“Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials” — and all is explained.
Also, someone at IU needs to catch up with Jack Shafer’s excellent urban-legend debunking on so-called “pharm parties” at Slate. Actually, that particular IU someone needs to catch up with a lot of things. In a new study on substance abuse, a task force recommends: “Raise prices for alcohol and other drugs.” Your alcohol, maybe! Leave mine alone!
A small task for you today, my little fuzzy peaches, at reader request.
Let’s solve the health-care crisis. To quote a well-known public figure: Yes, we can.
I ask because I received an e-mail from a reader last week, with a link to a story with this non-inflammatory headline — Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits. Ahem:
As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few. But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.
Castonguay is credited as the man who first conceived of Quebec’s provincial single-payer system, which eventually spread across the country and became the Canadian system we know today. In a story that begins by implicitly scorning the anecdote as a public-policy driver, the anecdote of Claude Castonguay (what a wonderful name) is given great weight, although his ideas about how to fix the Canadian system boil down to a pretty tame set of recommendations:
Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.
In my night-shift editing I read half a dozen pieces like this a week. Everyone has an idea how to fix American health care, but no one has the idea. Personally, I don’t believe the system is fixable in the state it is now. But I’m always willing to read one more idea. My favorite is the Wall Street Journal, which has some of the best health-care reporting in the world, but a whack editorial page bought and paid for by the American Medical Association. And my single favorite piece on that page in recent months was last year sometime, suggesting we could all learn something from the Amish, who don’t believe in health insurance, and who use such radical cost-containment practices as chipping in for one another and, my personal favorite, dickering.
Oh, how I can’t wait for the day when I dicker with my doctor. I bet he can’t, either. Unmentioned in the admiring WSJ editorial are the other documented Amish health-care cost-containment practices, which include alternative medicine (herbalists, midwives, etc.), bus trips to Mexico for the Third World option and, frequently, quackery. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette had a pretty good series a few years ago, where a reporter followed one of these caravans. Among the anecdotes was a woman who’d had a serious ankle injury requiring reconstructive orthopedic surgery, and the incision stubbornly refused to heal, with chronic infections. (Dr. Nance would prescribe a hospital stay with heavy antibiotics to knock down the infection, followed by a rigorous home-care program emphasizing keeping the wound clean, with instruction for all her caregivers. Oh, and diabetes testing. This is just off the top of my head.) Her Mexican doctor advised removing all the surgical screws on the theory they were causing her infections, followed by poultices. I don’t know where the Amish woman is now. My guess is either pushing up daisies, or coping with life as a 19th-century amputee.
(A further note, also from the WSJ: Dickering doesn’t solve everything. Also, let’s recall the tragic case of the Amish Cook, who dropped dead at 66 from an aortic aneurysm, diagnosed by her herbalist as an iron deficiency, IIRC.)
I don’t mean to be flip, I really don’t. I’m glad the reader sent the link along. I know there’s no simple answer to this problem, or any answer. But here’s what I know:
A health-care system where a poor kid with asthma has to take three buses and a subway to his clinic doctor, and a doctor’s wife can get spa-level care while recovering from her breast augmentation — is not a good system.
A health-care system that rewards doctors more for choosing dermatology as a specialty (with all those lucrative, pay-out-of-deep-pockets anti-aging patients) than primary care (with all those poor kids with asthma) — is not a good system.
A health-care system where insurance is connected to your job, with no contingency for job loss other than COBRA — is not a good system.
There is no perfect system, and there might not even be a very good one. Life is a terminal disease, and some of us have trouble facing this fact. There may be no way to balance the truly miraculous technological and pharmaceutical advances that are driving the cost of health care into the stratosphere with the fact hardly anyone can pay for it. But maybe there’s a better way. This is your job today, little commenters of mine: Let’s fix it! You know we can!
And if you’re not up to it, in the bloggage, two internet-related stories about the campaign:
From Saturday’s WashPost, a woman offended by the Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail tries to track it back to its source, with more success than you’d think.
