OmegaMom’s fifteen minutes
posted in Blogging, Illnesses, Pop Culture, Science |Andy Warhol famously said everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes. Ah, fleeting celebrity! I have touched upon it. Yes, me–your very own OmegaMom–I have been mentioned by pseudonym in the New York Times.
Okay, it’s not like I was interviewed or anything (thank the Kozmik All!), and in context it sounds like the dude writing the article assumed that I was some type of epidemiologist or physician or something (I don’t even play a doctor on the Internet, folks!), and it was merely cribbing a comment I wrote on someone else’s blog.
How-some-ever. It’s pretty cromulently KEWL to see my very own ‘nym on the pages (hey, a web page is, technically speaking, a “page”, right?) of The Gray Lady herself.
The context: Towards the beginning of the whole swine flu H1N1 pandemic, one of my Twitterers asked if it made sense to deliberately expose oneself and offspring to the new flu now, since it seemed like a mild flu here in the U.S. At the time, I thought it was a totally, absolutely, horribly lousy idea. Now I just think it’s a lousy idea. Anyway, knowing that Revere at Effect Measure was a Good Source of epidemiological answers, I asked in a comment if he’d speak to the “insanity” of doing such. I got a bunch of responses that boiled down to “NO! DON’T DO IT!”
Apparently, now that the swine flu H1N1 pandemic is really seeming to be a generally mild virus (so far) (cross your fingers, knock on wood, throw some salt over your shoulder, and maybe even pray to the Kozmik All), the whole “flu party” idea is spreading, enough so that the NYT got wind of it and decided to check it out with The Experts.
Being a modest sort, I didn’t find this thing on my own; however, Effect Measure got a trackback link out of it, so decided to check it out and report on it. So here’s his take on the question, in more depth.
There it is: My brush with fame. Excuse me while I go hide from the paparazzi.
