Been there, done that

The Gadarene swine take a dive in this Anglo-Saxon tapestry.

Well, I guess I can scratch "contract swine flu" off my to-do list. My case must have been a mild one, but it seems to have passed and I've been fever free since Friday (sorry about the alliteration in the last part of that sentence, although Anglo-Saxons were kind of into that).

Here's the official Goat Rope verdict on H1N1: if it doesn't kill you, it's not that bad. I guess you can say that about lots of things, but in this case it fits. IF your fever doesn't spike and IF you don't develop trouble breathing, it's pretty much like any other flu. The thing I remember most about it is how it made my body feel like I'd been in a pretty decent car wreck, which is something I'm pretty used to as a martial arts person.

I learned one thing from the experience: blogging can be good for your health. After mentioning symptoms in a post last week, a friend and co-worker emailed me about a medicine that could help if taken within 48 hours. I tried it and it helped. Thanks to her and to others who send good wishes.

On the down side, I missed a couple of events I'd been looking forward to. On the bright side, I got to sleep a little more and finish season 5 of The Sopranos.

Now, once more unto the breach...

DEMOGRAPHIC UPDATE. Among those swelling the ranks of the homeless are those who lost everything due to foreclosures.

WAGES are taking a dive.

ARDI'S POLITICS. A leading primatologist ponders human origins here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pigging out

It's official. El Cabrero has been diagnosed with swine flu. So far it's not that bad, at least in comparison with having one's chest split open or getting a catheter you know where.

I had a whole bunch of things scheduled for yesterday into the week ahead but sometimes you get a time out. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, because I could not stop for it, it kindly stopped for me.

Regular posts to resume soon.

The world in a grain of sand

El Cabrero sometimes teaches a night class in sociology somewhere comfortably off the campus of Marshall University. The most recent semester, now in finals week, I taught Deviance and Social Control.

Mostly I do it to get to use the library, wherein I can find all kinds of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore with which to regale the Gentle Reader.

I often find myself bringing works of literature and poetry to class because these can often get to the heart of the matter more quickly and clearly than reams of statistics. In the last few weeks of this class, I've brought in or referred to works by William Blake, Shakespeare, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, and others.

William Blake's poem London, for example, speaks volumes about his time (and ours) in four short stanzas.

Aristotle noted the power of poetry for this kind of thing 2,400 years ago. In the Poetics, he discusses the difference between poetry and history. In modern terms, what he called poetry would include novels, plays and other works of literature, whereas history would include most kinds of nonfiction. He puts it this way

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. [emphasis added]

SINKING LIKE A ROCK. Stagnant or falling wages can make the recession worse, according to Paul Krugman.

WHICH GOSPEL IS THIS IN? A Pew survey found that regular churchgoers were more likely to support torture than those who were less observant.

THE FIRST GARDEN continues to attract attention.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, the ancestor of the current swine flu now sweeping parts of the world has been traced to US factory farms.

ANIMAL UPDATES. Fish may feel pain in ways similar to us, according to a recent experiment. And while we're at it, animals that are capable of voice mimicry also seem to be capable of keeping a beat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED