate has yet to vote on this issue, and so it’s not too late to write to your elected representatives. Go to 170 Million Americans for more information.

If you weren’t already afraid, very afraid, get ready for real terror: America is becoming a Hispanic country! Oh, the horror. Just as it became an Irish country after the potato famine, a Polish country during the waves of Eastern European immigration, a Chinese country while the railroads were being built, a Welsh country while we were importing miners to rip ore out of the earth…heaven help us!

In Japan, a country in no danger of turning Hispanic (yet!), 7,000 people have been confirmed dead, the government has raised the danger level at Fukushima a notch, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls the situation “grave.”

That notwithstanding, the Japanese stock market is recovering as the Bank of Japan and G7 countries intervene on the falling yen. Just the other day, Frugal Scholar was worrying about the ethics of taking advantage of investing as markets tumble in response to a disaster. Now’s the time, folks, to buy stock in companies that produce the supplies that will be needed to rebuild Japan.

Citizens of the globe don’t put much stock in their governments’ soothing words about the potential meltdown of not one, not two, not three, but four nuclear reactors. Despite world leaders telling their people don’t worry, be happy, consumers as far away from Japan as Great Britain are racing to buy potassium iodide, a substance said to block the uptake of radioactive iodine. Better buy some stock in the companies that make that stuff, too!

Speaking of the Brits, the Prince of Wales is spending a great deal of energy saving a variety of red squirrel native to Great Britain.

Faced with the threat of invasion by UN forces to “protect civilians,” Libya has declared a cease-fire. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Stem cell research, that bane of the right-threaded wingnut, is now poised to save many right- and left-wing lives. Injecting stem cells into the hearts of cardiac arrest victims can bring scarred heart tissue back to normal. This astonishing development promises to relieve untold suffering and restore health to millions of people.

Now…if only we could come up with a cure for the common cold…