And in Sunday’s NYT, a piece on DIY attack ads by freelancers.
Both worth your time. And just for laughs:
A bunch of white kids fight the “Barack Hussein Obama” thing by taking “Hussein” as their own middle names, an “I am Spartacus” sort of protest. I am Salman Rushdie!
Well, I was right. The weather was hot and muggy and partly cloudy all day, and then, late afternoon, a deluge. This drove the film-festival launch party indoors, to the ground floor of the Renaissance Center. That place belongs in an architectural case study book somewhere, in several chapters, including “And Then Came the ’70s: What Were We Thinking?” and, of course, “How Not to Do It.”
Built in the mid-’70s, the RenCen has its own complicated history, perhaps best summed up in its name, an ironic joke worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Love. It was intended to reassure the white people leaving the city in their rearview mirrors (although I’m not sure, precisely, how that would work) that the city was done with the unpleasantness of the riots and was on its way back, yeah baby. Obviously it didn’t work, but the city got its signature building out of it — a five-tower “rosette” with a central silo reaching 73 stories and the surrounding ones, 39 stories, all wrapped in the black glass that was not only ’70s standard but also a trademark of its architect, John Portman. (Its familiarity was always an itch I couldn’t scratch, until a little research showed Portman was the man who designed the Peachtree Center in Atlanta. Atlanta’s downtown was an early-adult formative experience for me.)
Inside is the nightmare. I walked in from the parking garage and stood there a minute, trying to get oriented. A security guard sitting at a station nearby didn’t even look up from his desk when he drawled, “Lemme guess. You’re lost.” Everybody gets lost in the RenCen. All those towers! All those levels! Curse you, John Portman and your stupid ideas about atria. Everything is round, every walkway seems to lead to another roundabout, and all the walls are some sort of beige concrete. I tried to listen for the music of the party, but the acoustics are awful. I knew where I was going, but I still needed directions. These were the directions: Go straight, follow the walkway around to your right. Look for the escalator. Take it down one level, make another right and you’re there. And I still nearly missed the escalator.
It’s not a terrible place, though. There’s the GM Wintergarden, a vast interior public space with a window wall overlooking the river. Alan likes to take the People Mover over on his lunch hour and eat a Potbelly’s sub while watching the freighters go by. Tellingly, this was a 1999 add-on to the building, after GM bought it. Trust Michiganders to know how much you need the sun in January.
And, I’m pleased to report, you can get good cell service inside, which is good because you need it: “OK, you’re passing Starbucks? I’m right across from Starbucks. Stop. No, stop. Stop walking. Turn to your right. Look up. Not that far. Lower. OK, I’m waving. See me wave? Great. No, I don’t know how to get here from there. Maybe we’d better hold the meeting over the phone.”
The storm was great, and the clearing after the storm was greater, the sun breaking through to light the casino on the Canadian side, bright against the fleeing bank of black clouds. There’s nothing that says, “yes, the storm will pass” like CAESAR’S in red neon, is there?
One final note: I interviewed a man a couple years ago, a sailor. On the wall of his office is a great photo of a boat sailing down the Detroit River, past the half-completed RenCen. It was him, and his boat. He had no idea who’d taken the picture. He’d just found it at a garage sale. What are the odds.
Some bloggage:
Geoffrey Feiger’s co-defendant’s lawyer suggests thanks for his client’s recent acquittal goes right up to the top:
In his initial meeting with 39 mock jurors chosen to represent a typical southeast Michigan jury pool, the judge hired to conduct the simulated trials asked how many trusted their government to tell the truth. Just four of 39 raised their hands.
“In my father’s day,” Fishman told me, “there would have been 38 hands up, with maybe one holdout who’d just gotten out of prison.”
Roy, on a roll, riffs on a Peggy Noonan column about the need to let the gray stallion run, by letting him insult people. Worth a try — he already sort of reminds me of Don Rickles.
Happy Friday. Happy weekend. Happy everything. It’s a lovely day.
