One Year

It's my blogiversary! Wooo-hoooooooo!

Blown kisses to my 6 or 7 readers and the lurkers at sea.

Time to start a project to avoid by throwing myself at another project.

Reinforcing All Those Tea Icons

Study suggests tea good for you.

Of course, which tea is unmentioned. Might be all tea. But at this point nothing that tastes worse than straight cranberry juice gets drunk around here.

A Medley of Extemporanea

If I still had that penchant for split second timing, schedule keeping, and train catching, I'd be at a nice seminar on moral values about two hours away. But that's not going to happen. I have a 4 pm appointment (yes, on Saturday), a 2 pm gathering, and distances.

Pfui.

So. Large chunks of computer time yesterday were devoted to Michael Jackson videos (and the two "Weird Al" parodies, which are remarkably...exact), mostly via the authorized site, where embedding has been disabled. I could watch "Thriller" over and over. But I was also reminded of what I call the Michael Jackson Rule that I declared in the '80s after one too many conversations speculating on his sexual preference: "I'm never going to sleep with him. You're never going to sleep with him. Why should you care?"

(And of course he was the poster child for the radiating damage child abuse inflicts through the years, including the trial for molestation, which was ugly on all sides.)(ETA: See Tiger Beatdown, who hits the point about his being an abuser a lot harder.)

There's a science fiction novel, probably already written, in which the society under consideration:

1. has mandatory parenting classes beginning in grade school, leading to
2. psychological testing
3. and certification.

(Hmmmm, sounds like Beta Colony!) Birthrate would probably be lower, but the children would grow up mostly sane.

Of course, they'd be overrun by Barbarians with Issues. That and the "Who controls what is being taught, tested for, and certified?" problem, at present insoluble.

In less fraught topics, Avedon Carol on the malpractice herring.

Make them come right out and say that they either can't do simple arithmetic or that they care more about the health insurance industry than they do about protecting American lives. And then comparing them unfavorably to Al Qaeda is fair game.

And fresh Fafblog.

In Memoriam

Betty Allen, mezzo-soprano.

“On Saturday, walking down the street, you could hear the Met broadcasts coming from the windows of everybody’s house. No one told them that opera and the arts were not for them, not for poor people, just for rich snobs.”

(Opera used to be for everyone; even if you did not go to live performances, you could listen on the radio. My mother had Milton Cross's compedium of opera plots and recordings of Faust and Gianni Schicchi and a Leontyne Price album of selected arias. I think the segmentation of musical tastes into separate radio stations has harmed the appreciation of music because people don't get exposed to as wide a variety.)

Weirdness

Odd thing: I woke up from a dream evaporating so quickly that all I caught was "Denzel Washington" and couldn't move my eyelids for a second or two there.

Strange.

A beautiful day for a solstice.

By The Way

I have 2 [ETA: 1] Dreamwidth invite codes (actually 3, but the third one hasn't been used yet and is not in contention at this time) which would like a home.

Comment at this link with your email address and I will send you an invite code. First come, first served, although in case of a tie, well, we'll hope there are no ties.

Turning off comments here for this post.

In Memoriam

Dusty Rhodes. (NY and SF Giant.)

Spocko's Brain on violent rhetoric:

They have developed the idea that they can't be held legally responsible so they are working that argument in public. They don't want to deal with moral or ethical responsiblity, just, "Can I be sued or go to jail if I say this?" It is a legalistic mind set that fits in quiet well with the Authoritarian mind set. They will happily use lawyers to help them create legal cover. They ask the lawyer, "I want to do this, how can I do it with out getting into trouble legally?"

There's more. Please read the rest.

Becoming What One Beholds

Shakesville's Quixote on the direction the country's taking (see also Arthur Silber).

(I need some frivolity. How about having the car checked for a funny grinding noise?)

The Defense Against Spinal Tap Drummers Professor

Jon Carroll, smarter than the Justice Department. (Which, considering the Bush legacy of placing primarily ideological ophidians in Justice, is not difficult.)

