What Is the Deal?

For some reason, we had the radio on some news station in the back room at work yesterday, and the only thing anyone was talking about was that ricin was mailed to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office. It was all over the front pages of CNN.com, Foxnews.com, etc. Now the story's vanished. None of the blogs I read regularly have said a word about it. The story's still out there if you search for it, but... I just found it odd that such a thing went so quickly from "RICIN SCARE FOR FRIST!!!" to "..."

Sure, it's not the most earth-shattering story in the universe (unless, I suppose, you happen to be Bill Frist and you get a nice healthy whiff of ricin and then you prompty die), but is everybody really so accustomed the idea of deadly powders being mailed like birthday cards to our nation's leaders that a news item like this goes from Big Friggin' Front Page News to Page Eight, Under The Horoscopes in less than twenty-four hours?