Am I missing something?

Sooo...a few months ago the world went insane with the whole "swine flu" chaos. Twitter trending topics and Egypt's "Bacon Elimination" solution incited a mindset that H1N1 would bring about the apocalypse or Ragnarök or whatever other "end of the world" scenario you care to imagine.

Then, it wasn't that bad.

Cool. Awesome. Pigs won't kill us all. Life will go on.

But it's now Tuesday, October 20th, and I feel like I've read 2400 tweets in the last 2 weeks about H1N1. And nobody is panicking at all.

I'm seeing tweets about schools closing in Sioux Falls. I'm hearing about percentages of college students expected to come down with it in the next few weeks/months.

And we're basically just LOLing it off like it's not even happening.

I'm just curious as to what brought about the fairly drastic change of heart. I'm all about NOT getting worked up for things (mostly because forced panic is really off-putting). I just don't get how the entire world went crazy with swine flu fears a few months ago when almost NOTHING was happening, and now that way more people are coming down with H1N1, everyone's ho-hum about it like people are simply stubbing their toes or biting their cheeks.

To be clear, I'm all about making light of serious (or non-serious) issues whenever possible. Sometimes it's just necessary to maintain some sanity. As one of my favorite rappers, Gift of Gab, puts it, "life is insane, so insanity is a sane life." (I recognize that quote's not entirely fitting, but I think it's an awesome line and I wanted to include it.)

Regardless, I'm just looking for opinions on why this whole situation seems to be so trivial now when H1N1 actually does seem to be detrimentally affecting society at the moment. Is it simply because we now know people don't die instantly or turn into pigs and there's no reason to panic? Or is it just something people aren't taking seriously enough (and probably should)? I'm going with the former, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Image c/o bfishadow.

What Stan Lee's done for the comics industry...

Comic Vine is running a contest to win a signed Stan Lee iPod. I'm not sure why he signed an iPod rather than something way more awesome like a picture of one of his characters or something, but I guess (unfortunately) something like an iPod would get more people to sign up and submit than something not as (technically) valuable as a signed image of one of his characters (for that matter, I'd even take a signed picture of him). Needless to say, anything signed by Stan Lee is better than not anything signed by Stan Lee.

That said, the submission requires a text or video description of what Stan Lee has done for the comics industry. Although text is typically my forté (much more so than video), I felt passionate enough about this one to throw it in video form. Hopefully it's not completely awful.

Anyway, here's my opinion of what Stan Lee has done for the comics industry. It goes a bit deeper than his list of characters he created/co-created or the list of important issues he wrote or cartoons he helped develop. It's much more than that. Here goes something...



Those are my thoughts. Hopefully Comic Vine agrees with me and sees my point. Because it's more than characters and comics...it's passion and community shining through in ways that had never been seen. To me, that's a lot more valuable, and it's why the comic book industry is what it is today.

As Stan would say (much, much better than I ever could)... "EXCELSIOR!"