Happy 4th of July! (Although I suspect that if I were living here in Massachusetts during Colonial times I perhaps would have been a Loyalist.)
We’re going to watch the big fireworks show in Boston tonight, and because it starts so late, 10:30, we’ll be staying in town overnight. So there won’t be anything new here until tomorrow night.
We live not too far from Providence, RI, where the Providence Journal has added Peanuts to its comics page lineup. I used to feel that longtime cartoonists should retire and make way for new talent, but later I decided that the merit of a strip, whether new or old, should be the only determining factor.
It appears the managing editor didn’t intend that notice to be published immediately, because it’s dated Sunday. WordPress has an option to schedule the publishing of posts. I haven’t used it often, but I’ve been thinking about coming up with a series of posts on a single subject and scheduling them to appear automatically as sort of a weekly feature.
And out in Minnesota, one of the “150 Minnesota moments we’d just as soon forget” is the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press dropping Schulz’s first comic strip, Li’l Folks.
The Charles M. Schulz Museum has an excellent collection of the Li’l Folks panels called Charles M. Schulz : Li’l Beginnings. At that link you’ll find it under the Biographical section of books.
More songs I’d like to point out. Like The Clash song, these will be testosterone tracks.
I’ve featured David Bowie doing “The Man Who Sold The World,” and Nirvana did a cover version, so I’ll include it, even though it isn’t a particular favorite. If Kurt Cobain were alive, I’d tell him there’s nothing chic about heroin use, let alone addiction, especially when you’re found with your brains splattered everywhere. But I would also tell him that I consider “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to be a quintessential Rock track.
[Ah, well, it seems that Universal Music doesn’t want these videos embedded, so guess what? I won’t use them. Bye-bye, Nirvana.]
One of my top three favorite albums ever is Green Day’s American Idiot. All at once it can be considered derivative, calculated, and manipulative, yet sincere, original and compelling. American Idiot is a brilliant accomplishment, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came and went before, and one out of every three times you ask I will tell you it’s my all-time #1 pick. The 20 seconds that start at 4:35 in “Jesus of Suburbia” distill everything that the Sex Pistols and The Clash were all about.
As promised, here’s more anime. Emma, A Victorian Romance, a 24-part series, isn’t Jane Austen, but it’s not giant robot battles, either.
We’ve watched only the first episode of Emma, but the series looks like a good selection for Eric’s girl cousins. I’ve spliced together a couple of scenes. See? No giant battling robots! 😉
[flv:/Video/2008/JUL/Emma.flv 448 252]
Ever hear of balance billing? It’s a game that health care providers and insurance companies play with their customers caught in the middle, and it’s getting a lot of attention in California. The idea is insurance companies reimburse only the amount that Medicare pays for a given service, which is sometimes about 60% of the actual cost, and the patients are billed for the difference. Combined with the free care that many hospitals provide to uninsured emergency room walk-ins, it’s no wonder health care providers want fully insured patients to be fully insured.
I make my living working at a company that depends upon the viability of hospitals. Carol worked at two suburban Boston hospitals that closed. Shut down and gone. So there’s a reason for hospital administrators to insist upon full reimbursement for services.
Until and unless there’s national health in the United States, it’s my expectation that at some point “fully insured” will mean having a sizable deductible. Everybody will pay something like the first $1000 annually for individual coverage and $2500 for a family. These amounts would be adjusted over a period of time until they’re doubled. The elderly, diabetics and pregnant women would go through that very quickly, of course, but many people would be paying for all of their routine care.
The problem is, of course, that some people won’t go to the doctor and they’ll end up in emergency rooms anyway. But by shifting the financial burden of primary care to consumers, the hope would be that premiums would drop enough that more people could be covered for cancer and heart attacks. And no more of that pre-existing condition nonsense. Health care as we know it in America would be gone, but I just don’t see how else the system can manage.
And let’s be honest with ourselves. Many health problems are caused by eating, drinking, smoking, and lack of exercise.
The list of everything you’ve ever watched on YouTube will soon be in the hands of Viacom. This is ridiculous.
What is Viacom going to find people were watching that belongs to them? Mostly Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and that won’t be news to them. You’d think those guys could put some pressure on the suits and tell them to lay off. Deal with reality and find a way to make it pay without making the fans feel like crooks.