It’s raining outside my window, not too hard, but a definite get-wet-if-you-stepped-outside sort of rain, going pitter-pat on everything, and it sounds wonderful.
It’s 8:54 p.m. The sun is trying to break through in the west, real golden-hour light, even though the rain isn’t abating at all. It’s almost, but not quite, Hollywood rain, the kind created by an industrial sprinkler on a bright Los Angeles day. I can hear a cardinal singing somewhere. If I weren’t sitting here, I’d go outside to look for a rainbow, but I’m enjoying the sound and the light filling the room too much to move.
The rain is harder now. Not a breath of a breeze; it’s falling straight down. Very very nice.
I know I’ve been bitching a lot lately, but today I am happy to be a work-at-home freelancer (even thought I have to go to work in, um, two minutes). But I’m working in a chaise in my own bedroom, on my laptop, enjoying the rain and the light and the cardinal. I just left Alan sitting over the remains of dinner — grilled salmon with cucumber-dill sauce, mixed green salad with herbs from the garden, Swiss potatoes — and he informed me he intended to listen to the rain for a while, too.
(Later.)
I don’t know why, but just sitting there enjoying the moment reminded me of something I heard on NPR — you know, that elitist radio network — a few days ago. Margot Adler’s story is headlined “Perfecting the Art of Frugal Living in NYC,” but it really should be called Perfecting the Art of Living, period. It was about a study of New York’s most endangered species — its starving artists, the people who in large part give the city its character and flavor, but who are also the ones least able to live in its staggeringly expensive apartments.
Wary of using too much in fair use, I urge you to click over and read the story of Hank Virgona, visual artist, who typically makes less than $30,000 per year, but still has the world’s riches outside his front door:
Virgona says when people come to see his art he never asks them if they’d like to buy anything.
“I talk about art. I talk about my love for art,” he says. “I talk about how a walk down a quiet street — especially toward dusk — is as good as going to Caracas or Venezuela or anywhere. It is nourishing. That is part of art’s purpose.”
Joan Jeffri, who directed the study for the Research Center for Arts and Culture, says for these creative people being an artist transcends every other identity — race, education, gender.
“They don’t ever think of giving up being artists,” Jeffri says. “If they have arthritis, they change their art form. They don’t retire.”
Jeffri believes these artists have wisdom to impart about living and aging. In a sense, she says, they are role models.
And what are the first programs to be cut when schools have budget troubles? Anyone? Yes, the arts. This has been your moment of Zen.
Jeez, it’s a hot one today. Of course, the hottest part of any day is late afternoon, which is when the (outdoor) kickoff party for the film festival starts. On a rooftop. Oh, well — if this day goes like the last 60 or so, it’ll be raining by then.
Some bloggage:
Of interest to media types only, a WSJ piece on the widening rift — there’s a piece of journalese, ain’a? when was the last time you used “widening rift” in casual conversation — between member papers and the Associated Press.
In the right blogosphere, Roy finds growing anxiety over “what the inaugural ball will be like” if Obama wins. I’m hoping for a five- hour set by Parliament Funkadelic, with lots of “get up offa that thang!” from the stage.
Color me astounded: Madonna’s teeing up a divorce filing. She’s said to be getting the best legal talent to preserve her giant pile of money, wherein live the souls of the men whose essence she extracted, creative succubus that she is. I think her husband’s best strategy is to go limp: Walk into the first negotiation and say, “I don’t want a dime. I won’t take a nickel. I’m off to live in a garret while I try to regain the semblance of originality and creativity I once had before you entered my life. I’m getting some futons from Ikea for the kids to sleep on when they visit. You are a curse and I am fortunate to have escaped with my life. Have a nice one of your own, what’s left of it.” And then walk out. She’d be running after him stuffing a check for $100 million in his pocket.
Not that anyone asked me.
OK, you all — work to do. Play nice.
Fort Wayne’s corporate overlords can’t support one of its crown jewels anymore, but they’re happy to ship the whole shootin’ match to Washington. Thanks, corporate overlords. Funny how Washington is so much closer to your new hometown of Philly.
