I wish they'd invent an influenza that leaves you feeling good enough to enjoy being sick. I had all the time I wanted last week, meetings canceled, work postponed, Kleenex well-positioned at bedside, and all I WANTED to do was return to that very dark, very warm place where people live before they are born.

I was too sick to read, and that's sick.

While I was away, books kept appearing, I know not how, and we have a chance to catch up with them now, and with all the other things that didn't get accomplished. When I went under, we had learned through the grapevine that Wal-Mart has been making noises about planting a BIG box store at the intersection of Highway One and Highway 20, which adds up to Highway 21 by my reckoning.

If Wal-Mart and supporters succeed, goodbye main street Fort Bragg, bye bye Racine's, Rossi's, Flo-Beds; in fact bye bye anyone in town selling anything Wal-Mart wants to sell. You know they can match any advertised price, and then some, for as long as you can compete with them.

I know this is true, intuitively, from the years booksellers have spent fending off the likes of chain stores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders in various towns around the country.

About Wal-Mart I get my latest and best facts from Bill Quinn's newly revised paperback, How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (And the World) And What You Can Do About It.

This is the one book I managed to dip into while eating chicken soup and drinking vitamin C -- or was it the other way around?

Quinn doesn't hold back, not one bit. He's more anti-Wal-Mart than before, if you can believe it. His well-researched facts, his strong opinions and tales from towns across the country will give support to anyone looking to resist our own big box invasion.

I like Bill Quinn because he's a good writer, a fighter, and especially because he is 88 years old already. He's been married 54 years, and he's sharp as a tack out on Highway One. Go Bill!

If the race to install Wal-Mart on the outskirts of Fort Bragg leaves you with any remaining doubts about the intelligence of some members of our human species, one short look through Wendy Northcutt's The Darwin Awards will set you aright.

Northcutt and her Internet friends have compiled a tidy book jammed with tales of people who removed themselves from the gene pool through deadly acts of natural selection so lacking in common sense you might be forgiven for some astonishment.

For example, there are the Arab terrorists who refused to put their watches "on Zionist time." "At precisely 5:30 p.m. Israel Standard Time, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities," Northcutt writes, "killing three terrorists who were transporting bombs... Three days before, Israel had made a premature switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time in order to accommodate a week of Slihot, involving presunrise prayers." Palestinians refused to "live on Zionist time" and "two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued." The bombs were prepared in one time zone but driven by terrorists living in another. Oops. Darwin Award.

She also has a Darwin Award for the guy who announced, "I'm a man -- I can handle it" and refused to go to the hospital after picking up his friend's cobra snake from its tank, and getting bitten. Northcutt writes, "Instead of a hospital, Ken reported to a Jenkins Township bar. Cobra venom is a slow acting central nervous system toxin. It works so slowly that he was able to consume three drinks while bragging that he had just been bitten by a cobra. He eventually succumbed to the poison, and died within a few hours."

Stories like that make me glad to be alive. You probably know a Darwin Award-eligible incident or two. Here are the submission rules: Darwin Awards are given only when:

(1) "the candidate removes himself from the gene pool,"
(2) "the candidate exhibits an astounding misapplication of judgement,"
(3)  the candidate is "the cause of his own demise," and
(4) "the candidate is capable of sound judgement."

The Darwin Awards could be funny reading for those with a taste for the grim side of life. I found it quite refreshing. I got over the flu, and so far (knock on wood) I haven't put even a single finger into my friend's cobra tank.

Aired Friday February 9, 2001 at 8:35 am and Sunday February 11, 2001 at 6:55 pm