From YesButNoYes:
Damn, He's freakin' talented.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
5 Myths About Health Care Around the World
From the Washington Post:
By T.R. Reid
Sunday, August 23, 2009
As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.
I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.
In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.
Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.
As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.
In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.
U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.
Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.
Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.
The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.
This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.
Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.
T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.
By T.R. Reid
Sunday, August 23, 2009
As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.
I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.
In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.
Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.
As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.
In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?" the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?" I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"
3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.
Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.
U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.
The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.
4. Cost controls stifle innovation.
False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)
5. Health insurance has to be cruel.
Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to survive in a tough business.
Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums. The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me. The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.
The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.
This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess.
Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.
T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," to be published Monday.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Good Points
Via the esteemable Alpentraum:
I am lifting these from the ever-estimable .:DataWhat?:. because just about every one of these anecdoty little maxims is now precious to me.
Join me!
- More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.
- Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
- I don’t understand the purpose of the line, “I don’t need to drink to have fun.” Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?
- Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.
- I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.
- Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the “people you may know” feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?
- Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.
- There is a great need for sarcasm font.
- Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what the f was going on when I first saw it.
- I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.
- How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
- I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.
- I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
- The only time I look forward to a red light is when I’m trying to finish a text.
- A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.
- LOL has gone from meaning, “laugh out loud” to “I have nothing else to say”.
- I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
- Answering the same letter three times or more in a row on a Scantron test is absolutely petrifying.
- Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart”.
- How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?
- I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!
- Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using ‘as in’ examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss’s last name to an attorney and said “Yes that’s G as in…(10 second lapse)..ummm…Goonies”
- What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?
- While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.
- MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
- I wish Google Maps had an “Avoid Ghetto” routing option.
- Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
- I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.
- Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
- I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.
- Bad decisions make good stories
- Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!
- Is it just me or do high school girls get sluttier & sluttier every year?
- If Carmen San Diego and Waldo ever got together, their offspring would probably just be completely invisible.
- Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I’m from, this shouldn’t be a problem….
- You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you’ve made up your mind that you just aren’t doing anything productive for the rest of the day.
- Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.
- There’s no worse feeling than that millisecond you’re sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.
- I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.
- “Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this ever.
- I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There’s so much pressure. ‘I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren’t watching this. It’s only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?’
- I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dammit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away?
- I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.
- When I meet a new girl, I’m terrified of mentioning something she hasn’t already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.
- I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
- Why is a school zone 20 mph? That seems like the optimal cruising speed for pedophiles…
- As a driver I hate pedestrians, and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.
- Sometimes I’ll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
- It should probably be called Unplanned Parenthood.
- I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
- Even if I knew your social security number, I wouldn’t know what do to with it.
- Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, hitting the G-spot, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey – but I’d bet my ass everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time…
- My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day “Dad what would happen if you ran over a ninja?” How the hell do I respond to that?
- It really pisses me off when I want to read a story on CNN.com and the link takes me to a video instead of text.
- I wonder if cops ever get pissed off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.
- I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
- I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than Kay.
- That’s enough, Nickelback.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
NATO Secretary General on Greek-Turkish relations
A continuing part in the series on what the heck I do all day.
More on Ted Kennedy's passing.
Via HuffingtonPost:
On the Death of My Older Brother, Jeremy, and Ted Kennedy
Not a day goes by that I don't think about my brother. I find myself wondering often what my brother would do if he were still alive. He died at the young age of twenty one of leukemia far before he could develop into the type of activist that I am today. He never got the chance to fight for working people the way that I so luckily have.
Ever since I have turned twenty-one, I have treated every day like it was one extra day and cherished it. It has made me want to get up in the morning and worker harder and be smarter because I feel so lucky to be alive. I feel that to not work as hard and diligently as I possibly could would be a disservice to my brother's legacy. My brother's legacy serves as a constant source of inspiration for some of the darkest hours and toughest fights.
Senator Kennedy cited his brother's legacy too in passing health care reform with a public option out of his committee earlier this year. In his statement he said:
This room is a special place. In this room, my two brothers declared their candidacy for the presidency. Today, the nation takes another major step toward reaching the goals to which they dedicated their careers, and for which they gave their lives. They strived, as I have tried to do, for a fairer and more just America -- a nation where every American could share fully in the promise of quality health care.