Maybe you haven’t heard: The Detroit Newspaper Partnership is looking to cut another 7 percent in costs. Another round of buyouts is coming, but now that most newsrooms have burned the deadwood, cut the fat, stripped the muscle and amputated its pinky fingers and other superfluous body parts, it’s now time to, what? Suck the marrow?
I dunno. I tell you this only to stress that for me, for pretty much everyone with a stake in the newspaper industry, worry is our constant companion. At this point in my life I’ve learned not to let it consume me, but honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve thought next year might, possibly, lord willin’, inshallah be better than this, I can’t even remember.
So I’m always looking around for interesting job opportunities. They frequently present themselves at this time of year, summer’s beginning, when I can’t take them. This was yesterday’s:
Here’s the deal. We sell adult stuff. Not porn, but toys, lubes and all that. In our business they are called “adult novelties” Why do we sell adult stuff? Because people really enjoy buying it, that’s why. It’s called making money. The local economy isn’t doing that well, but we are doing great!
We do the website / Internet thing. We have been at it for 10 years now. It’s not too shabby. The work environment is as casual as anyplace on earth and people here are nice.
You’ll write stuff and maybe take pictures of it. We then create a webpage. People see what we have to say and decide whether to buy or not. A great copy writer will balance salesmanship with truth. You’ll be honest and upstanding. People will respect you for it and you will earn their trust.
The job is Monday-Friday 9AM - 5PM. …This is not a freelance job, nor is it a work-from-home type of thing. This is a real copy writing position. You will sit at a desk in a crappy office.
It goes on from there. They extend an offer to apply and invite writing samples about a package of bachelorette party stickers. I blinked when I saw what they wanted: “100-200 words.” Say wha? That’s a big ol’ copy block for a catalog. It sounds like they’re producing the J. Peterman catalog of adult novelties.
This could be my dream job:
The night started the way they always start — sexy dresses straight from the dry-cleaning bag, new shoes, the thrilling sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the apartment door. It’s Clarissa’s bachelorette party, and we are going to plow a wide swath through the night, starting with pomegranate martinis at dinner and ending with shooters at 2 a.m. Comes the witching hour, and here we are – Jenna is puking in the ladies’, Jess is dancing with some guy who has his hand on her ass, Cassie is slumped at the other end of the table, drunk-dialing her exes and crying for no reason. And the bride-to-be? She left an hour ago, and if you squint, you can see her through the window of the tattoo parlor across the street, stretched out on her stomach, some illustrated-man ink artist putting the groom’s name at the top of her butt crack. And you? You’re looking down at the pink bubble sticker you slapped on when the evening was young, a sticker just above your left boob that reads “flirt.” Just so you remember which one you are.
That’s 187 words. They actually sound like fun people, if you don’t mind the soul-destroying work of crafting 150 words about personal lubricant.
That Craigslist ad makes me despair, actually. After our weekend of filmmaking, which would have been impossible without Craigslist, I wonder what the newspaper industry has in the pipeline to compete. Many in the business have criticized Craig Newmark for failing to “monetize” his creation; in fact, I think they have a special word for him, from a high-level econ seminar, something like “bad actor” — used to describe a capitalist who doesn’t want to make money. That implies a similar site could be monetized, while remaining free, so what are they bringing to the table? There’s always a better idea, a way to innovate. My guess is: Not bloody much. They’re GM in 1972, looking at the first Hondas rolling off the boat from Japan, scoffing, who’d want to drive that stupid thing?
As I said: I worry.
OK, on to bloggage, because that’s what we love:
Headlines that shouldn’t be written, much less clicked on: Oprah Winfrey completes her 21-day vegan cleanse.
Oh, and this just in: Copy editing outsourced to India.
And why don’t we leave it at that? Have a swell day, all.
