Crumbs of Wednesday: the administrative post.

Okay, so. A few things...

1. I am still assembling the T-shirt spreadsheet. I had intended to finish last night, but then my home internet decided to emulate the mighty banana slug and travel at a speed of approximately three miles per hour, making navigating LJ borderline impossible. So if you haven't heard back from me, you do not yet need to worry. I will post one more time when the spreadsheet is done, saying "if you haven't heard back from me, worry." But if you followed the instructions (name, size, color, email address on the original post) or contacted me and asked politely for an exception, you should be fine.

2. I just found out that apparently, my drummer on Wicked Girls was never paid. I thought he'd been paid out of the money I gave my producer, but no, that all went to mixing. Given the math of albums, this is totally believable, but marginally, you know, inconvenient. So if you don't yet have a copy of Wicked Girls, or wanted to get one for a friend, now would be an awesome time to do so, as I now have an unexpected recording-related bill to pay.

3. I have a convention this weekend, and word counts to make, and I'm trying to post a piece of Newsflesh-related short fiction every day during the countdown to Deadline. So in the interests of maintaining my own sanity, I'm declaring amnesty from my normal "answer all comments" blog policy where those posts are concerned. I'll try to answer direct questions and the like, but I won't answer every expression of "yay, more story." I'll read and appreciate them all, I just need to use my time in other ways right this second. :)

4. My phone is dead. Not just a little dead; dead-dead, the great death from which there is no returning. So I'm a little grumpy, and only accessible via electronic channels right now. Some of which don't work from home, where the internet is toast. Did I mention that this was the best week ever?

5. There is no number five. I just didn't want to end the list on an even number.

T-minus 27 days to DEADLINE.

Manhattan, New York. June 9th, 2014.

The video clip of Dr. Kellis's press conference was grainy, largely due to it having been recorded on a cellular phone—and not, Robert Stalnaker noted with a scowl, one of the better models. Not that it mattered on anything more than a cosmetic level; Dr. Kellis's pompous, self-aggrandizing speech had been captured in its entirety. "Intellectual mumbo-jumbo" was how Robert had described the speech after the first time he heard it, and how he'd characterized it yet again in communication with his editor.

"This guy thinks he can eat textbooks and shit miracles," that was the pitch. "He doesn't want people to understand what he's really talking about, because he knows America would be pissed off if he spoke English long enough to tell us how we're all about to get screwed." And just as he'd expected, his editor jumped at it.

The instructions were simple: no libel, no direct insults, nothing that was already known to be provably untrue. Insinuation, interpretation, and questioning the science were all perfectly fine, and might turn a relatively uninteresting story into something that would actually sell a few papers. In today's world, whatever sold a few papers was worth pursuing. Bloggers and internet news were cutting far, far too deeply into the paper's already weak profit margin.

"Time to do my part to fix that," muttered Stalnaker, and started the video again.

He struck gold on the fifth viewing. Pausing the clip, he wound it back six seconds and hit "play." Dr. Kellis's voice resumed, saying, "—distribution channels will need to be sorted out before we can go beyond basic lab testing, but so far, all results have been—"

Rewind. Again. "—distribution channels—"

Rewind. Again. "—distribution—"

Robert Stalnaker began to smile.

Half an hour later, his research had confirmed that no standard insurance program in the country would cover a non-vaccination preventative measure (and Dr. Kellis had been very firm about stating that his "cure" was not a vaccination). Even most of the upper-level insurance policies would balk at adding a new treatment for something considered to be of little concern to the average citizen—not to mention the money that the big pharmaceutical companies stood to lose if a true cure for the common cold were actually distributed at a reasonable cost to the common man. Insurance companies and drug companies went hand-in-hand so far as he was concerned, and neither was going to do anything to undermine the other.

This was all a scam. A big, disgusting, money-grubbing scam. Even if the science was good, even if the "cure" did exactly what its arrogant geek-boy creator said it did, who would get it? The rich and the powerful, the ones who didn't need to worry about losing their jobs if the kids brought home the sniffles from school. The ones who could afford the immune boosters and ground-up rhino dick or whatever else was the hot new thing right now, so that they'd never get sick in the first place. Sure, Dr. Kellis never said that, but Stalnaker was a journalist. He knew how to read between the lines.

Robert Stalnaker put his hands to the keys, and prepared to make the news.

***

Robert Stalnaker's stirring editorial on the stranglehold of the rich on public health met with criticism from the medical establishment, who called it "irresponsible" and "sensationalist." Mr. Stalnaker has yet to reply to their comments, but has been heard to say, in response to a similar but unrelated issue, that the story can speak for itself...

When will you Rise?