Thursday, February 18, 2010

Recommended Reading

I send you to a lot of Fred Kaplan articles but this one's especially good. It's about how the line that Dick Cheney is currently selling — the one about how the Obama administration makes us less safe by treating terrorists as criminals — is really at odds with both the policies and the successes of the Bush-Cheney administration in that area. Even the guys Cheney worked with there didn't agree with him on how these matters should be handled.

• Posted at 5:32 PM · LINK

Today's Health Care Rant

As I mentioned in this post from just last August, I take one very expensive prescription medicine. (And I take two cheap ones. Before I lost all that weight, I used to take nine prescriptions of varying price tags.) At the time of that posting, I said the medicine cost me ten bucks a month through my insurance and that if I didn't have that insurance, it would cost me $320 a month.

Things have changed in five months. The prescription now costs me $25 a month and the pharmacist tells me that if I didn't have insurance, it would be $525. And again, that's per month, which (assuming no further increases, which is probably a silly assumption) is $6,300 annually. The monthly cost if one were to buy the exact same thing in Canada — made in the same factory with the same formula — is $280.

There are a lot of things wrong with our health system but there's a biggie right there. Some people, pure and simple, cannot afford $6,300 a year, even for medication on which their health depends. Republicans want people to be able to shop around and buy health insurance from any state in order to get the best price. How about letting us shop around and buy from Canada if that gets us the best price?

• Posted at 3:53 PM · LINK

Last Thought Before Bed...

And this is even too later to be up writing scripts.

• Posted at 5:25 AM · LINK

Today's Bonus Video Link

This blog has gone far too long without a video of baby pandas...

• Posted at 2:25 AM · LINK

Roger, Not Over and Not Out

A lot of you were moved by (and forwarded and tweeted) the article I linked to about Roger Ebert's current condition. If you read that, you'll want to read Ebert's latest journal entry in which he discusses the article and the reaction to it.

Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for telling me about this. Shelly, by the way, is resuming her cabaret career after too long a hiatus. Sunday, April 18, she'll be singing songs of the sixties at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I'll post details here soon but if you're in Southern California, you might want to enter that date in your Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar or whatever you use. Some folks, I hear, still have calendars on paper.

• Posted at 2:22 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's an image of a newspaper page from 1960 with a piece about a record my friend/hero Stan Freberg had just released — a little ditty called "The Old Payola Roll Blues." It was a funny spoof on a scandal that was then sweeping the record and radio industries. What's interesting here is that the reviewer, Don Page, makes some fearless predictions about how the sixties will mark the demise of rock-and-roll. I don't think that happened.

• Posted at 12:43 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Joe Conason reminds us that there's nothing surer: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Wealthy folks have never done so well.

The thing I find most interesting is that this information comes from a report that the Internal Revenue folks prepare each year on the incomes and tax liabilties of the 400 richest taxpayers. According to Conason, this report was available to the public when Clinton was president and is available under Obama...but George W. Bush did not allow it to be distributed during his terms. Gee, I wonder why.

• Posted at 12:18 AM · LINK

Jim Harmon, R.I.P.

Author-historian Jim Harmon died February 16 from (I am told) a heart attack. Jim was born in 1933 and in the forties, he was an avid collector of pulp magazines — science-fiction, especially — and a devout fan of radio programs of the day. He became an expert in these areas, authoring several fine books, most notably The Great Radio Heroes, a top-selling 1967 chronicle of an art form and an era. He was also a fan of comic books of the forties and so was a contributor to the earliest comic fanzines. He could talk for hours about the nexus of radio heroes like The Green Hornet and comic book characters like Batman.

Jim wrote a lot of fiction under a number of names. His own appeared on dozens of stories the sold over the years to science-fiction magazines and he wrote often for film publications. In the seventies, he briefly edited Monsters of the Movies, which was Marvel's attempt to mine the marketplace that bought Famous Monsters of Filmland.

I did not know Jim well and our paths didn't cross much the last decade or so. But there was a time when we often sat and talked at local conventions or appeared together on panels. He was a friendly, bright guy who took his work seriously...but not, I'm pleased to say, too seriously.

• Posted at 12:12 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Hey, if you think the Marx Brothers are funny in English, wait'll you see them in Italian. I feel sorry for the guy who had to translate (and I guess, replace) all the puns...and I like the fact that some Italian actor is dubbing Italian dialogue for a Jewish guy doing a bad Italian accent. But I really like the fact that in the original scene (from Horse Feathers, of course) Chico spoke English but occasionally mumbled something in Italian...and in the Italian version, he speaks Italian but occasionally mumbles something in English...

• Posted at 12:03 AM · LINK