My mind is empty as a cup today. We now get three newspapers delivered to the door — a WSJ salesperson called the other day, and I took pity — and I can’t think of anything to write about. Well, there was this: A story in the NYT about a lawyer’s plan to use Google searches to establish community standards. Since more people search “orgy” than “apple pie,” the reasoning goes, this proves the community tolerates more porn than may be immediately evident on its public face.
The NYT calls this a novel approach. I don’t think so.
In the 1970s, Columbus, Ohio was the country’s first test market for an interactive cable service called QUBE. Warner QUBE, to be exact. It was ground-breaking for the time — 30 channels! — and offered what was then cutting-edge technology, the ability to talk back to your TV. The box was hard-wired to your TV and lots of people tripped over the cable, but it was so novel no one cared. Three rows of buttons adorned the box, the size of a fat trade paperback. Ten channels were local broadcast (with Cincinnati’s and Cleveland’s included), 10 more were “community” channels, but the real interesting ones were the 10 on the far right, which were premium — pay-per-view. And of that 10, the most interesting was P-10, in the southeast corner of the box. This was the porn channel. You could have it disabled, but no one I knew did. The free-viewing period before the charge kicked in was ridiculously long by today’s standards — two whole minutes. It was what we’d now call hotel-room porn, hardcore movies with the closeups excised, but they were the real deal. I watched “Captain Lust” there with some friends, agog at the novelty of it all, not to mention the original theme song, sung as a sea chanty (Captain Lust was a pirate): Oh Captain Lust, he’s greedy, mean and horny-o… To give you an idea of how swiftly this changed the local lexicon: I was at a party around that time, and there were three guys named Pete in attendance. The host introduced the first two as P-1 and P-2, but the last guy was a real ladies’ man, so they called him P-10. Everybody got the joke.
We weren’t the only ones experimenting with this amazing technology. (Some things “Swingtown” gets right.) Remember, Betamaxes still cost in the $700 range back then, and this would have been among the first opportunities Americans had to view pornographic movies in the privacy of their own homes.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, an eager prosecutor is preparing a case against a dirty-bookstore owner, or maybe it was a dirty-movie theater owner. Can’t recall. (Kirk, Bernie Karsko told me the rest of this story, and maybe you remember it better.) He’s using the community standards offense. The defendant is smart enough to hire the right lawyer, who looked at his QUBE box, added two and two, and drew up a subpoena of the company’s records regarding P-10 movie purchases. Let’s just see what the community’s standards are when they’re behind closed doors, he says. Warner gets wind of this, pees its corporate pants, raises a stink, etc., and I believe the prosecutor backed down almost immediately. He knew he had a loser on his hands.
I think, but again I’m not sure, that the lawyer in question was Alan Isaacman, the same guy Edward Norton plays in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” Smart guy. (And a very good movie, I might add, despite its repellant central character.)
So, some bloggage:
Sometimes I think the difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of us is simply the power to get up off the couch. I thought of the human-powered gym years ago. You probably did, too. It’s impossible to sit pedaling, treadmilling, elliptical-ing or whatevering in one of those long lines at most gyms and not wonder why the whole setup isn’t hooked up to a generator. Screw the banks of TVs tuned to ESPN and CNN; what you need to keep going is the dimming of the overhead lights.
(Note that news item is over a year old. I only read about it today, buried within a Slate story about harnessing the power of the breast-bounce. Sorry, guys — no pix.)
Spend any time in Amish country, and you learn a thing or two about storing power. I once visited an Amish quilt shop in rural Allen County. It had a high, pitched roof, and on the south-facing side of the roof — also, coincidentally, the side that customers didn’t see, entering through the front door — was a bank of solar panels. Wires led to a stack of six car batteries, and wires from those powered a huge, industrial-type sewing machine of the sort found in any Asian sweatshop. This is where the quilts were made, and if you know sewing at all, it was obvious in the evenness of the stitching. They never claimed they were hand-sewn, but I always think of this as the height of Amish tricksiness. Many people think of the Amish as North America’s very own tribe of aboriginal innocents, but surprise, they’re not.
