Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Today's Video Link

This is the Betty Boop version of "Snow White," which is famous for its performance by the great Cab Calloway. It was released on March 31, 1933 and in addition to Mr. Calloway, one hears the voice of Mae Questel.

Animation historians have been known to debate whether audiences of the day (or even the folks who made this cartoon) quite understood the lyrics and meaning of the song Calloway sings, "St. James Infirmary." The tune was said to have been about a girl who died from an overdose of Cocaine...and when you put it in a cartoon called "Snow White," well, it gets people to wondering.

The film runs around seven minutes and you have two choices — three, if you include not watching it at all. You can just click below and see an okay version of it. Or if you have a lot of downloading time, you can go over to this page and get a fairly large Quick Time file of a nicely restored version. The original opening (but not the closing) titles have been returned to the film and as explained on the page I just linked to, the aspect ratio has been considerably improved. This is some of the fine work being done in conjunction with the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive Project, an endeavor that we applaud.

• Posted at 10:24 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan discusses the plans for a new missile defense program. This is in spite of the fact that every year we pour another ten billion or so dollars into the old missile defense program with close to zero evidence that it can ever work properly. But it sure sounds cool so I guess that's worth the money.

• Posted at 9:55 PM · LINK

E-Mail Jam

One of the many companies through which e-mail passes on its way to me is experiencing server problems. If you sent me something earlier today, it may have bounced. If you sent me something since about 1 PM my time, it's jammed up in a computer waiting to get to me. All will be straightened out soon.

• Posted at 3:06 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

From someone who works in a hospital emergency room...

The reason there's a 4-5 hour wait in our emergency room is simple. There's a 4-5 hour wait everywhere. People know they have nowhere else to go where there won't be a 4-5 hour wait so they sit there and put up with it. They have no choice. If there was a hospital down the street that got people in and out right away, we'd lose a lot of business and the management of the hospital where I work would make changes.

It often breaks my heart to see people sitting there hour after hour, moaning in pain and crying. I am proud of how many people we help but frustrated that we cannot do better for them. We could if we had more room and more facilities and more staff. More doctors would also help but I think we could cut the wait times in half with the same number of doctors if we had more examining rooms and nurses. Unfortunately then, there might be occasional hours when we weren't working to capacity (wouldn't that be nice?) and someone would say "Why did we build all these extra examining rooms and hire these extra people if they're not in use?"

People ask me what they can do to deal with the long wait times. I tell them the only thing is to only get sick when you know you can get an appointment with your physician. I wish I had a better answer.

It has been my experience — and I think I've said this before here — that the doctors and nurses I've encountered in hospitals have been generally wonderful. There have been exceptions but not many. My problems have all come from the overall bureaucracy and the paper shufflers and the setup, which includes crippling financial burdens. Within a very inefficient framework, dedicated medical professionals perform well. But that framework and the sheer cost of health care are killing a lot of people...and I use the word "killing" in its literal definition.

• Posted at 11:26 AM · LINK

Early Tuesday A.M.

My mother is home now and doing better but I spent all of last evening in a hospital emergency room with her, appalled as I usually am about what you have to do to get medical care in this world. We got there before 8 PM and though we made it clear my mother was in great pain (a wound on her foot), we still didn't see a doctor until after Midnight — and that was only because I started in with threats to call this or that hospital official. A nurse told me that four hour waits are not at all unusual. In fact, they're pretty much the norm these days everywhere.

We don't wait four hours for any other business. We don't have to because when other kinds of businesses have people waiting, they expand and build new facilities and train more employees to meet the demand. Obviously, it's not as easy to build a hospital as it is to erect a new Starbucks, and it takes a lot less time to train the employees in the latter. But we have pretty accurate projections of the population in the future and a pretty fair idea of what percentage will need medical treatment. Why have hospitals, at least in terms of facilities, fallen so far behind the expected demand? In the emergency room I was in last night, it was Standing Room Only, even though some of the people there were there because they couldn't stand...and there isn't even an epidemic or natural disaster sending excess patients to the E.R. This is business as usual. A doctor shortage, I can almost understand. What I don't get is why they don't even have enough chairs in the waiting room.

I'll write more about this when I wake up. Right now, I just wanted to vent that much and apologize that posting may be light here the next few days. I was behind already and now this had to happen. Good night.

• Posted at 3:14 AM · LINK