America has lost an older brother in the death of Ted Kennedy. We must all be fortunate that we are still alive. and around to fight for a public health insurance plan available for all Americans that Ted would have loved to fight for. We must work harder for the things that we believe in. If Ted were still alive today, he would be fighting like hell for the public health insurance option that he considered a fundamental human right.
Lets fight for my brother too. He died tragically and far too young. His death shocked my family. Fortunately, my father was a member of a union and the union provided us with excellent health care. In the closing days of my brother's life, we did not have to worry about medical bills. We spent them enjoying the company of my brother, Jeremy.
Every American deserves the same type of high quality health care that my brother, Jeremy, had in the closing days of his life.There is no reason why the richest country on the planet that people should have to suffer because their only crime was being too poor to afford quality health care.
Let's fight like hell for the public health insurance plan that Senator Kennedy so dearly fought for in the closing days of his life.
My deepest condolences to the friends and family of Senator Kennedy.
I hope that Ted is in heaven now finally reunited with his brothers as I hope to someday be reunited with mine.
Follow Mike Elk on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MikeElk
On the Death of My Older Brother, Jeremy, and Ted Kennedy
Not a day goes by that I don't think about my brother. I find myself wondering often what my brother would do if he were still alive. He died at the young age of twenty one of leukemia far before he could develop into the type of activist that I am today. He never got the chance to fight for working people the way that I so luckily have.
Ever since I have turned twenty-one, I have treated every day like it was one extra day and cherished it. It has made me want to get up in the morning and worker harder and be smarter because I feel so lucky to be alive. I feel that to not work as hard and diligently as I possibly could would be a disservice to my brother's legacy. My brother's legacy serves as a constant source of inspiration for some of the darkest hours and toughest fights.
Senator Kennedy cited his brother's legacy too in passing health care reform with a public option out of his committee earlier this year. In his statement he said:
This room is a special place. In this room, my two brothers declared their candidacy for the presidency. Today, the nation takes another major step toward reaching the goals to which they dedicated their careers, and for which they gave their lives. They strived, as I have tried to do, for a fairer and more just America -- a nation where every American could share fully in the promise of quality health care.
America has lost an older brother in the death of Ted Kennedy. We must all be fortunate that we are still alive. and around to fight for a public health insurance plan available for all Americans that Ted would have loved to fight for. We must work harder for the things that we believe in. If Ted were still alive today, he would be fighting like hell for the public health insurance option that he considered a fundamental human right.
Lets fight for my brother too. He died tragically and far too young. His death shocked my family. Fortunately, my father was a member of a union and the union provided us with excellent health care. In the closing days of my brother's life, we did not have to worry about medical bills. We spent them enjoying the company of my brother, Jeremy.
Every American deserves the same type of high quality health care that my brother, Jeremy, had in the closing days of his life.There is no reason why the richest country on the planet that people should have to suffer because their only crime was being too poor to afford quality health care.
Let's fight like hell for the public health insurance plan that Senator Kennedy so dearly fought for in the closing days of his life.
My deepest condolences to the friends and family of Senator Kennedy.
I hope that Ted is in heaven now finally reunited with his brothers as I hope to someday be reunited with mine.
Follow Mike Elk on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MikeElk
Monday, August 24, 2009
Big Mac Index
Via BoingBoing: From The Economist, a chart showing "how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities."
The more important question is how long you have to work to eat something less gross than a Big Mac, of course.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Holy Vertical, Batman!
I caught these videos of Redskins rookie Keith Eloi while momentarily watching a Redskins pre-season game on TV yesterday. Holy shit. In both of them, you have to wait until :48 for the jump, but it's worth it.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Big Bang
Via Geekologie: This is a video produced by Columbia University explaining the Big Bang in terms even a sped like myself can understand. I thought it was pretty interesting, especially the notion that nothing, not even time, existed before the Big Bang.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Practice Makes Perfect
You know what this makes me think of? When the kid runs up and is like, "Can I see? Can I see?"
Our kids will never remember there was a time when you couldn't instantly see the photos or videos as soon as they were taken. Wierd.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Barney Frank Gives It To A Nutcase
I'm not saying this is the correct debate we should be having on health care in this country. But it's definitely the correct response to the insanity that seems to be spewing forth. Go Barney Go.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
RANG AS AM
This site let's you plug in a name and it will provide an anagram for you. Mine is GOD! ON ANIMAL
What's yours?
What's yours?
Monday, August 17, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Home.
