You may have the flu if you have some or all of these symptoms:

• fever *
• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue
• sometimes diarrhea and vomiting

*It’s important to note that not everyone with flu will have a fever.

Very helpful. If you sometimes get fever, but not always, and you sometimes get diarrhea and vomiting, but not always, that leaves:

• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue

In other words, the Swine Flu could look just like any other non-specific illness. That’s not terribly helpful at all. Maybe the CDC should provide more of a narrative description:

On Day One, you will notice giant red spots on your forehead. Those will grow into huge sweaty red welts. The coughing will be uncontrollable, and you’ll wish you were dead. Then the real fun will start….

At least then I’d know what to look out for. Instead, I have non-specific symptoms and no real way of knowing whether I have the Swine Flu without a tedious trip to the doctor.

So I did a little digging and found some more useful information. I dug through blog post after blog post and compiled these actual, specific symptoms from first hand accounts. If you have any of these, seek medical attention immediately

Swine Flu Symptoms

• An urge to watch Babe and Charlotte’s Web over and over again.
• An overwhelming sense of cannibalism from eating bacon.
• Smelling like Des Moines, IA.
• Random snort and oinking sounds (separate and distinct from your normal Tourette’s).
• Developing a random stutter.
• Falling in love with frogs (or general inter-species romance).
• A tendency toward Stalinism.

So there you have it. An actual, helpful list of warning signs. Now you can consider yourself prepared.

P.S. (For those who missed them, the stutter joke is a reference to Porky Pig and the Stalinism crack is a reference to Animal Farm.)

After a quick trip to the urgent care facility near my house, and a brief consultation with a doctor I could barely understand, I picked up on three things – not strep, ulcers, and something having to do with cold sores. When I got home, I Googled those three terms and discovered a wealth of information about the fascinating world of mouth ulcers.

Now most people are aware of canker sores and cold sores. They’re the nasty little sores that develop on the mouth and gums and on the lips respectively. Canker sores are generally tiny little things, but hurt much more than their size would suggest.

Mouth ulcers are like a canker sore’s really big, mean older cousin with a glandular problem and a short temper. They are likely to attack the throat or tongue as well as the gums. Mine is about the size of a dime and right next to my tonsils. It makes me pray for death every time I swallow. In short, they’re a lot of fun.

I’m sharing this for one reason and one reason only. I had no idea such things existed. I’ve never experienced the joy of a mouth ulcer and hope to God I never do again. They suck. However, I thought I’d throw this out there so anyone who Googles strep, ulcer, and cold sore will know that someone else feels (or felt) their pain.

For instance, I can fall asleep very easily (almost instantly). Mrs. Quip has trouble falling asleep. The difference? Apparently it’s her tendency to completely cover herself with blankets. I always keep my legs outside.

Being overheated can keep you from nodding off, researchers say: A natural nighttime drop in your core temperature triggers your body to get drowsy. To ease your way to sleep, help your body radiate heat from your hands and feet… Don socks to dilate the blood vessels in the extremities ‚Äî then take the socks off and let a foot stick out from under the blankets.

The article is actually full of a lot of good information. Want to avoid airsickness? Avoid the tail section and sit near the wing. Want to avoid germs in public bathrooms? Stay away from the center stall. Where’s the worst place to store medicine? The medicine cabinet where high, steamy temperatures can exceed your medication’s safe storage temp.

My personal favorite, though was this little statistic.

[S]wabs showed up to 10,000 bacteria per square inch on purse bottoms ‚Äî and a third of the bags tested positive for fecal bacteria! A woman’s carryall gets parked in some nasty spots: on the floor of the bus, beneath the restaurant table ‚Äî even on the floor of a public bathroom. Put your bag in a drawer or on a chair, Gerba says ‚Äî anywhere except where food is prepared or eaten. (emphasis mine)

That’s right. Your wife’s or girlfriend’s purse is likely trekking the poo right into your house and kitchen – and they say men are the unclean gender.

