Once again, in our last episode of Name That Part, two commenters breezed through our challenge with virtually no difficulty at all.
Well, I’m working on some steps to try and throw a greater challenge at you, but it’s going to take some time; adding to that challenge is the fact that I came down with the Infamous Pig Death last week, rendering me even more useless than usual.
Nonetheless, alf and Dr. Dangerously quickly solved our last challenge in bare minutes, once again tracking down the photo. Well done to you both; a pity it was so easy. I promise we’re working on it.
On to today’s Name That Part!
There has been a great deal of panic in the media — and consequently, the public who can’t be bothered to look in to these things more thoroughly — regarding the new strain of H1N1 A, or “Swine Flu”. People are clamouring for vaccines, standing in line for hours, and posting angry missives on their Facebook and Twitter pages whenever they feel they haven’t been treated fairly enough. Should someone be given the vaccine before them, they complain that their life is being placed at risk, and create a Facebook group to protest it. Problem solved!
The media, meanwhile, has made a killing off of this mass hysteria. Without ever reporting a single inaccurate detail, they have managed to make allusions to the Spanish Flu of 1918, and imbued the word “pandemic” with images of uncontrolled death and destruction. While there are similarities to the Spanish Flu — in that it is the H1N1/A virus, and it does have a stronger tendency to impact the healthy middle-aged demographic than the normal flu virus — the media seems to be reluctant to report on the fact that this current pandemic, while more contagious, is even less likely to be fatal than the regular seasonal flu that goes around every winter.
Furthermore, the current strain of the flu would not be so contagious, or such a threat, if we were to follow a certain number of precautions. Simply washing our hands frequently, and taking the precaution of frequently wiping down door-knobs, telephones, water-coolers or other shared public surfaces would decrease the exposure of the virus dramatically. Or, in a revolutionary line of thought, if we’d just stay home from work or school when we’re sick, just as doctors recommend, there’d be little to no chance for a breakout in the first place. But somehow, we just can’t be bothered to listen.
What does all this have to do with today’s Name That Part? Well, that shouldn’t be hard to work out.