In retrospect I should have known last night this was going to happen. I was ready for sleep by 10 p.m. And then this morning the scratchy throat begin. A workout was unsatisfying. The day slipped into, well let’s just call it existential decline.
Hey, it sounds good.
So there was work. Messing up a spreadsheet and recovering it by chance. Finishing slides for a lecture. Lecturing. Doing research. Tabbing through more spreadsheets. Making phone calls and so on.
As the afternoon slipped into evening the scratchiness in the back of my throat turned to a full-on sore throat. There was coughing. At the end of the day there was little breathing. Sinuses, then. My mortal enemy it seems. There will be little breathing or rest or happiness until this passes.
Links, then: Steve Yelvington has 10 things we (should) have learned about mobile and tablet news. Robert Rosenthal, meanwhile, offers lessons learned on reinventing journalism. About seven of these can apply to any industry, however.
And now the fun of new immigration law, writ large in Alabama’s fields. There is so much wrong here that deserves correction:
The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.
“This law will be in effect this entire growing season,” Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.
“There won’t be no next growing season,” farmer Wayne Smith said.
“Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They’ll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double,” he said.
Lana Boatwright said she and her husband had used the same crews for more than a decade, but only eight of the 48 workers they needed showed up after the law took effect.
“My husband and I take them to the grocery store at night and shop for them because they are afraid they will be arrested,” she said.
Tough situation with no obvious answers. It is already impacting Alabama’s agricultural industry, small farmers, the construction industry, schools, the DMV, large groups of people who are willing to endure thankless jobs at low or average pay to try and make a better life and who knows what else.
You can’t envy anyone in this circumstance, but we’re all about to learn the rule of unintended consequences. This is, however, a federal issue that has failed and the states — Arizona, Georgia and Alabama the first among them — to try to address the issue. There seems to be an overreach.
And now, for something more fun:
Come back tomorrow for ragged coughing and sneezing. And some other things too.