The long loud silence out of Indonesia

It's July 31 in Indonesia, and we were told that Dr. Supari would condescend to advise the world about now on any recent human H5N1 cases.

So far, the only Indonesian flu site that's been recently updated is Bidang Komunikasi Komnas FBPI. It does have some new links, though they all seem to be in Bahasa Indonesia—or they're under construction, or they've exceeded their bandwidth.

Maybe by August 1 the Indonesians will get around to informing WHO and the rest of us of what's happened in the past month or two. I hope so.

Visitors of a certain age may recognize an allusion in the headline of this post. In 1952, Wilson Tucker published The Long Loud Silence, a pretty good SF novel about a nuclear/biological attack on the US east of the Mississippi. (Why the western US was spared was never made clear.)

I must have read it when I was 11 or 12, so my literary judgment may be a little dubious. But the silence out of Indonesia grows longer and louder with every passing day.