Off to work. Back to regular morning blogging this week, I think. I’ve finally slept enough.
It was shortly after 7 Friday night that I wondered whether we were doomed. We’d gone into the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival Challenge knowing we’d have to make a film in 48 hours — no more than eight minutes, incorporating several assigned elements, in one of six genres, this last to be chosen randomly. Those were: Action-adventure, horror-thriller, crime, sci-fi, mockumentary and chick flick. We had vague ideas of a story for five. Some we liked better than others, and only one seemed un-doable with our standing team (chick flick). The rules would allow us to throw back one genre, but we would be required to take the next one. Before our two representatives went to the assigning event, we told them that if they drew chick flick to draw again, and we’d take whatever we got.
Diane, one of our reps, called a few minutes after arrival with bad news. Two more genres had been added: Superhero and musical. Musical? Musical?! We counted ourselves very lucky to have a musician on our team, but making an original musical in 48 hours seemed more daunting than a chick flick. We had a new bete noire. Diane spun the wheel, and it came up…Superhero.
We took it. The worst-case scenario of spinning again and getting Musical was too much to risk.
I’m not going to tell the whole story here — it was an entertaining and interesting weekend, and I’d like to tell it somewhere I have a chance of getting paid, but here are the highlights:
Our required elements were these:
We had to use the Ambassador Bridge and one more location, which was determined by throwing a dart at a board. Ours hit the campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. We had to have a used-car salesman in there somewhere. We had to use a “for Dummies” book as a prop. And our line of dialogue was a real gem: “What’s that? It smells like cheese.”
It’s hard to make a superhero movie without tights, capes, special effects and the ability to drop women off tall buildings. Believe it or not, we had a green screen, but with only 48 hours to work with, it couldn’t be the foundation of our movie. So our superhero had to be antiheroic, reluctant. To compensate, we honored the other conventions of the genre — we gave him an origin story, an adversary (the guy with the limo) and a happy ending.
The bottom line of fast filmmaking is, you can’t be too picky. Good enough frequently has to be good enough. You have no, or barely any time to rewrite, reshoot or even think very much about what you’re doing. But we were fortunate to have a great crew, entirely assembled from Craigslist. Michael, our director, said several times how amazed he was by the power of Craigslist. I concur.
We finished, but just barely. Remember that scene in “Broadcast News” we talked about a while back? It was just like that. I was the Joan Cusack character. We left our headquarters in Royal Oak with the bare minimum to turn in (a mini DV tape; no time for the DVD burn) at 6:32 p.m., headed for the dropoff just north of downtown at 7 p.m. We made it with 9 minutes to spare. But three teams finished after we did. My favorite was the last one, which by my watch arrived at 6:59 and change: A Chrysler Pacifica rolls up, its door opening before it was fully stopped. Out jumps one guy and sprints for the building at top speed. Another guy jumps out behind him, ditto. Behind him was a third guy, running a little slower, holding an open Mac PowerBook with an attached remote hard drive — still burning the DVD. After all were away, the driver backed into a parking place, got out, shook his head and said, “This car will never be the same.”
More as the week develops. Screenings are next Sunday, when we find out if we placed. In the meantime, just remember: It’s not a movie until someone yells, “Let’s get a move on, people! We’re losing light!”
I learned of George Carlin’s demise from an e-mailer who used the seven dirty words as the subject line. (Good to know my spam filter’s every bit the ace I suspected it was.) I’m sorry to hear the news. Carlin was a genius. He may still have been at the end, but the last HBO special I saw wasn’t very funny — he came across as bitter and angry, which can work, but didn’t this time.
The thing is, I’d just heard him in an NPR interview, and he was hysterical, so I don’t know what happened. He was famous for his dirty-words routine and could work blue with the best of them, but he always did it askance, light-heartedly — the biggest laugh in the seven-words routine is just two of them: “Tater tits.”
It’s early, and I can’t quite think yet — maybe I’ll have more to add later. But this is an open thread for George, the first hippie stand-up comic. RIP.