Ozone Action Days

For the past two days, the city of Chicago has declared an Ozone Action Day. Before moving here, I had never heard the word. In fact, after almost two years in the city, yesterday was the first time I had heard a reference to it.

People who are already especially vulnerable to ozone are even more vulnerable when exercising or engaging in strenuous work. These people include: children; asthmatics, those with heart and lung disease; and the elderly.

I asked my coworkers yesterday, "Why are they calling it ‘Ozone Action Day?’ Why aren’t they calling it ‘Darwin Action Day?’"

A long while ago, I read Stephne King’s Running Man. The book, I thought, was so much better than the movie version. Granted, this was when I was in high school, so cut me some slack. But one of the big elements of the book revolved around how polluted the air was in the future, and how the mortality rate increased dramatically on particularly "bad" days. Television was used, in King’s imagined world, as a means to pacify the populous so that they could die a coughing, asphyxiated death.

And look at me. I’m typing all this when, given all that’s logical in the world, I should be dead because of a charred pizza.