Waterglass 50/50 of the Week

First, the bad news:

‘Springer’ to Arrive on Broadway in 2005

NEW YORK – “Jerry Springer ? The Opera” is coming to Broadway but not until the fall of 2005.

The raucous, raunchy London hit about the American talk show host will open Oct. 20, 2005, at a theater to be announced, producer Jon Thoday said Monday in a telephone interview from London.

But first, the $13.9 million production will play San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre for six weeks starting at the end of February or the beginning of March 2005, the producer said.

“Going to San Francisco, gives us a chance to work on the show if we need to improve it,” Thoday said. No cast has been set for the American production, and Thoday has not ruled out hiring Michael Brandon (news), an American who originated the role in London.

This is exactly what Broadway needs: a musical honoring what’s most pathetic and sickening about popular entertainment developed by an individual whose sense of shame simply cannot be measured by any means known to man. The electron microscope can only go so small. The only bright spot in this horror story is the fact that “Springer is shot at the end of the first act and gets dragged down to hell.” He’s certainly earned his spot there.

And now, for the good news:

UN Uses Atomic Technology to Fight Malaria Mosquito

SEIBERSDORF, Austria (Reuters) – The United Nations is harnessing nuclear technology to try to eradicate the mosquitoes whose bite transmits malaria, a deadly disease devastating the African continent.

Sunday [April 25] is Africa Malaria Day, when governments will focus attention on a disease which kills millions of Africans a year, most of them children, and costs the continent at least $12 billion in lost gross domestic product.

Bart Knols, a Dutch entomologist at the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), estimates there are “three to five hundred million cases of malaria every year on a world-wide scale, 90 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers the major burden… of mortality,” he told Reuters during a tour of the IAEA’s entomology laboratories.

One African child dies of malaria every 20 seconds. People in poor, remote villages are usually unable to get treatment and so Knols’s research aims to nip the problem in the bud by destroying the mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite.

Or, they could just use DDT, which kills the mosquitoes much more cheaply and effectively. But why let something that saves lives get in the way of environmental activism?