It's early in the morning and after dreaming about cats committing suicide I'm seeing the morning papers online as I drink my coffee. The flu...so 1)it's spreading fast this year (per the CDC the flu has hit a wider percentage of people than in 1976!!!) and 2)The vaccine this year is kind of wrong.

If you've ever gotten a flu shot then you've read the explanation sheet...the flu changes a little bit all the time and the flu that one gets in September is different than the flu one would get the following May. That's why vaccines are encouraged for EVERY year, unlike, say, smallpox which is stable ("drift" is what the flu is doing). Not sure how they go about guessing what the flu will be like in the fall when they begin manufacturing the vaccine but apparently they guessed wrong; the flu that's doing its thing is different from the vaccine.

Cheery statistic-around 35,000 Americans die of the flu every year.

On another note, apparently a journalist went undercover and got a job as a servant in Buckingham Palace. Undercover reporting is pretty much dead in the US, killed by lawsuits. Interesting that it's okay to go undercover as a journalist in the UK but not talk about what Prince Charles was *allegedly* doing with that servant. If only THAT servant had been an undercover journalist...

And, as always, I'm fascinated by Michael Jackson (and how ironic that the name of the album he released is "One More Chance") We, as a society, disagree on all sorts of things but can't we agree that it is not okay for adults to share their beds with adolescents?

And here's a cool thing from the BBC about Bush's kick-ass limo