Precision

DBK at skippy the bush kangaroo writes to a Republican congressman on public health care.

I was wondering if the taxpayer provided health care that you enjoy is efficient and not too costly.

Succinct.

That's Right, More Commentary

...on health care reform.

Is there some sort of healthcare insurance never have to make an appointment or get non-emergency procedures approved hook-up that a bitch doesn’t know about?

***cue crickets***

Is there some sort of insurance coverage that the millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans could score but are not aware of…or are willfully not taking advantage of?

***tell crickets to keep it going***

Yeah…uh huh…right.

More here at Angry Black Bitch.

Twofer

1. A reminder from Bob Herbert.

The truth, of course, is that there is nothing aberrational about hatred and murderous violence in the U.S. They are two of the most prominent touchstones of the culture, monumentally tragic flaws that have permeated the nation’s history from its earliest moments and that plague us still today.

Americans kill each other at roughly the rate of 16,000 a year! From racial violence to family violence to gang warfare to street crime to mass murder — the blood never stops flowing.




2. Civil marriage rather than civil union and the reasoning of Tom Suozzi.

Many civil marriages are not considered “holy matrimony” by religious institutions because they do not conform to the rules of the religious institution. Those marriages have not challenged religious liberty. We must see that civil marriage, which has always been separate from religious marriage, will remain so.

56

56.

Champeens!

Pittsburgh wins the Stanley Cup.

Polityx

Arthur Silber holds up the mirror to the face of government.

Power-plays (non-hockey division) in the State of New York.

Comic relief:  Jon Carroll, at the dentist's, free-associates about the Beatles.  (Less than three months and counting to the remasters...)

Go Helen! Go Helen!

Helen suggests hypocrisy on the part of Fox News.  All clutch pearls, now:  "Noooooooo-oo-o!"

It’s called the Fox News Channel. So someone explain to me where exactly is the news or even the journalists. Anytime you try to pin someone down over at Fox for irresponsible journalism they claim that they are news commentators and not journalists. You’re on a news channel you moron so if you are going to be a commentator then you should be commenting on the news and not your misinformed opinion about the private medical decisions made between a woman and her doctor.

Pro Reportage

Fourth-grade journalism, past and present.  (From the Daily Howler.  Some language might be triggering.)

Think I'll go enjoy a mediocre cover band this afternoon.  It can't be any less cat-waxing than hanging out here.

Health Care Comparison Shopping

I don't mean to drumbeat about health care reform (single payer!  Single payer!) (much), but Avedon Carol's essay at The Sideshow is worth reading.  (And maybe sending a copy with attribution to your Senator if you have one, because apparently they are still enthralled by insurance companies.)

On the money:

And why shouldn't Americans have that kind of care, too? After all, you're already paying for it - in taxes. Every time you pay taxes, regardless of your own healthcare plan, you also pay for someone else's healthcare - Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, NIH, SCHIP, whatever - you're paying for government health services and research (which, by the way, is also a subsidy to the commercial medical industry that makes use of the research and development at bargain rates) - only you're paying for a lot of it more expensively than you need to because so much waste is involved in servicing the myriad different commercial providers who have their fingers in the pie. And then when you get your own commercial healthcare, you pay extra for the very fact that someone has to ask you to name your insurance company and give them your insurance details. No one ever asks me my insurance details here - they already know them, because they're the same for everyone.

Not Rockers! (obBadPun)

The mods at Shakesville have a few things to say about a pattern they've noticed.  

In a society (US) that seems to prefer that one "Act without thinking," what they have to say is radical.

ETA:  Post from Tiger Beatdown which is sufficiently awesome that I'm adding it to the roll.  Meanwhile, one of my urgent bills is HIDING, and I have to find it.  Also there are 500+ comments at that Shakesville entry, a very few of which showcase the difficulty of respecting people's feelings.  (They were ably rebutted.)

