The Stand

[Callie McAllie]

A book by Stephen King. Have you read it? About a flu-like plague that sweeps the country, and the ultimate battle of good and evil for control of what's left.

I just started re-reading it, because with this swine flu stuff going on, I cannot get it out of my head. Part of my thinks this flu is just overblown media hype, but part of my thinks maybe it is necessary for something like this to cut down our numbers, force us to rethink our way of life, rethink what's important, change our pace, cut back our carbon emissions, etc. What a horror, though.

Yesterday I was in the bank and some little college coed was trying to cash in her pesos for american currency. Pesos? What? Are you crazy? She's waving these bills around and the tellers are all handling them and I'm breathing into my sleeve, trying to get out of there as fast as I can! Doused myself with hand sanitizer as soon as I got back to the car.

:rofl:

[rosesaylavee]

1. That book is why I don't read Mr. King anymore.

Seriously. I think it stopped my whole family from binging on his books. Doesn't it have the Dude in it or some such character who walks around in a malevolent fog. I never finished it. Just too too awful a story to finish for me.

My mom used to laugh about Salem's Lot - she had had horrible dental work early in life and in the last decade of her life when she read that, she had gone to complete set of dentures, no real teeth. She thought that perhaps would prevent her vampire career if she ever were bitten.

[Callie McAllie]

2. It actually ends well

I never read Salem's Lot though. Just heard Eminem rap about it.

"Mom, I love you, but
this trailer's got
to go. I cannot
grow old in Salem's Lot."

[Myrina]

3. I have been trying to get folks to read it for a few years ...

.... I've just had that feeling that 'the next bad thing' that came along would be some gov't experiment run amok ... and the ultimate forces of light and dark would be left to sort things out ...


:tinfoilhat:

[SheilaT]

4. The original version of The Stand

is vastly better than the longer "updated" one that came out some years later.

I'm trying to figure out if you are serious about freaking out that someone at your bank was trying to convert pesos to dollars.

[davsand]

5. The Stand completely freaked me out when I read it.

I was just past the point in the book where everyone had died off. I'd spent all that time reading about how The Superflu was passed from person to person, I had read in great detail about the "summer cold" that people passed around to each other--and I was at the grocery store buying some stuff.

The lady in front of me in the checkout line turned around and sneezed on me (I think she didn't realize I was there.) I almost ran out of the store screaming because it was SO much like how the book described the transmission of that flu.

That book carried a very real impact and given how on edge people are right now with all this Swine Flu stuff, I would not be shocked to hear that The Stand is freaking out people again.

:shrug:


Laura

[SheilaT]

7. Keep in mind that the book is fiction.

There's a sort of plausibility to it, but it's still fiction.

[davsand]

9. If course it is fiction. It plays off a fear that a lot of people carry.

The reason ANY fiction works is because you (the reader) feel some affinity for either the character(s) or for the subject matter. In the case of The Stand, I think the idea of some engineered virus getting out and killing people struck a chord with me. The Andromeda Strain was another of those type of stories and THAT creeped me out at the time too.

YMMV, but I read mostly for entertainment. King's stuff is great fun and in a few cases it is pretty well done. The Stand was one of those success stories for King.


Laura

[Callie McAllie]

8. Not totally serious

I was certainly aware of it. I didn't say anything. But I did use the hand sanitizer afterward. I was wondering, as I often do, how some people survive in this world, as clueless as they are. ]

Yeah, serious.

[northernlights]

6. I never read the book

actually, I've never read any Steven King. I've only seen a couple of his movies...I don't generally like them. Maybe my real life has been too traumatic to deal with made up trauma. :D

It's ok, Callie, if you freaked out at the bank. There is a *lot* of what I call "free-floating anxiety" out there in some places these days, made all the worse by media hype. It is all too easy to pick up on it. I can imagine a young drama queen's high energy leaking all over the place and contaminating someone standing nearby. Shrill little girl's voices are enough sometimes to do it to me. I know they do it to my old gelding! :rofl:

At this point in time, per the CDC rep, the swine flu does not have the virulence factors to pose a significant threat to healthy people. It could come back mutated in a much more virulent form next flu season...or not. For that matter, avian flu had its first human-to-human transmission last year and *it* could mutate into an easy human-to-human strain that is already highly virulent with a 30% mortality rate. That is why the CDC and WHO are taking the kinds of actions that they are. Part of it literally is to test out the procedures and systems that were put into place in the event of a serious pandemic.

[Shallah Kali]

10. Selenium & Vitamin E cut down on viral mutations - Selenium also cut lung damage in flu infected mic

Selenium Curbs Colds and Flu

Getting adequate selenium in your diet or from your multivitamin could help you and everyone around you stay healthier this cold-and-flu season. In lab studies, researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill found that when viruses pass through bodies deficient in selenium they can mutate into more damaging forms (The FASEB Journal, published online, Apr 27, 2001).


"It's always been known that when people are not well nourished, they tend to get sick," says coauthor Melinda A. Beck, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and nutrition at the university's school of medicine and public health. "But these results indicate that nutritional deficiencies can help transform a virus into something more dangerous, something that can then infect even those with a healthy diet." Earlier studies have shown that the same danger accompanies a vitamin E deficiency, Dr. Beck notes.

Selenium Deficiency Increases Severity of Flu Virus in Mice

The researchers reported today in the FASEB Journal on the web that the mice getting selenium-deficient diets developed significantly more lung pathology than the animals getting ample selenium. The deficient mice had significantly more inflammation in their lungs, and the inflammation lasted much longer.

Selenium is a critical part of a major antioxidant enzyme that humans and animals produce to protect delicate cellular components against damage from oxygen free radicals. Americans get ample selenium in their diets, according to ARS nutritionist Orville A. Levander. Good sources include Brazil nuts, whole grain products and meat. But deficiencies can occur in parts of China, New Zealand and other nations where agricultural soils lack this element.

In a way I find it painfully ironic that the smithfield factory farm swine flu could probably have been prevented by things that people should do anyway. No factory farms and feed farm animals proper nutrients. Add to that it and other regular flu virus which kills thousands in the US each year their spread would be greatly reduced by people property washing their hands and also getting enough basic nutrients including Selenium, Vitamin D, & Zinc. Things that should be done anyway as a matter of course, doctors and such should be teaching teaching about and insisting on instead of waiting until the fit hits the shan and stockpiling antivirals which increase the risk of secondary infection, cause bad side effects in kids and are increasingly ineffective against mutating virisues.

I don't think changing the world requires tragic circumstances and refuse to give that Thoughtform any more energy. It already gets plenty from all the end timer fundamentalists empowering it. At this point i figure reality will split as it has many times before and some people will go to one alternate earth where they have all the death and destruction their nightmares can continue to conjer up and others will have a less drastic change as a series of small steps end up creating great big healthy change that effects the whole world. I think the election not being stolen this time is one sign this reality is possible. Peaceful change vs storming the bastile or simialr.

[kentauros]

11. The Hot Zone

Never read that book, nor anything by King, but I did see the miniseries and the movie from The Hot Zone - Outbreak.

And then there's The Andromeda Strain ;)