LC sent this on to me. This piece is amazing and accurately reflects what me and many of my neighbors feel. I'm so happy to live where I do. In its entirety from Next American City:
A Farewell to D.C., and to a Valued Contributor
Ben Adler Tue, Aug 11th, 2009
Editor’s Note: Ben Adler, who has been an Urban Leaders fellow for Next American City since 2008, recently accepted a position as Articles Editor for National Affairs at Newsweek.com. Throughout his time at NAC, he has written prolifically for both the print magazine and the website, sounding off on legislation, the White House, and crime in Washington, D.C. Look for his profile of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in Issue 24 of NAC, to be released in September.
During my four and half year stay in Washington, D.C. I have not developed a reputation for loving my adopted city. I am prone to relentlessly criticizing its cuisine, its nightlife, its weather, its crime and its cultural offerings, sometimes even in writing. But, with my departure impending, I feel acutely nostalgic for my house, the block it sits on, and the neighborhood I have made my home, each of which are triumphs of good urban design.
I live on Hobart Street, in Mount Pleasant, a diverse neighborhood that is nestled on a hill between swampy Rock Creek Park to the west and 16th Street, the broad thoroughfare of luxury apartment buildings, churches and embassies that leads to the White House, to the east. Originally a streetcar suburb, Mount Pleasant’s commercial drag, Mount Pleasant Street, shoots off 16th Street at a northwest diagonal, gently welcoming you into the neighborhood.
As you enter Mount Pleasant, my street is the first you will pass on your left. It’s so low-profile that, like most cab drivers, you might not even notice it. But it is a world unto itself. Improbably long—at .3 miles it is the longest unbroken block in D.C.—it even has local politicians. There is the elderly African-American man who sits on his front porch every morning. He has some sort of speech impediment (from a stroke is my guess) so I cannot make out his name but I feel like we are friends. He wears a Washington Nationals baseball cap and shouts pleasantries as you pass. When he briefly disappeared my roommates feared the worst. But to our great relief he re-emerged, complaining about the noise from construction being done to the road bed.
Mount Pleasant, in Washington, D.C. Image via flickr.
Across the street is Morris Levitt, a retired professor of political science. Gay, widowered, Jewish and originally from New York, Morris is a lovable stereotype of himself. An avuncular mix of curmudgeon and mother hen, he lives in the biggest house on the block. It is a boxy, wide white brick mansion that Morris and his neighbors call Casa Blanca. Morris sits through the evening on his stoop, a long Benson and Hedges dangling languidly from one hand and a tumbler of whiskey in the other, kibbitzing with his young neighbors, while Elmo, his fat furry dog, scurries around. Sam, Morris’ tenant, is a Southern school teacher who unfailingly calls him “Mr. Levitt,” and repays Morris’ generosity in alcohol and cigarettes by barbecuing. “I never wanted a tenant,” says Morris, “but when he said he was a teacher…”
One night, I was hanging out on a porch with neighbors after 1 am, drinking wine and singing along to ad hoc guitar adaptations of pop songs. We heard a woman shouting from a window across the street and shushed to hear her, expecting an earful of “do you know what time it is?!” Instead she made a song request.
I call Morris the mayor of Lo Ho. That’s short for Lower Hobart, meaning the far third of the block where it dips steeply down the hill towards Rock Creek and gradually turns a full 90 degrees until it dead ends in a T intersection. Hobart is so long that it has micro-blocks. There’s Mid-Ho, where Tom, the terse middle-aged man who I always see walking his dog, hangs out with the thirty-something parents, gay couples and twenty-something renters. Then there’s Hi Ho, at the top of the hill, where the block flattens and straightens out and you feel like you’re back on the grid. From my house it might as well be California.
Every time I take a friend to my house for the first time I make sure to take them down the full length of my street because they usually pause, about one-third of the way in, and exclaim, “This is beautiful!” The street is narrow, and traffic runs both ways, with cars parked along each side. So traffic moves slowly and you never feel like an ant on a football field, as human beings so often do in a parking lot or alongside a boulevard. The early 20th century row houses look dignified—no squat ranch houses with sideways windows like you see in the Sun Belt, nor even the boxy condominiums that are saturating D.C. like coffee bars in Seattle. The short stoops leading to small covered porches engage the sidewalk. They transition smoothly from private to public space. From my front porch you have a striking vista, especially at night, when the street lamp casts lithe shadows from the trees on Casa Blanca. The front yards are small and filled with foliage, and the curb is lined with trees. In the spring, when everything is in bloom, the natural cover from both sides creates a full canopy of coverage for the pedestrian.
