Some quick factoids of past flu pandemics:

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 remains the most devastating outbreak of modern times - infecting up to 40% of the world's population and killing more than 50m people, with young adults particularly badly affected.

In 1957 the Asian flu killed two million people. Caused by a human form of the virus, H2N2, combining with a mutated strain found in wild ducks. The elderly were particularly vulnerable to this flu.

A 1968 outbreak first detected in Hong Kong, and caused by a strain known as H3N2, killed up to one million people globally, with those over 65 most likely to die

Is this 2009 Mexican Swine Flu going to get as bad as the ones listed above? I think we will all know in the next week or two. What are your thoughts? Are you worried about this outbreak of swine flu?

Sources: BBC

I came across this homemade inukshuk while walking near the river on a bright sunny day, and thought I'd snap a photo of it.

Inukshuk means "in the likeness of a human" in the Inuit language. They are monuments made of unworked stones that are used by the Inuit for communication and survival. The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is "Someone was here" or "You are on the right path."

If interested you can see many photos of traditional inuksuk in this galleryek's blessings for me is that I am starting to finally feel a bit better, and the weather here is just glorious putting everyone in a much better mood I think.

Overall despite the past trials with my health I feel in the last few years that I am finally on the right path for me, and that too is a blessing.

Thanks for visiting, and hope you are having a wonderful weekend, and week ahead!

Blog Your Blessings

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X+
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X+
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X+
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total read: 35
Total I want to read: 3
Total I love: 13

The Unofficial Earth Day Flag

Happy Earth Day! Can you believe that it has been almost 40 years since the very first Earth Day celebrations? According to Wiki sources Earth Day was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in in 1970. Since that time many countries have joined in on Earth Day festivities.

Are you planning on doing anything special to mark today? When the kids were smaller I liked to take them to events around the city that promoted environmental causes. I hope that they in turn will pass this tradition onto their own children someday.

"EARTH DAY is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.

EARTH DAY draws on astronomical phenomena in a new way – which is also the most ancient way – using the vernal Equinox, the time when the Sun crosses the equator making night and day of equal length in all parts of the Earth. To this point in the annual calendar, EARTH DAY attaches no local or divisive set of symbols, no statement of the truth or superiority of one way of life over another. But the selection of the March Equinox makes planetary observance of a shared event possible, and a flag which shows the Earth as seen from space appropriate."

- Margaret Mead

Happy 83rd birthday wishes for our Queen Elizabeth II! Today is her actual birthday, her "official" birthday is in June. Since the 18th century, British monarchs have been publicly celebrating their birthdays in June, no matter when they were actually born, in hope of good weather for public events.

The King's Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery will fire a royal salute at noon today in Green Park in central London to mark the occasion.

Happy Birthday!

What do you buy the Queen for her birthday????

The Ontario Fire Marshal's office is investigating a fire that gutted the historic Red Barn Theatre in Jackson's Point, Ont.

Canada's oldest professional summer theatre has been gutted by a fire.
The Red Barn Theatre in York Region near Lake Simcoe went up in flames around 11:00pm, Saturday. By the time the fire was put out the entire structure was charred rubble, the Toronto Star reports.

Thankfully, no one was injured.

The Barn was at least 130-years-old and has been operating as a theatre since 1949.

This is very, very sad news for historians, and theater lovers.

Source: 680 News

It has been about 5 weeks since I've had radiation therapy, and I'm still not feeling 100% in fact I am feeling at about 50% and that is on a good day. I am still very hyperthyroid, and back to see the Endo in approx. 3 weeks. Hopefully by that time I will be feeling a bit better. I was able to do a little bit of blogging this week as you can see, and feel pretty good about that. I do miss the blogosphere.

Thanks for visiting, and hope you are having a wonderful weekend, and week ahead!

Blog Your Blessings

I came across this news story, and wanted to share it.

Here is a snippet from the BBC:

More than 200 people have attended the funeral and burial in north Kent of an unknown teenage girl who was decapitated about 700 years ago.

Her remains were found by an archaeologist on unconsecrated ground next to Hoo St Werburgh Parish Church, near Rochester.

Her head had been placed by her side, suggesting she may have committed suicide or been executed for a crime.

Her body has now been reburied in the church's main graveyard.

The girl was affectionately named Holly by church officials because her remains were found beside a holly tree used over many years to decorate the church at Christmas.

Read More

Whatever was the true cause of her death it is obvious that this girl came to some horrific end so many centuries ago. The fact that she was reburied with ceremony was a very nice, and appropriate gesture in my opinion.

While I have been taking time off of blogging to recuperate from a medical procedure I have been indulging my book wormishness, and catching up on my must-read list. Currently I am enjoying Marianne Faithfull's Memories Dreams and Reflections.... a sorta sequel to her autobiography Faithfull.

Here is a snippet:

Anecdotal, conversational, intimate, and revealing, this is the iconic artists' raw and honest account of her life, her friends, her triumphs, and mistakes. A wry observer of her slightly off-kilter world, Marianne muses nostalgically about afternoons languishing on Moroccan cushions at George and Pattie Harrison's, getting high and listening to new songs. She fondly recalls the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; is frequently baffled at her image in the press (opening the paper to read of her own demise: "Sixties Star in Death Plunge"); is terrified by the curse sent by Kenneth Anger; and is mortified by her history of reckless behavior, not to mention her near-death experience in Singapore while looking for an opium den. Legendary characters from Henrietta Moraes and Donatella Versace to Sofia Coppola, Juliette Greco, and Yves St. Laurent's dog show up in this anecdotal memoir that spans from the dark side of the 1960s to the bright side of the 1990s, the latter of which saw her collaborating with the likes of Blur and Jarvis Cocker. This is as intimate a portrait as we've ever had of Marianne, as she meditates on sex and drugs, confronts her alter ego, the Fabulous Beast, and faces her own mortality in her battle with breast cancer.

This is definitely a fun romp, and I am enjoying seeing her life through her eyes as opposed to what the popular media perceives her. If you are interested in picking up a copy you can get one from our History Nook for around $10.00 bux.