It's green

My neighborhood is turning into a jungle. It has been raining so much here that the vegetation is getting out of hand. Personally I can’t really take care of it myself anyway, but my more able-bodied neighbors are also being overwhelmed. There are green things everywhere.

It’s actually kind of nice, but boy is there a lot of stuff growing out there. And is it ever wet.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make sure there are no triffids.

I’m tired of the games

The Following Is a Political Rant on Health Care – consider yourself warned

I don’t want to hear anyone – President, administration personnel or member of either chamber of Congress – say anything about health care reform unless they are saying that the bill they are proposing guarantees health care for every citizen of the United States.

That’s it. No convoluted plans, no compromises. Every person in this country deserves health care as a fundamental right. It’s embarrassing that we have the most expensive but least effective coverage of the world’s leading industrialized countries (and some of the poorest counltries). Think about it: a foreign army threatens, sure we’ll save you; your house is burning down, sure we’ll put it out; someone is burgling your house, the police will be right there; you’re dying of a curable disease but can’t afford the treatment, sorry, maybe we’ll send flowers. Who does that make sense to?

I want the minimum level of care tied to what members of Congress get (which is paid for by our tax dollars). In other words, no member of Congress or their family can have better coverage than the lowest level of coverage available to an average citizen. Guaranteed, birth to death.

If we must maintain the for-profit health insurance model, then every American should get a subsidy to pay for insurance. I don’t give a damn if insurance company executives can’t make millions, we are talking about peoples’ lives here. This affects health and emotional and financial security. The fact that any citizen of the United States must choose between food and prescriptions, or rent and a doctor visit, is obscene.

Don’t bother telling me that we can’t afford to have a government bureaucrat making decisions about our health care. For one thing, it seems to be fine to have this done for people on Medicare or Medicaid and for veterans – you know, the people who put their lives on the line for us. For another, I have insurance company bureaucrats who personally profit from denying benefits making those decisions now so how would it be worse?

And stop throwing out lame ideas like taxing benefits or taxing sugar and tobacco to pay for this. Raise the marginal rates on income over $500,000. Tax stock transactions, say $0.25 per transfer, to pay for the bailouts to recover that money. Fuck the hedge fund managers and tax their income as income, not as capital gains. Why someone earning billions pays 15% tax and someone earning $50k has to pay 22% is beyond me. And the effective rate on corporations in this country is 0%, how about we make that more equitable so the average citizen doesn’t have to pay for everything?

Any plan to further cut Medicare and Medicaid is also outrageous. Medicare administration has already been farmed out to private companies. That’s tax dollars from a non-profit government agency being funneled to third party administrators. An additional layer of unnecessary administration has been added whose only job is to cut benefits so they can show a profit. That is criminal.

Don’t forget, we already subsidize healthcare. For every emergency room visit that can’t be paid for, for every indigent care case, for every person without health insurance, the insurance premiums and hospital fees are pushed up to cover the loss.

Yes, I am bitter and royally pissed. Everyone in Washington is playing political games with this. This is much more than a political power play. This is a game that affects peoples’ lives. To fight against health care is to support insurance company policy that harms lives and has lead to deaths. All for the sake of profit.

Also, please remember that the network of Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans were originally not for profit, and they made tons of money and the executives made huge salaries.

All that we have now is a system of for-profit insurance that can be arbitrarily cancelled and emergency rooms nationwide that are strained to the breaking point, with many closing and leaving the community they served with no place to turn for help. To believe that this constitutes a working health care system is delusional or at best wishful thinking.

We need change – now where have I heard that hollow statement before? We need it now. This is a moral imperative. People are suffering and dying because of our collective actions. I don’t know what to do beyond this here and annoying my Congress critters, which I do routinely. Any suggestions?

One more thing: health insurance is not health care. The current conversation is focused on insurance and forgets the people who need care.

Fair warning

I started this blog so that people I know could find out what was going on with me at their convenience and not by me sending out long, boring emails. But I also wanted to use it to just get information out there in the ether so that it could be found by anyone else who had lived through a similar experience. I know the value of learning that you are not the only person to have lived through something, that you aren’t the only person to have an unusual experience, that your life being turned upside down in a spectacular way has actually happened to others – because that means that you aren’t alone even if you never meet the other person.

I have been contacted by other people because of things I have put on-line. So I am going to keep posting things about myself that are not pleasant experiences. Some of it is old stuff – nothing I’ve posted before, just not necessarily a recent experience, but I want it out there for people to see just in case it might help.

