Happy Flu Year!

The best way to start a new year is with a winning lottery ticket. I sure failed on that note, but I managed to spend the holidays largely unplugged from the world and its concerns, which was a winning move in its own right. So don’t ask me what’s going on, I pretty much don’t know. Still, a few items have come my way, and I’ll note a few of them:

1). The year 2014 didn’t go out with a bang. It went out with a sneeze. And it sprayed its cooties all over 2015. Poor 2015, it never had a chance.

And neither did many of us, for that matter, which is why NyQuil probably out-sold champagne in many places. Cheers, and “Happy Flu Year!”

Although the yearly cycle of flu worries often point to Asia (I’ve heard of the Hong Kong flu, but never the Wichita flu), the mainland U.S. seems like it’s getting a lot of the attention this time around. The largest national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, are running pretty serious stories about this, and local news sources all over the place are carrying stories as well.

A couple of days it was declared an epidemic in the U.S.

This flu crossed paths with some family and friends, and it sure is a doozy. The strain at issue apparently did an end-run around the vaccination recipe this year; such are the ways of mutation and natural selection. Slippery little bugger, this flu.

And it can be a tenacious one, too. I know a few people, young and strong, who have been grappling with this doggone bug for weeks.

I asked a nurse in management about this stuff. She told me that she sees the specter of pneumonia as the biggest threat here, particularly for folks who already have health vulnerabilities, but she also said it’s too early to tell if this flu season is really going to be any worse than average.

2). There’s a bit of comet fever in the air again, this time due to Comet Lovejoy, or, if we want to sound fancier, C/2014 Q2. It’s been easy enough to catch in telescopes, and my pals and I have done that, but reports are that it may get naked-eye visible in the coming week. Saipan is very much in the running for this action.

I don’t know if I’ll dedicate more ink to it next week. For now I’ll just offer a heads-up since, if you’re interested, the Web is alive with news about it.

I’ll note that the comet in the general neighborhood of Rigel, a bright star in the constellation Orion. Rigel is Orion’s foot. Whether naked-eye visible or not, Comet Lovejoy should be a juicy binocular object, so if you can scrounge a pair of binocs over the next week or so, you should be well-rewarded for the effort.

This part of the sky is in the low eastern sky in early evening. So this isn’t a case where you have to put on a pot of coffee at 3am in order to see some cosmic eye candy.

All comets are moving relative to the backdrop of the stars, so Lovejoy and Rigel won’t have the same relative arrangement from one night to the next. But, again, the Web is the answer here; it has charts that can convey in a glance what would take a lot of blah-blah-blah here to express.

Unfortunately, the moon will be washing things out a bit with its light, but it shouldn’t be a deal-killer in this case.

Here’s something cool: The comet was discovered by an amateur (Terry Lovejoy, of Australia) using a fairly small telescope (8 inches). Comet-hunters have a long history of discovering a lot of stuff, not just comets.

3). A manager in a large company told me that upon returning to the office after a one-week Christmas vacation, it took her three hours to plow through her backlog of email.

She reports that the equivalent task in pre-cyber days would have taken 30 minutes, at most. Here’s my beach chair thought on the topic: Email is essentially free, but, paradoxically, this is what makes the “second-order” costs so high.