First Looks category archive

But anything would be better than what we’ve got.

A old man, just a tad older than I, walks into an emergency room, complains of pains consistent with heart trouble, gets told to wait, and dies an hour later in the waiting room. From Will Bunch:

You know, I listen to a lot of talk radio and the other places where people are talking healthcare reform a lot of the time these days, and these conversations, quite frankly, tend to be dominated by affluent suburbanites who have decent health coverage — as long as they’re not laid off, anyway — and access to state-of-the-art hospitals in safe communities, people who can’t understand why there is a push for changing things in the country. And there are people like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina who thinks that just showing up at the hospital is a perfectly fine way of receiving healthcare. No one is speaking loudly enough for the Joaquin Riveras.

Addendum:

According to the Inky, Rivera died 11 minutes into his visit to the ER; 49 minutes passed before anyone noticed (except, of course, for the three losers who heisted his watch).

In English, the passive voice has several legitimate uses:

1. When the speaker wants to emphasize the recipient of an action over the doer of the action (“The house was destroyed” rather than “the fire destroyed the house,” when the house is the topic).

2. When the doer of the action is unknown (“The till was emptied”).

3. When not pointing out the doer of the action makes for tact (“This blog post sucked eggs–wait! that’s active could have been writtten better.”).

And one illegitimate (sadly, the most common) use:

When the speaker wants to avoid acknowledging responsibility for his or her actions (“Mistakes were made“).

I just heard this poem as the soundtrack for a blankety-blank Levi’s commercial.

Sacrilege.

(I knew there was a reason I preferred Wranglers.)

And I promise I won’t crash it.

It is probably not a good idea to take a personal feud on line, even if the case is dismissed.

A civil peace order filed by a Salisbury (Maryland–ed.) business owner against a controversial blogger was dismissed by a Wicomico County District Court judge late Wednesday afternoon.

(snip)

Robinson (the plaintiff–ed.) told the judge he called Albero (the blogger–ed.) after he received a phone call concerning a comment on Albero’s blog that had Robinson’s name attached to it. Robinson said he called Albero to say he didn’t author the comment, and that Albero allegedly cursed at him and made a death threat.

Albero told the judge that he did use an expletive when he spoke with Robinson, but claimed that Robinson was the one who allegedly threatened to put a bullet in his head.

“I’m satisfied that on behalf of both parties there has been deplorable and ungentlemanly conduct,” Hayman (the judge–ed.) said.

More details at the link.

Aircraft carrier, slightly used.

Details here.

From the Guardian:

For parents too stretched to make sure their offspring are perfectly turned out at all times, it may just be the scientific cover they’ve been waiting for.

They will now be able to answer the disapproving tuts of their more fastidious friends by pointing to research which gives biological backing to the old adage that the more germs a child is exposed to during early childhood, the better their immune system in later life

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California found that being too clean could impair the skin’s ability to heal. The San Diego-based team discovered that normal bacteria that live on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt.

The writer of the story could not avoid the oh-so-cutsy-poo lead that still implies that parents who let their kids get dirty are somehow bad parents.

I know someone whose daughter, when she was young, was sickly. It was 30 years ago that her doctor told her, “Let [the kid] play in the back yard.”

Mother followed his advice, the sickliness went away, and now, oh so many years later, daughter is a quite healthy adult.

There is evidence that the recent increase in asthma is related to parents’ keeping kids too clean.

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Furniture shopping.

GI Statue, Philadelphia, Pa., Korean War Memorial, Foglietta Plaza. A citizen has added the rose, no doubt taken from one of the hundreds of rose bushes in the Penns Landing and Society Hill areas.

Sun setting behind Society Hill Towers.

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Joshua Bell and Frankie Mureno.

I remember when I was a young ‘un, pundits would talk about the limitless potential of the oceans to provide food.

Not so then, not so now.

From the BBC:

A species of skate could become the first marine fish driven to extinction by commercial fishing, say scientists.

A study reveals that an error in the classification of the species has meant researchers have failed to see just how close to the brink it is.

On the south side of Chestnut between Front and Second.

The inscription reads

From the People of the
Bicentennial to the People of
the Tricentennial Our Mementos
to be Opened Only by the
Mayor of Philadelphia
July 4, 2076, 3 P. M.

Depth 5 Feet

It’s not going to make it.

I made it to the Philly Drinking Liberally for the first time in a couple of months. Some of my friends were there; some were out of town. It was good seeing those who were there and, oddly enough, good missing those who were out of town. Even though some were missing, the fellowship was not.

Now to investigate Liberallies in Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

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One knows that the Newsweek issue about Sarah Palin must be really bad when even diehard carpet chewing liberals are complaining that it’s disrespectful and sexist.

Afterthought: I gave up on Time and Newsweek a long time ago and U. S. News and World Report even a longer time ago. All they are good for is passing time in the dentist’s waiting room.

Well. Not even that. I have internet on my cellphone.

From a “Recovering Republican”:

I am a former Republican. And I wasn’t merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own ass.

(snip)

Strangest of all, I developed a finger-wagging puritan bent, which made absolutely no sense for a 20-year-old guy who was getting laid and intoxicated on a steady basis. I blamed “the anti-family Left” for encouraging couples to divorce and youngsters to fornicate, as if liberals were all conspiring together to destroy the traditional family, as if liberal states do not have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than their conservative counterparts. My hypocrisy is mystifying in retrospect — why would I bash sexual liberation while having sloppy drunken unmarried sex whenever possible? — but perhaps conservative politicians such as John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich can explain.

A golden oldie from Eileen Davis.

Well, maybe.

Act here.

Amber waves of grain.

More than 49 million Americans — one in seven — struggle to get enough to eat, the highest total in 14 years of a federal survey on “food insecurity,” the U.S. government said on Monday.

While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said programs such as food stamps softened the impact of an economic recession, anti-hunger groups pointed to the huge increase from the preceding year when 36.2 million people had trouble getting enough food and a third of them occasionally went hungry.

And then pouncing:

In the space of just three days, Wachovia Bank hit (Benjamin) Cohen with $630 in overdraft fees for what the bank said were 18 overdrafts, all for use of his Visa debit card.

(snip)

But here’s the thing: Cohen, for all his youthful foibles, was a savvy enough consumer that he had already taken the very step the Fed says all bank customers deserve. After an earlier taste of penalty fees, Cohen had opted out of Wachovia Bank’s system of routinely covering overdrafts at $35 a pop.

There are some complications to the story which I won’t go into to, including a transfer into his account that wasn’t credited until the next day; considering the timing of the transfer, I think the timing of the credit was quite reasonable.

But here’s the kicker:

(Benjamin’s father–ed.) Alan Cohen says he spent at least an hour on the phone with Wachovia representatives, trying to understand the system and express his dismay at the charges.

“They’re barely able, if at all, to explain what happened,” Alan Cohen says.

Full disclosure: I bank at the same bank covered in the story and have received only satisfactory service ever since they gobbled up my preceding bank as long as I have been associated with them.

I almost never use my debit card for anything other than ATM withdrawals and deposits. When I see persons using a debit card to buy an $.89 cup of coffee and a $.50 newspaper, I wonder, “How the hell do they ever keep their checkbooks straight?”

I guess the answer is, “They can’t.”

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