It should be unnecessary to say, but in this country it unfortunately needs saying, the garages sit in back of the homes, in a service alley. I am not known for extolling the urban design of D.C. over my hometown of New York, but the prevalence of alleys is a smart innovation. The trash is collected from them, keeping it off the curb and the smell away from pedestrians. There is a gray stone stairway off the alley that leads to the next block. I think of it as the secret shortcut, like something out of a children’s novel.
The street car that ran on Mount Pleasant Street is now a frustratingly slow bus, but otherwise Mount Pleasant looks a lot like it did in black and white photographs from 60 years ago. The houses, gradually growing grander as you approach the park; the apartment buildings, gradually growing bigger as you approach 16th Street; the stores on the ground floor of Mount Pleasant Street with apartments and offices for tax preparers and travel agents above them.
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my family shopped in a way that is almost unheard-of for middle class Americans today. We did it on foot. And we didn’t go to chain super-stores. The butcher, the drug store, the fruit and vegetable stand, the cheese store, the shoe store, the hardware store. We knew the owners and the workers and they knew us. Gentrification changes many things. In Brooklyn it has brought Fairway and Home Depot and Foot Locker.
D.C. is, compared to New York, even today, a wholly owned subsidiary of chain stores. CVS and Starbucks have outlets that are often separated by just a block from the next one. Lacking the strong history of foreign immigration that shaped other East Coast cities, the stores that defined my childhood are generally non-existent: the Korean greengrocer, the Arab newsstand, the Greek diner, the Italian pizzeria or bakery.
But not so in Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is home to a large concentration of Latino immigrants, mainly from El Salvador. As a result it has the gold standard for urban ethnic business: the bodega. It’s such a neighborhood that it has micro-neighborhoods: a laundromat at the southern end of Mount Pleasant, and one at the northern end, a mere four blocks away. Same goes for the dry cleaners, liquor stores and take-out Chinese.
The areas to the west, across the park, have always been well-to-do, and thus suffer from the bourgeois lameness of suburban America. The stores have brightly colored signs that proclaim their business loudly enough to be read from a passing car: “Lebanese Taverna, Yes! Organic Market, Tasti D-Lite.” To the east of Mount Pleasant are neighborhoods, such as Columbia Heights, that suffered such long and severe destitution that they had virtually no businesses. Now, gentrification in Columbia Heights means the importation of chains large and small, from Best Buy to Julia’s Empanadas, and high-concept faux local hangouts, such as an overpriced British gastropub and “Pete’s Apizza” (get it?)
In between sits Mount Pleasant, where gentrification has been a slow burn rather than a conflagration. Mount Pleasant was stabilized a generation ago by hippies and middle-class African-Americans who were attracted to the undervalued houses, but it never became a nightlife destination. Today, it feels integrated, rather than colonized. There are black and white families, renovated group houses for the young and clean cut and unrenovated ones for the not-necessarily-so-young or clean, immigrants stuffed into apartments, and unique little stores to cater to them all. We have a pharmacy, one of the few independent ones in the District, a basement video store (ditto), and a hardware store where the men behind the counter chat you up about neighborhood issues like the now-repealed ban on live music. There’s a precious Latino-influenced health food restaurant with a notoriously imperious owner and a mediocre bakery with a notoriously forgetful staff. There’s a farmers market that takes food stamps, a bar and grille that constantly changes its menu but knows better than to abandon its signature tater tots, and a dive bar where, this being D.C., after all, the long-haired, mustachioed bartender is a libertarian political blogger.
But, so far, there are no frozen yogurt emporiums, no places where you can get a macchiato, and, unless you count the sketchy hole-in-the-wall takeout joint that gave one of my roommates food poisoning, no sushi. These are boasts, not complaints.
Recently, I met a woman who lives in D.C. and reads Next American City. “I know your type,” she said in an arch, teasing tone. “You’re one of those people who lives in Mount Pleasant and loves to talk about how great it is.” I imagine that in Flirting for Dummies, it might say that I should have protested, or bashfully admitted that she had me pegged. But those thoughts did not cross my mind. Backing away from my Mount Pleasant boosterism would be like downplaying my New York dialect, my Yiddishkeit heritage, or my Brooklyn pride. I did not miss a beat. “Hell yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I am.”
