Michael Fumento

Okay, not exactly.

Last December one blogger whose website was devoted entirely to avian flu predicted a 50-50 chance of a pandemic within the next year. I offered the blogger and any other taker not 2 to 1 odds but rather 10 to 1 odds that it wouldn't happen.

Curiously, each entity I specifically challenged chickened out. They couldn't get permission from their mothers, stuff like that. One of the chickens was a crank named Crawford Kilian who authors the - or shall we say the, H5N1 Blog. He pretends to be the ultimate resource on avian flu developments but refuses to link to anything I write. On the other hand, he has now seen fit to link to an online novel in which pandemic flu kills the entire population of Sydney, Australia (4.3 million) save for 300 souls. After all, in tackling such an important issue you have to have priorities.