By Any Other Name/ The New Yorker

‘Swine’: a word that encompasses, in a single syllable, decades of greed and entitlement. “In darker psyches, the thought lurked: was the pandemic some sort of cosmic comeuppance for our collective swinishness, a funk for our profligate times?” asks Laura Collins as she charts the journey the hastily named Swine Flu made before it was officially christened ‘2009 H1N1 Flu’. An Israeli minister attempted to rename the virus ‘Mexican Flu’, but that wouldn’t have been a politically correct thing to do. Hog farmers and pork processors proposed the “North American Influenza”. Collins goes back to Chaucer’s time to trace the swine’s humble beginnings as it coursed through Shakespeare’s pages, idioms such as Swine Dining and Swine on Board and has now finally hit the highest point in it’s existence as a probable serial killer.

Blog: www.fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com

It takes some gumption to sit and write a blog in the middle of the IPL in South Africa. It makes for great entertainment as the ‘fake IPL player’ writes about the dirty secrets of the team (it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that it is the Kolkata Knight Riders) and names for the players are unprintable. But that is why the blog is such a hit.