Danehy

Some stuff I need to mention before we get into the holiday
season:

• Is this a great time to be an Arizona Wildcats football fan,
or what? Only one Pac-10 team is ahead of Arizona in the standings, and
a home game with that first-place team is coming up. We need to bask in
this right now, because the Cats will probably be underdogs in three of
their last four games, and the one game they’ll be favored in, against
Arizona State, is always a toss-up.

A lot had been made about their going 35 days between home games
earlier in the season, but this has shaken out quite nicely. Of course,
reality might come crashing down over the next four weeks, but for this
moment in time, it’s pretty sweet.

• I was watching the news the other day, and they showed this
bad car crash on the northwest side. Guy Atchley (or Kristi Tedesco,
I’m not sure which) said, ‘The crash occurred on La Cholla, right in
front of Northwest Hospital.”

Then, Heather Rowe (or Dan Marries) said, “The injured driver was
taken to University Medical Center.”

What the heck?! You’re right in front of a hospital. Who cares if
there’s a trauma center someplace else? I’m bleeding here!

• Somebody sent me a CD to review with no picture of the
artist. I listened to it, and it sounded like late-’60s Motown, with
maybe some Chi-Lites thrown in. The instrumentation sounded like the
Funk Brothers, who backed up the Motown groups; it even had that echo
sound to it.

The singer’s voice reminded me of Eddie Kendricks (the high-pitched
Temptations member who sang “Get Ready” and “Just My Imagination”). The
music is sweet soul, basic and simple, with clever hooks and
almost-innocent lyrics. (On “Make Her Mine,” he sings, “I may not be a
rich attorney, but I’ll win my girl’s heart in the trial of love.”)

He even does a song called “I Wish It Would Rain.” It’s not the
Temptations’ song of the same name, but an equally heartbreaking ballad
of lost love.

So anyway, I love the CD, and I’m listening to it all the time. It
sounds so much like the stuff I grew up on that it actually makes me
smile.

The other day, I finally saw a picture of the guy. His name is Mayer
Hawthorne, and he looks like the love child of Buddy Holly and Pee Wee
Herman. He even plays up his nerdiness. I don’t care if he’s goofing on
us; if he is, it’s a brilliant goof.

The CD is A Strange Arrangement. Give it a listen.

• Letter-writer Chuck Aubrey took me to task for my contention
that the swine-flu vaccinations of 1976 didn’t cause
Guillain-Barré syndrome. He’s sorta right, but mostly not. I
shouldn’t have said that the widely held belief that the mass
vaccinations caused some people to contract Guillain-Barré is
not true. I should have said that there is absolutely no evidence to
prove that it is true.

My side in this is the easy (and smart) one to take, because
nobody knows what causes Guillain-Barré syndrome. Experts
think that something (perhaps a severe infection) triggers an
auto-immune response that begins to attack the body. According to the
National Institutes of Health, “No one yet knows why
Guillain-Barré syndrome—which is not
contagious—strikes some people and not others. Nor does anyone
know exactly what sets the disease in motion.”

Mr. Aubrey quoted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
which offered this classic nugget of CYA and hedging:

Because GBS cases are always present in the population, the
necessary public health questions concerning the cases among vaccine
recipients were, “Is the number of cases of GBS among vaccine
recipients higher than would be expected? And, if so, are the increased
cases the result of increased surveillance or a true increase?” Leading
epidemiologists debated these points, but the consensus … was that
the number of cases appeared to be an excess.

Whoa! The experts disagreed, but more than half of them thought that
there might have been an increase. And even those who thought
there was an increase put it at maybe one per every 100,000 vaccine
recipients. That sucks for that one person, but it’s statistically
insignificant and certainly no reason not to get the vaccine, since far
more people die from the flu than from GBS.

It’s entirely possible that some people back in 1976 got the flu
from the vaccine, and then the flu lowered their resistance, and then
something triggered a runaway auto-immune response. But claiming
that putting a needle in someone’s arm led to GBS is a leap that
Baryshnikov wouldn’t have attempted in his prime.

Mr. Aubrey started by saying that an alt-weekly columnist shouldn’t
be dispensing medical advice. My point was that we have parents these
days who are making important medical decisions for their children
based not on what they’re told by doctors or nurses or government
health officials, but rather by doofuses on talk radio and Fox
News.

Finally, as for my not getting a vaccination, it’s only because I
don’t get the flu. If there was a widespread outbreak of dumbassitis
that could be contained by a mass vaccination, I’d probably get the
shot. If not, I might find myself watching Glenn Beck.

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.