Two things became crystal clear to me as a result. First, I have spent more time sick since the birth of my two year old than I had in almost my entire life up to that point. Second, I honestly believe that my son is a magnet for the only the most debilitating diseases. He doesn’t bring home the normal, every day run of the mill cold bug. There’s no 24 hours of sneezing and that’s it. He brings home the granddaddy germs. He tracks in the worst of the viral strains. He must carefully identify and capture only the nastiest of bacteria to pass on. When he brings the evil, he really means it.

At any rate, I’m back among the living. I am heavily medicated on antibiotics and Codeine laced cough syrups.

I’ll jot some thoughts later on some of the goodies I’ve missed while out of it. I can’t possibly let Britney’s VMA performance go without a comment and I’ve been laughing my ass off all morning at the sorry state of one O.J. Simpson. But I’ll get to that. In the meantime, the Robitussin’s on me.

As soon as the family and I recover, I’ll get back to writing. Hopefully this will be in time for my thoughts on tonight’s season finale of Lost to still be relevant.

The question for Republicans — who are increasingly worried by the disconnect between those two sets of numbers — is whether voters can be convinced before they go to the polls in November that a) the economy is doing well; and b) that their Member of Congress deserves to be re-elected because of it.

The answers (despite my slim thread of optimism about our turnout machine above) I fear are NO and NOT LIKELY.

Having just spent some time hanging out back home, with people who don’t follow politics the way this town does, I sense that Americans are hugely uneasy. As a result, their thoughts on the economy cannot be extracted and viewed separately from their thoughts on the world in general. They view it all together, and it’s not a pretty picture.

They see job numbers and the market rising, and they feel good. But they see gas at $3.25 a gallon, and a war in the Middle East that shows no signs of ever ending, and they feel bad.

They truly believe that same war could, given the wrong bit of fuel, quickly become a conflagration that consumes much of the region with our sons and daughters stuck in the middle. What’s worse, is they have lost any pretense that the war was justified.

They see their fellow Americans wiped out in New Orleans (N’awlins for my wife’s family) and a government that couldn’t, and largely still isn’t, helping.

They see dire warnings of a coming disease and feel a fear that is fed by the near constant alarm bells sounded by the government, but they have no faith that the government that is scaring them can protect them.

They see corruption run amok through both parties in Congress from Abramoff to Patrick Kennedy getting off for an offense that would cost them a license.

They see immigration as a huge issue, but see Washington torn between two simplistic solutions – let them all come in regardless of their illegal entry, or round them all up and throw them back over the wall. Neither is workable, but both sides refuse to concede that their plan sucks and refuse to discuss alternatives.

It’s against that backdrop that the GOP must convince the populace that the economy is going great – and it may be. The trouble is, there’s too much else that makes us question the direction in which our nation is heading. That, despite any turnout effort, really does turn this into a game of limiting losses more than of trying to win.

Now we have the bird flu. The media and the government have done a fabulous job of terrifying the public. So now I have a month supply of canned goods, water and other essentials stored under my stairs next to enough duct tape and plastic to cover my whole house..

I was only six the last time we freaked out over a breed of virus that was supposed to wipe us out. The government handled that one beautifully. The immunization killed more people than the virus, but that’s ok. It was dealt with in typical government fashion – fix it until it’s broken, then fix it again.

The one person who seems to have this whole thing in perspective, and the one guy getting the least media attention, is apparently the one guy that we should listen to the most. He’s not a professional bureaucrat like the head of HHS. He’s an expert on infectious disease at the National Institute of Health. What’s his take?

“It won’t be what you see in countries in which there is no regulation, in which there is no incentive to compensate farmers, in which the people, who are so poor, when they see their chickens are getting infected they immediately sell them or they don’t tell anybody because they don’t want them culled,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci [the National Institutes of Health's infectious disease chief] said in Tuesday’s interview. “That is a critical issue that is fundamentally different than what we see in Western Europe and that we will see in the United States.”

It is entirely conceivable that this virus is inherently programmed that it will never be able to go efficiently from human to human,” Fauci said. “Hopefully the epidemic (in birds) will burn itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of being more efficient in going from human to human.”

If not, we can practice unnatural selection by killing off our own with an unnecessary immunization the way we did in ’76.

Go Government!