Just so you know. I’ll probably have something up in a day or two.

The hits keep coming

I just though that I’d add one last update on my car. The repair shop is only about 4 blocks from home, so it wasn’t until a couple of days after the repairs that I found out that the air conditioner wasn’t working. I hadn’t thought to ask them to check that.

Now, for me, an air conditioner is a necessity; I can’t breathe in the summer without one. If it had been October I might have let it slide for a while, but summer is just getting started. For me, with my lungs, having a car without a/c is like not having a car.

So, ka-ching! I got me a new compressor. Oh well, them’s the breaks. My other bills can just wait. At least I have a working vehicle again to take the strain off of the other car.

The penguin is gone

Or in other words, there’s nothing on the telly.

My TV is no longer useful. It works just fine, but there’s nothing left to watch. I have a Sony Watchman that I received as a gift more than 20 years ago. It’s a clunky little thing with a 1.5 inch black and white image and I’ve always thought it was pretty cool. Oh, it was surpassed in functionality as the technological times rolled on, but when it came out in the 80s it was leading edge in consumer electronics.

I was always amazed when I would take it out over the years and find that it was still working. I didn’t use it much, more recently for the fun of it and because of the impending loss of signal, but it was nice to have around. It was a neat gadget.

Now I can’t use it anymore. There are a few low power stations still broadcasting in analog in the area, but the only one of those that I can really get a decent image and sound on is a shopping channel.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. I’m just sad that the TV still works but the times have passed it by. Profit has overwhelmed technology. Everybody with a voice in the matter wanted broadcast TV to go digital and so it did. Now I have a relic. At least I’ll save on the batteries.

Maybe I’ll add a new, digital, color TV to my wish list. After all, you have to have something to use to sit outside and watch the game on. OK, the 1.5 inch projected Watchman image was not really good for watching a game (I used it for news and weather mostly) but I can go for an upgrade, can’t I?

Better luck next time – oh, I see you had lots

I read Angels & Demons. I bought this on the recommendation of someone working in a bookstore 5 years ago. They said it was better than The DaVinci Code. When I started it the first time I had to put it down because of some flaws in the details, not the writing itself but the content. They aren’t big things, they aren’t things most people would know about or even care about, but they put me off the character and the author. Before the movie came out, my wife bought me The DaVinci Code as a diversion because boy did I need one. She also knows that I like to read the book before I see the movie. I read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Dan Brown may not be remembered as a writer of great literature, so what, he can sure plot a thriller. And I like the main character. Well, I want his job, anyway.

Now that the movie of Angels & Demons is out, I needed to read the book. So I took my disbelief, suspended it, wrapped it in bubble wrap, sealed it with duct tape and locked it in a back room. It didn’t matter; it got loose and I could feel it reading over my shoulder. But once I got past my personal problems with the book I had fun. I don’t think it’s as tightly plotted as The DaVinci Code, but it is an earlier book. Assuming that I’m remembering the book and not the movie, The DaVinci Code had a more fully realized conflict and leaner plot – which is not to say that there weren’t some things that could have been edited. Though the more I think about, I think I am comparing the movie to this book.

I expect the movie version of this one to have the requisite changes to get the story on film but it should translate well. Go ahead and read Angels & Demons. My complaints are nitpicking in a very real sense.

Overall, easy to dance to with a good beat.

I feel almost human

My wife and I went out with a friend to see a movie yesterday. It was like being a real person. We have now broken our long-standing annual total of movies seen in one year. For 2009 our total is now 3! Yay!

We saw Star Trek. It was, in a word, fun. I expected some major changes – as you would need to do to make a movie of this sort where many pieces are reworked into a whole – and I have some complaints, but for now I’ll keep them to myself. They managed to get in all of the original main characters in a reasonable way which was not easy. The cast was very good, but for me there were two standouts.

I think Zachary Quinto nailed it as Spock. There was one moment there with a raised eyebrow and an expression where he absolutely channeled Leonard Nimoy. Karl Urban was also pretty darn good as McCoy. He just had the personality down. Oh, I almost forgot Simon Pegg. How could I do that? He was fun and exuberant and a little crazy. His attitude was pure Scotty.

I also loved the lines they threw in: I’m a doctor not a physicist. I’m givin’ you all she’s got. There might have been more, I forget. That was fun. At one point it got a laugh out of us at a tense moment, but it was too much fun to care.

Go see it.