DEATH BY CELLULAR TELEPHONE

Mrs. David Reynard of St. Petersburg, Fla., died of brain cancer, and she had been using a cellular telephone. Her husband, a true-blooded American of the 90s, therefore sued the manufacturer (Japan's NEC Corp.), and GTE Corp., which provides the service at something like 90 cents a minute.

I, too, have cancer, metastatic (spreading) prostate cancer, and I print on pink paper. Clearly, by the "logic" that there are no studies to the contrary, printing on pink paper is the cause of my cancer, and if I were not so delicate, so polite, so diplomatic, and so reticent I would sue Wausau Paper Inc., the Denver wholesaler who sells it to me, and the Colorado Rodeo Riders Association (why not? there is no rule that the loser pays court costs).

That the media took up the story and smeared it around forever does not surprise me, but the stocks of Motorola, McCaw Cellular Communications, and other cellular telephone companies dropped sharply. It does not necessarily follow that the stock exchange gamblers are idiots; maybe they are smart enough to know that engineering policy in the US is not made by the facts, but by what the Maharishis, dutifully amplified by the media brainwash, "feel."

Not surprisingly, too, Motorola and the other corporate wimps came out crawling slavishly on all fours from their PR departments, and instead of telling people what I will tell you below about UHF TV stations, they all whimpered about spending big money on studies of what cellular phones could do to you.

Any eight-year old child would ask two pertinent questions: "Daddy, are there any people who die of brain cancer who never used cellular telephones? And daddy, are there any cellular telephone users who did not get brain cancer?"

What godforsaken idiot would fail to ask these questions?

The most Honorable Edward Markey, Jr. (D-Mass.), for one. He is chairman of the House Telecommunications subcommittee, and a leper even among Congressmen. He is the one who during the Chernobyl days in 1986 held special grandstanding hearings, bullying everyone in sight with the deadly dangers of nuclear power, yet groveling before a secretary of the Soviet Embassy, calling the USSR "a great and responsible power," while the Soviet diplomat was lying through his teeth and counterattacking with the Challenger disaster. This time round he grandstanded with dire warnings that studies on the health effects of cellular telephones are "critical."

He probably uses a cellular telephone himself, but without risking cancer of the brain, for it is doubtful that he has one.