Ben Adler joins Next American City as an Urban Leaders Fellow based in Washington, D.C. He will be focusing on Washington and the role of the federal government in urban policy. Ben covered the 2008 election and Congress as a staff writer for Politico. Prior to joining Politico Ben was the editor of CampusProgress.org, a daily online political and cultural magazine at the Center for American Progress, a regular contributor to The American Prospect Online and its award-winning blog, TAPPED, and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation and the websites of The Guardian and The Atlantic among other publications.
A Farewell to D.C., and to a Valued Contributor
Ben Adler Tue, Aug 11th, 2009
Editor’s Note: Ben Adler, who has been an Urban Leaders fellow for Next American City since 2008, recently accepted a position as Articles Editor for National Affairs at Newsweek.com. Throughout his time at NAC, he has written prolifically for both the print magazine and the website, sounding off on legislation, the White House, and crime in Washington, D.C. Look for his profile of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in Issue 24 of NAC, to be released in September.
During my four and half year stay in Washington, D.C. I have not developed a reputation for loving my adopted city. I am prone to relentlessly criticizing its cuisine, its nightlife, its weather, its crime and its cultural offerings, sometimes even in writing. But, with my departure impending, I feel acutely nostalgic for my house, the block it sits on, and the neighborhood I have made my home, each of which are triumphs of good urban design.
I live on Hobart Street, in Mount Pleasant, a diverse neighborhood that is nestled on a hill between swampy Rock Creek Park to the west and 16th Street, the broad thoroughfare of luxury apartment buildings, churches and embassies that leads to the White House, to the east. Originally a streetcar suburb, Mount Pleasant’s commercial drag, Mount Pleasant Street, shoots off 16th Street at a northwest diagonal, gently welcoming you into the neighborhood.
As you enter Mount Pleasant, my street is the first you will pass on your left. It’s so low-profile that, like most cab drivers, you might not even notice it. But it is a world unto itself. Improbably long—at .3 miles it is the longest unbroken block in D.C.—it even has local politicians. There is the elderly African-American man who sits on his front porch every morning. He has some sort of speech impediment (from a stroke is my guess) so I cannot make out his name but I feel like we are friends. He wears a Washington Nationals baseball cap and shouts pleasantries as you pass. When he briefly disappeared my roommates feared the worst. But to our great relief he re-emerged, complaining about the noise from construction being done to the road bed.
Mount Pleasant, in Washington, D.C. Image via flickr.
Across the street is Morris Levitt, a retired professor of political science. Gay, widowered, Jewish and originally from New York, Morris is a lovable stereotype of himself. An avuncular mix of curmudgeon and mother hen, he lives in the biggest house on the block. It is a boxy, wide white brick mansion that Morris and his neighbors call Casa Blanca. Morris sits through the evening on his stoop, a long Benson and Hedges dangling languidly from one hand and a tumbler of whiskey in the other, kibbitzing with his young neighbors, while Elmo, his fat furry dog, scurries around. Sam, Morris’ tenant, is a Southern school teacher who unfailingly calls him “Mr. Levitt,” and repays Morris’ generosity in alcohol and cigarettes by barbecuing. “I never wanted a tenant,” says Morris, “but when he said he was a teacher…”
One night, I was hanging out on a porch with neighbors after 1 am, drinking wine and singing along to ad hoc guitar adaptations of pop songs. We heard a woman shouting from a window across the street and shushed to hear her, expecting an earful of “do you know what time it is?!” Instead she made a song request.
I call Morris the mayor of Lo Ho. That’s short for Lower Hobart, meaning the far third of the block where it dips steeply down the hill towards Rock Creek and gradually turns a full 90 degrees until it dead ends in a T intersection. Hobart is so long that it has micro-blocks. There’s Mid-Ho, where Tom, the terse middle-aged man who I always see walking his dog, hangs out with the thirty-something parents, gay couples and twenty-something renters. Then there’s Hi Ho, at the top of the hill, where the block flattens and straightens out and you feel like you’re back on the grid. From my house it might as well be California.
Every time I take a friend to my house for the first time I make sure to take them down the full length of my street because they usually pause, about one-third of the way in, and exclaim, “This is beautiful!” The street is narrow, and traffic runs both ways, with cars parked along each side. So traffic moves slowly and you never feel like an ant on a football field, as human beings so often do in a parking lot or alongside a boulevard. The early 20th century row houses look dignified—no squat ranch houses with sideways windows like you see in the Sun Belt, nor even the boxy condominiums that are saturating D.C. like coffee bars in Seattle. The short stoops leading to small covered porches engage the sidewalk. They transition smoothly from private to public space. From my front porch you have a striking vista, especially at night, when the street lamp casts lithe shadows from the trees on Casa Blanca. The front yards are small and filled with foliage, and the curb is lined with trees. In the spring, when everything is in bloom, the natural cover from both sides creates a full canopy of coverage for the pedestrian.
