In a recent E.W. Times poll, 45% of Americans aged 18 and over admitted they believed they were suffering symptoms of Swine Flu H1N1 Virus. With a total of fifty-seven confirmed cases and two deaths, hospitals are being swamped by millions each day with flu-like symptoms whom mostly consider themselves the walking dead. “The strange thing is,” Dr Angstrom H. Troubador reports, “Almost all of these people are perfectly healthy, except for the psychological illness that has programmed itself into their brain through evening news.”
Hospitals have begun refusing admittance to any persons claiming to have Swine Flu or even just flu-like symptoms in some instances. “If they even mention the word Swine in my hospital, they’re out,” Dr. Troubador admits. “I used to tell these people to take a break from their televisions, but that seemed to anger them more than anything.” Cultural heresy aside, television has spread a much more dangerous virus than the H1N1.
Hospital waiting rooms nationwide are completely filled with healthy people, leaving no doubt that some of them will contract Swine Flu simply by waiting to get help they don’t need. In the long term, Dr. Troubador expects hospitals to continue closing their doors to Swine Flu patients, even if the pandemic actually begins to spread. “You can’t fool us doctors like you have so easily been fooled yourselves. We won’t EVER treat anyone claiming to have H1N1 virus!”
Category: World
Witness as seemingly unrelated events gradually interconnect to degrade your overall quality of life in America.
Elf Wax Tech Watch is a new segment in which technological trends are examined in depth. Today’s article is how “virtual literacy” relates to the now dead newspaper industry.
Technological change has widely shut down newspapers for the past decade, and today the last paid reporter has punched his clock for the last time. Nobody has reported a word on the issue, but the blogosphere is rampant with rumors and speculation of what actually has just happened. Among most bloggers, the consensus is that youTube is far more effective at spreading news than text. Stupidly, this statement was made on textual blogs, which are next in line after newspapers for total extinction.
The pseudo-literacy of youTubers is obvious in a quick scan of any video’s comments. Has literacy, like the watch, been replaced by new devices? Sure, no one carries pointless watches, because cell phones keep the time and do other things too. They record what happens, transfer it around the place, and with a camera it takes the least of human effort. YouTube might be the newest kind of literacy, because who needs writing when there’s a video of what just happened? Skip the explanation, no time for that in the modern world. Let’s see the police brutality caught on tape.
At some point, the only vestiges of literacy will be txt spk, an abbreviated form of English almost without vowels. In future high schools, students will read Moby Dick on their cell phones in a summarized and abbreviated form. Rather than writing a book report, they will youTube their reflections and leave their classmates taunting and barely-intelligible cmnts.
Their will be one glorious moment in our future where humans no longer have to communicate for themselves and computers will automatically perform all necessary communications so as not to burden the puny human brain. Computers are already set to do all the heavy-lifting for society, soon they’ll do the communicating, so now it’s just time to teach them to flip burgers and cut hair.
Following a recent governmental lapse in Truth, a scrambled message has been intercepted and somewhat decoded. The communication details an alien overthrow of humanity. Elf Wax analysts were able to decipher certain parts of speech and published them. The translation, in its original form follows:
I am from Alpha Centauri, a star of dead rocks.
I am from another dimension. Another time.
You have lived too long. Your bad vibrations are polluting our air waves.
It’s time now. It’s time to burn. We’ll burn you and your sons’ sons. And then we’ll burn up the sun.
With hungry eyes, we’re looking at you lucky few.