Negotiations and Love Songs

“two disappointed believers
two people playing the game
negotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same.”
-Paul Simon, "Train in the Distance"

Nobody likes people that say "I told you so." Nonetheless: I told you so.

One debate topic back in high school (which, for me, was in *cough* 1990-1994) was about universal health care. It was a hot topic, and I was much more conservative then. One thing did bug me about my conservatism, though. It was the projections of what health care would cost American business if we remained largely insured by our employers and costs kept rising. They basically said American business would be unable to compete globally or insolvent (or both).

Now we're in the second round of bailouts. For some reason the media (even the New York Times, which should jump at the chance to point this out) are burying the simple connect-the-dots between the Big Three bailout and the lack of universal health coverage in the US. People outside the paper have had to do it for them (and who knew I'd ever be posting a link to analysis by Mitt Romney I'd be praising?) Today, a post on Timothy Egan's blog carries the story of an insolvent municipality, but buries their crazy health insurance coverage in paragraph 18!

And it is a simple connect-the-dots: other governments provide universal health care and can thus control their costs. The free lending of the mortgage boom was the finger that pushed the first domino, but frankly all the dominos are close together because of the shortsightedness of the American people to deal with their health care problem.

I love the free market for a lot of things, but I've come around since high school on this and told anybody who would sit still long enough to listen: we need universal health care. It's good for our health; it's good for the health industry; it's good for the competitiveness of American companies. Let's get over our strange flirtation with government provided health insurance through tax breaks to business and actually use the same money to provide universal health care.

Definitions

Soccer. You know. "Sock" means sock, and "er" means ball.

That's why you play soccer with your socks. You don't play it with your feet. You play football with your feet... um... foots. Foot. You play football with your foot.

Pictures and Images

"I'm caught in a crossfire between pride and fear
and my heart isn't bullet-proof...
I'm in pieces
think of something clever"
--Ginny Owens, "Pieces"

First off, Sharon promised a picture of Asher as Larry the Cucumber:



Many more recent Asher pictures can be found in the Asher in Grove City Album on our Picasa page.

And, before I ramble on about things that don't matter, something fun for musicians this holiday:



I'm headed back to Chicago for a whole week this time. I obviously don't want to be away from family for so long, but at the same time this promises to be the end of version 1.0 of the Jump archive, so I may be wrapping up an important milestone.

I've also gotten several emails about SAD, thank you to everybody who's taken the time to write.

Now, on to something truly important: TV. It appears NBC is pretty upset at the way "Heroes" has been going this season. I'm not truly surprised; when Sharon and I got sucked into "Heroes" its first season it benefited from snagging a huge portion of a Sorkin audience. The show wasn't as tight or fun as a Sorkin show, but it wasn't preachy or self-important like "Studio 60" and all the show's best qualities were on display against something that was struggling and failing. Now it's obvious the writers are comic book writers with all the good and bad that goes along with that, and with the sloppy plots and big jumps from what viewers were expecting (not just continuity breaks, but deliberate changes in intent of characters) the show has clearly lost its focus. Sharon and I are still watching it, but I at least feel like each episode is letting me down a little more.

"Chuck", on the other hand, has been wonderful this season. Faced with what is typically a show's death knell (the guy-girl relationship is made sorta possible) the show hasn't just thrown in the towel or turned into a rerun of itself. Instead, the writers seem to have grasped something that makes for really good television: theme and parody. The most recent episode was full of completely unbelievable points (really, Japan has a nuclear missle satellite in orbit that is controlled using a code available only if you beat the last level of Missile Command?) but the show manages theme and variation so well (especially as they tap geek subculture) that I just didn't care. It is caricature, but it's fun caricature, and even characters that seemed to exist only to be cardboard cutouts for the Chuck/Sarah story have been given room to breathe.

"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles", despite having already been picked up for the whole season, seems to also be losing its footing. My fear (and the fear of many on Television Without Pity) when the show began was "how are they gonna make this interesting without turning it in to 'Terminator of the Week'"? The answer: they aren't. Basically, this season has been a different Terminator every week. It's a shame, because there are tons and tons of ways to take the show that don't involve massive time travel, but I guess since they don't capitalize on the Terminator part of the francise they're out. Also, they (like every other SciFi show ever) are having problems not regressing their android characters. Summer Glau is doing great, but their bad guy Terminators seem to be having problems finding where to draw the line between "human behavior I can emulate" and "human behavor I can't understand", tending to side on whichever involves the least impact on the scene.

(There's a whole different discussion here on the use of Christian imagery and the Bible in that show, but let's just say I'm mostly buying it and Sharon mostly isn't. The line is where the use seems forced versus an interesting theme and variation model. Sharon's mostly annoyed and I'm mostly interested. They can definitely ruin it if they start trying to use the Christian imagery as more than theme/texture and start trying to actually tie in story to foretold events. If they stay away from that I'm okay, and most of Sharon's concern is, I think, that they'll head that direction, at least with the former FBI character.)

I watched the second episode of "Fringe" and dropped it. Too weird, not enough for me to care about. I watched "Alias": people seem to forget that before "Lost" people watched Abrams's shows because he knew how to do characters, not just weird stuff with online hints. I wanted to know stuff about Alias too, but only after I was watching it for Sydney Bristow and (more, honestly) SpyDaddy Bristow.

"House" is turning into a completely different show (less about medicine, more about characters) but with the exception of 13 I'm pretty into the characters, so this is an okay change for me. It had to happen eventually, since you just can't have that many crazy medical things that aren't completely absurd (and, basically, they'd gotten to the completely absurd point during most episodes last season, and I'm not even a doctor.)

The election is over so it's likely that SNL will soon not be worth watching again (I mean, there will be highlights, but that's what NBC.com is for) and that pretty much brings us up to the present. (We could talk about "The Amazing Race" but this post is too long already.)

I'll talk about more weighty stuff another day, but the quote probably gives a pretty good idea how I'm feeling this days.

Bomblets

I know it's been a long time since I posted. As soon as I bother Kurtis to do it, or figure out for myself how to do it, there will be some pictures -- including the cutest Larry the Cucumber you ever did see.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers for my mom. She's recovering well, although her energy is still low. She's back home, and going to rehab 3 days a week. Unfortunately, there was anothe break-in/burglary at my folks' house -- this happened while they were helping us move in July, and now it's happened again. I am pretty worried about them -- their safety, since it's likely it was the same people both times, and their stress levels. And of course the burglars weren't satisfied with taking things; they had to dump over piles and empty drawers and throw things around, so now they have all that cleaning up to do, just when Mother is already tired, etc. So, things are going okay, but there's obviously plenty more to pray for.

Asher is growing and changing -- he's so capable in so many ways, that I almost don't notice it. But it really does strike me when we come across something he's not familiar with. This morning Kurtis and Asher made omelets, and while eating Asher kept saying "omelet" in many different, wrong ways. It's so seldom that he mispronounces anything that Kurtis and I were loving it! We miss cute mispronounciations. Anyway, in particular, he kept telling us that we had some egg bomblets to eat... would you like to share some of my embelopes? (pronounced like "om-be-lopes" It was a reminder of how much he's grown, and yet how young he still is.