It should be unnecessary to say, but in this country it unfortunately needs saying, the garages sit in back of the homes, in a service alley. I am not known for extolling the urban design of D.C. over my hometown of New York, but the prevalence of alleys is a smart innovation. The trash is collected from them, keeping it off the curb and the smell away from pedestrians. There is a gray stone stairway off the alley that leads to the next block. I think of it as the secret shortcut, like something out of a children’s novel.
The street car that ran on Mount Pleasant Street is now a frustratingly slow bus, but otherwise Mount Pleasant looks a lot like it did in black and white photographs from 60 years ago. The houses, gradually growing grander as you approach the park; the apartment buildings, gradually growing bigger as you approach 16th Street; the stores on the ground floor of Mount Pleasant Street with apartments and offices for tax preparers and travel agents above them.
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my family shopped in a way that is almost unheard-of for middle class Americans today. We did it on foot. And we didn’t go to chain super-stores. The butcher, the drug store, the fruit and vegetable stand, the cheese store, the shoe store, the hardware store. We knew the owners and the workers and they knew us. Gentrification changes many things. In Brooklyn it has brought Fairway and Home Depot and Foot Locker.
D.C. is, compared to New York, even today, a wholly owned subsidiary of chain stores. CVS and Starbucks have outlets that are often separated by just a block from the next one. Lacking the strong history of foreign immigration that shaped other East Coast cities, the stores that defined my childhood are generally non-existent: the Korean greengrocer, the Arab newsstand, the Greek diner, the Italian pizzeria or bakery.
But not so in Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is home to a large concentration of Latino immigrants, mainly from El Salvador. As a result it has the gold standard for urban ethnic business: the bodega. It’s such a neighborhood that it has micro-neighborhoods: a laundromat at the southern end of Mount Pleasant, and one at the northern end, a mere four blocks away. Same goes for the dry cleaners, liquor stores and take-out Chinese.
The areas to the west, across the park, have always been well-to-do, and thus suffer from the bourgeois lameness of suburban America. The stores have brightly colored signs that proclaim their business loudly enough to be read from a passing car: “Lebanese Taverna, Yes! Organic Market, Tasti D-Lite.” To the east of Mount Pleasant are neighborhoods, such as Columbia Heights, that suffered such long and severe destitution that they had virtually no businesses. Now, gentrification in Columbia Heights means the importation of chains large and small, from Best Buy to Julia’s Empanadas, and high-concept faux local hangouts, such as an overpriced British gastropub and “Pete’s Apizza” (get it?)
In between sits Mount Pleasant, where gentrification has been a slow burn rather than a conflagration. Mount Pleasant was stabilized a generation ago by hippies and middle-class African-Americans who were attracted to the undervalued houses, but it never became a nightlife destination. Today, it feels integrated, rather than colonized. There are black and white families, renovated group houses for the young and clean cut and unrenovated ones for the not-necessarily-so-young or clean, immigrants stuffed into apartments, and unique little stores to cater to them all. We have a pharmacy, one of the few independent ones in the District, a basement video store (ditto), and a hardware store where the men behind the counter chat you up about neighborhood issues like the now-repealed ban on live music. There’s a precious Latino-influenced health food restaurant with a notoriously imperious owner and a mediocre bakery with a notoriously forgetful staff. There’s a farmers market that takes food stamps, a bar and grille that constantly changes its menu but knows better than to abandon its signature tater tots, and a dive bar where, this being D.C., after all, the long-haired, mustachioed bartender is a libertarian political blogger.
But, so far, there are no frozen yogurt emporiums, no places where you can get a macchiato, and, unless you count the sketchy hole-in-the-wall takeout joint that gave one of my roommates food poisoning, no sushi. These are boasts, not complaints.
