Health Watch
Thanks for your expressions of concern! I'm a bit better today, though no longer so sure that my illness was the result of food poisoning—I have a feeling it's some sort of flu. Anyway, the worst seems to be over, and I'm left now with a feeling of exhaustion and kind of low-grade headache. Which is to say I'm kinda-sorta blog-capable.
Some thoughts for today:
Did you read the story in the Times about the West Virginia miner's farewell note?
As he lay dying, 51-year-old Martin Toler Jr., a grandfather, took an insurance form—an insurance form!—from his back pocket and a pencil and wrote, "It wasn't bad, I just went to sleep." And then: "I love you."
It occurs to me that this act is not just exceptionally moving, it could be truly selfless—I don't think that suffocating to death is quite the same as just going to sleep, and Toler seems to have been doing his best to make sure that his loved ones were not haunted by his death. The handwriting on the note is heartbreaking: crude, fragmented, unpunctuated. (I would guess that the miners were in complete darkness when it was written.) It's signed "Jr.".
Compare that act of bravery to Microsoft's act of cowardice: After the Chinese government complained about a blogger's coverage of a newspaper strike, Microsoft pulled the plug on the blogger's MSN account.
Again, from the Times: "Microsoft drew criticism last summer when it was discovered that its blog tool in China was designed to filter words like 'democracy' and 'human rights' from blog titles. The company said Thursday that it must 'comply with global and local laws.'"
A flack for Microsoft says: "This is a complex and difficult issue," said Brooke Richardson, a group product manager for MSN in Seattle. "We think it's better to be there with our services than not be there."
I'm sure that's true. And yet, Microsoft doesn't seem to be putting up very much of a fight, does it? Much better to talk about its pathetic new music service, "Urge," which looks bound to be a flop, or its desire to integrate TV and the Internet.
Just so long as you can't talk about important stuff like "human rights" and "democracy."
