The virus is widely being called swine flu although it has components of classic avian, human and swine flu viruses and has not actually been seen in pigs.

Anyone want to suggest a better name? Pigs-have-wings?

‘Cheever: A Life’
By BLAKE BAILEY
Reviewed by GEOFFREY WOLFF
This stunningly detailed biography explores John Cheever’s
crooked path step by stumbling step, disclosing the
addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected
himself and those in his household.

_ NYT

Dead baby discovery ‘hard on police’

It’s not that I don’t understand that police cop it. Talk to one, you’ll find out. But the headline strikes a note we hear incessantly. Everyone covering the fires for the ABC has been all over everybody else asking how they feel. Announcers even ask other announcers. Now as someone who lives in the path of Saturday’s fires, half-an-hour south of St Andrews, where people died, whose house and possibly whose family were spared by a late wind-change, I have a few feelings of my own. They seem to me completely without importance. Have we so much energy to spare from those who are truly suffering and in such terrible need that we should go about cossetting one another? Have we forgotten that there is strength in just getting on with it?

Kenny Rogers, a data security specialist, moved into Mountain House last year, buying a foreclosed property on Prosperity Street for $380,000. But the decline in values has been so fierce that he too is underwater.

He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying. ?Best to wait for a better price, or do without,? Mr. Rogers, 52, said.