Recently, I met a woman who lives in D.C. and reads Next American City. “I know your type,” she said in an arch, teasing tone. “You’re one of those people who lives in Mount Pleasant and loves to talk about how great it is.” I imagine that in Flirting for Dummies, it might say that I should have protested, or bashfully admitted that she had me pegged. But those thoughts did not cross my mind. Backing away from my Mount Pleasant boosterism would be like downplaying my New York dialect, my Yiddishkeit heritage, or my Brooklyn pride. I did not miss a beat. “Hell yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I am.”
Ben Adler joins Next American City as an Urban Leaders Fellow based in Washington, D.C. He will be focusing on Washington and the role of the federal government in urban policy. Ben covered the 2008 election and Congress as a staff writer for Politico. Prior to joining Politico Ben was the editor of CampusProgress.org, a daily online political and cultural magazine at the Center for American Progress, a regular contributor to The American Prospect Online and its award-winning blog, TAPPED, and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation and the websites of The Guardian and The Atlantic among other publications.
LA's "Donut Hole"
I'm sure no one even sees the irony in this. Here is the review.
Straight down the middle of the hole.
Straight down the middle of the hole.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Really, why are they here?
Via Ezra Klein:
Why Are Tom Vilsack and Janet Napolitano in the Obama Administration?
This is a good post from Matt Yglesias:
One could imagine a world in which instead of serving as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack was running for the US Senate seat currently held by Chuck Grassley. Vilsack would probably lose such a race, but one reason he would probably lose such a race is that Grassley could badly undercut his campaign by reaching an agreement with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus to produce a bipartisan health care reform bill.
Similarly, if Janet Napolitano were running for senate instead of serving as Secretary of Homeland Security that might be giving John McCain some incentive to deal.
This is one of those ways in which I don't understand the appointments process. I understand that given other career options, like an appointment to a Cabinet position, Tom Vilsack might not want to run against Chuck Grassley and Janet Napolitano might not want to take a shot at John McCain. Both of them could lose, and then they're unemployed and electorally tarnished. But the thing about an appointment is that the president can make it at any time. So why not just assure Tom Vilsack and Janet Napolitano that if they lose their elections they will be appointed secretary of agriculture and secretary of homeland security, respectively? Maybe they still don't want to run for Senate. But maybe then the president doesn't want to appoint them at all because they clearly don't care for his agenda all that much.
On the other side, it's not as if there's some massive benefit Obama got from choosing the former governor of Arizona to be the secretary of homeland security as opposed to, say, Bill Bratton. As far as I can tell, appointing popular politicians who could mount a credible Senate campaign is pretty much all downside.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Pics
Kottke had some great photos recently I wanted to share.
Balloons gather
Man and nature conspire to create something that looks straight out of a Pixar film.
Worth viewing large. (via flickr blog)
Our three Suns
In early July, a photographer took a picture of what appears to be three Suns rising over Gdansk Bay in Poland. The photographer insists that the effect was not created by the camera and was visible to the naked eye.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Xixi no Banho
Via Alpentraum(who has been spot on lately I might add):
New ad campaign from Brazil encourages kids (everyone?) to pee in the show in order to conserve water. Apparently that’s like 4.380 litres a year if one flush a day is saved per household. Sure beats out the disgusting “If it’s yellow” treehugger campaign from USA. I particularly like Gandhi, Stephen Hawking, an alien and King Kong joinging forces for this noble cause.
Well played, Brazil. Well played.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Good Morning!
Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal were married last weekend, before the marriage they were registered at Craate and Baarehyl.--SRB
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Ring of Fire
via Boing Boing: Ray Charles doing a fantastic cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." It's from The Johnny Cash Show, a variety show that aired from 1969 to 1971.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Please Refrain From Homicidal Rampages
Via Gawker. It's appalling that it has come to this. Boo Fox News. Boo.
We all know that the types of people who watch Glenn Beck on Fox News aren't exactly intellectual leviathans, but what does it say about their collective sanity when Beck has to lecture them on-air about the perils of mass-murder.
Beck closed his show tonight with a bizarre message to his viewers: don't go messing up all the progress we wingnuts are making at derailing the Obama presidency with obfuscations, distortions and outright lies with any sort of Timothy McVeigh or James Von Brunn-type shit!
Watching this clip, one is struck by a number of oddities, the most obvious being that Beck is unusually subdued during this segment of his show. His message is delivered in a somewhat somber, straightforward manner. There are none of the typical Barnum-esque theatrics typically employed by Beck to drive his messages through to the wee brains of his followers. Here Glenn Beck is just simply looking into the camera and imploring his audience not to murder innocent people — "Just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for." —nothing unusual about that, is there?