ETA 2:  A different viewpoint (some of the commenters also have comments and comment history at Shakesville, so it gets interesting) of the situation at Shakesville; I don't see it that way, but I can see how it might look, if that makes any sense.

Comments were closed at 744.

Ceci n'est pas un linkspam.  So there.

In Memoriam

Kenny Rankin, song stylist.

I make particular note of this because the name evokes late teenage evenings by the radio listening to baritone/bass voices reciting poetry and announcing a bottomless variety of music.  In those days Kenny Rankin got a fair bit of airplay.  Several years ago, because the phrase "cotton candy parade" had unaccountably gotten stuck in my brain, I Googled his name and discovered that he was still recording and still playing small clubs in the Village.  

I promptly forgot.

Oh, And...

Latest installment in Poisonous Parenting, from Republic of T.

And here I’ve been telling my kids it’s wrong to take things that don’t belong to them. Just goes to show ya that a big ‘mo like me doesn’t begin to know how to raise children. After all, the hubby and I can’t make babies like Roberson apparently can. So we can’t possibly get close to being as good parent as her. ‘Cause we’re gay, and if we can’t make babies with each other how are we supposed to know anything about raising them?

He cites several more horrifying examples.

Medically Pressed to Death

Mills River Progressive, because you're neither General Motors nor unscrupulous financial institutions.

Brief citation:

The financial elite have been allowed to utterly fuck over American citizens with unethical, deceptive, usurious practices, and congress has facilitated that process; spending its time instead on the big issues, like steroids in baseball and a split-second flash of Janet Jackson's nipple on teevee.

[...]

Medical problems contributed to nearly two-thirds (62.1 percent) of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the August issue of the American Journal of Medicine that will be published online Thursday. The data were collected prior to the current economic downturn and hence likely understate the current burden of financial suffering. Between 2001 and 2007, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6 percent. The authors' previous 2001 findings have been widely cited by policy leaders, including President Obama.
Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by medical problems had health insurance. More than three-quarters (77.9 percent) were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage. Most of the medically bankrupt were solidly middle class before financial disaster hit. Two-thirds were homeowners and three-fifths had gone to college. In many cases, high medical bills coincided with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance.

It would not surprise me if people in medicine were for single payer, by the way.

ETA:  Op-ed in the Boston Globe by an actual doctor, by way of The Sideshow, who got it from Cab Drollery.

One would think that doctors would have gotten together and made it clear that they do the work. Without doctors, there is no healthcare. In a theater when someone collapses, has anyone ever heard the call go out: "Is there an insurance executive in the house?" If doctors had stuck together they could have prevented the abuses they're now are battling.

The issue isn't that primary-care doctors get paid less than cardiac surgeons, but that the system of healthcare rests on insurance companies and their CEOs making huge profits. No amount of cost-cutting can save enough money to support a for-profit system. The only solution is a universal, government-run healthcare system.

Emphasis mine.

Yay!

Not pining for the fjords.  (The comments are definitely giggleworthy.)

In Memoriam

Sam Butera, bandleader and tenor sax player.

500

Technically this is the 501st post, but there's a post in draft that doesn't seem to want to be written (about my conversion) and yet won't go away.

Randy Johnson (SF Giants) won his 300th game.

It's time to get serious.  Also to look at material (it's called fabric because the fibers are woven into threads and the threads are loomed or knit into cloth already; "fabricated," in other words) with an eye toward turning into clothing.  There's gray wool worsted that wants badly to be a suit but not just any suit.  Picky material.

These Things are Related

1. One of my regular reading stops (Brilliant at Breakfast!) has discovered Margaret and Helen.  Coincidentally, there's a new post up.  Heh.
2. Daisy's Dead Air has a point:  older women are the wisdom of a society, and electing to ignore them is ... not wise.
3. If you survive, you will get old.  Trust me on that.

Reminder

Today is the 20th anniversary of the putting down of the Tiananmen Square protests, culminating in massacre.

(It's not as though I have a large readership in China anyway.)

In Memoriam

Koko Taylor, blues great.