Well, yes, there is in fact something very unusual about it. One can't help but wonder, "What the hell provoked this?" Was it a demand from the higher-ups at Fox News, and do they know something that we don't about how close certain segments of the right-wing are to acting out violently? Remember when Shep Smith talked about the crazy-ass emails the staff at Fox get from unhinged right-wingers? Could this be tied to that?
Then again, perhaps Beck's just feeling the heat from his "Obama is a racist" comment and is trying to do something to shine a positive light on himself. Whatever, the clip below is oddly compelling and scary as hell at the same time.
Monday, August 3, 2009
How Do You Decide to Run for President?
Via Ezra Klein:
The Post has published an excerpt from Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson's new book, "The Battle for America 2008
One day in late September 2008, aboard his chartered flight from North Carolina to Chicago, Obama talked about what pushed him into the presidential race after only two years in the Senate. "Objectively you've got to say there's a certain megalomania there that's unhealthy. Right?" he said with a chuckle. "Axelrod said this to me and he always reminds me of this. One of the things he said to me is he wasn't sure I would be a good candidate because I might be too normal. Which is why it's amusing, during the course of this campaign, the evolving narrative about me being aloof and elitist.
"Axelrod's right," he continued. "I'm not somebody who actually takes myself that seriously. I'm pretty well adjusted. You know, you can psychoanalyze my father leaving and this and that, but a lot of those things I resolved a long time ago. I'm pretty happy with my life. So there's an element, I think, of being driven that might have operated a little differently with me than maybe some other candidates. The way I thought about it was more of a sense of duty, in this sense. I thought to myself: There aren't that many people put in the position I'm put in. Some of it's just dumb luck. Some of it maybe has to do with me embodying some characteristics that are interesting for the time that we're in. But when I made the decision to do this, it wasn't with the certainty that I was the right person for the job. It was more the sense of, given what's been given to me, I should probably just give it a shot and see whether in fact there's something real there.
"But I went into it with some modesty, thinking to myself: It may be that this really is all hype, and once people get a sense of my ideas and what's going on there that they think I'm some callow youth or full of hot air, and if that turned out to be the case, that was okay. I think for me it was more of a sense of being willing to do this, understanding that the odds were probably -- I gave myself 25 percent odds, you know, maybe 30 -- which are pretty remarkable odds to be president of the United States, if you're a gambling man."
Photo credit: Jim Young -- Reuters
Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend
See, McSweeney's can be witty and pretentious! There are plenty of other witty lists to look at here. The one below was sent to me by EW, who while sometimes witty is also sometimes pretentious.
Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend.
BY SCOTT A. HARRIS
- - - -
Scott is making good, well informed decisions.
Scott is going to bed at a very reasonable hour.
Scott is drinking only on occasion, and even then it's just one or two.
Scott quit smoking several months ago without any apparent difficulty.
Scott is in no way involved, currently nor in the past, with a married woman, regardless of what anyone is saying.
Scott is making large, regular contributions to his savings account.
Scott is making yet another home cooked meal, avoiding fast food as usual.
Scott is no longer in debt like he used to be...boy that would be terrible.
Scott is in no way affected by the current economic downturn...everything is a-okay.
Scott is not gaining weight, and his clothes fit just fine.
Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend.
BY SCOTT A. HARRIS
- - - -
Scott is making good, well informed decisions.
Scott is going to bed at a very reasonable hour.
Scott is drinking only on occasion, and even then it's just one or two.
Scott quit smoking several months ago without any apparent difficulty.
Scott is in no way involved, currently nor in the past, with a married woman, regardless of what anyone is saying.
Scott is making large, regular contributions to his savings account.
Scott is making yet another home cooked meal, avoiding fast food as usual.
Scott is no longer in debt like he used to be...boy that would be terrible.
Scott is in no way affected by the current economic downturn...everything is a-okay.
Scott is not gaining weight, and his clothes fit just fine.
Russian Pilot Ejecting at Mach-2
Via Geekologie.
Movie producers paid two Sukhoi Su-35 pilots to fly without a canopy at Mach 2.0, and have one of them eject in what probably is one of the most dangerous stunts ever filmed.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Some changes
I'm playing with the blog a bit. Trying to get more viewing space, so things don't get cut off so much. Also, I added some feedback buttons for all you slackers who I know are reading but never leave comments. Now you can just click a button to let me know you feel the love. Let me know what you think.
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