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Good times: Jon Stewart meets the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and gets a fun surprise at the end. Also in the episode: Wyatt Cenac goes to Sweden to meet hot blondes; succeeds.

This puts a grin on the face of any old-school tech dweeb, which I only barely qualify as, due to my beautiful youth. Enjoy: Bohemian Rhapsody on Atari 800XL, TI-99, 8-inch floppy, 3.5-inch hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C.

Saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, and found my curiosity piqued. In all the arguments about healthcare in America, all I ever hear comparisons to are the Canadian and UK versions of free public healthcare, which by many accounts are kinda sucky. Apparently what we need to model our healthcare system on is the French one.

According to Wikipedia, FrogHealth^TM was

named by the World Health Organization as the best performing system in the world in terms of availability and organization of health care providers.

Sounds like “Win” to me. As I understand it, and admittedly my grasp of the situation is tenuous at best, the French healthcare system pays something akin to 80% of basic medical costs. The rest is born by the patients or the private medical insurance that a majority of French citizens have. Who’s covered? Any legal resident of France. Still, having to pay 20% of medical costs can get pricey, right? What about serious illnesses like cancer? The public healthcare system covers that 100%.

It sounds like the best of all possible worlds: serious sickness is covered completely, and treatments that are prone to being overused by demanding patients have a co-pay to deter them from doing so. Meanwhile France, as a nation, spends about $3,500 per person on healthcare, as opposed to the $6,100 spent by Americans.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to tell me why this couldn’t work for the US. Cut costs, get everybody covered? What’s the roadblock?

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Correction: in this post, the French Healthcare system was referred to as “FrogHealth^TM.” This is inaccurate; the true title of the program is “CheeseEatingSurrenderMonkeysHealth^TM.” We regret the error.

Since more and more people are going out and purchasing iPhones, and since I also have an iPhone, I thought I’d make everybody’s life a little better and talk about what applications I have and love. Here’s an abbreviated list:

• TwitterFon – Free – my preferred Twitter reader. Shows your whole timeline, but scrolls down to the first message you haven’t seen, so you can pick up wherever you may have left off. Can also track your conversations, so if someone replies to you days later, you can see what post they were talking about. Kinda nice feature.


• Facebook – Free – Meh. You can see people’s updates, post pictures, poke through a few things, but it’s kind of annoying, frankly. You can’t view other people’s friend lists to browse for people you might know. You can’t search for folks. The way it links to things is ridiculous; if someone makes a comment on something, and you click it, you don’t get linked to whatever was commented on, you get linked to the commenter. Little annoyances. I rarely use it, actually, unless I can’t get to my lappy for a day or two and want to see if I’ve missed anything important.


• iMafia – Free – Mildly entertaining game in which you steal money, rob banks, buy real estate. You log in every four or five hours, do a few minutes of stuff, and then log back out so your resources build back up. Not time-consuming, but still fun.


• WordPress – Free – Oh yeah man, WordPress has an app. I’m just starting to play around with it, but I can use it to post without having to open Safari and do it through a webpage, which is kludgey even on the iPhone.


• MLB.com At Bat – $9.99 – One of the few applications I’ve paid for, but I can use it not only to follow live games in a VERY detailed manner, but listen to the radio feeds for any game. Yesterday I listened to the Red Sox/Yanks game at work. Also has detailed player information, so if you hear that Jason Varitek just hit a home run, you can quickly bring up his stats. Useful for fantasy, particularly if you were dumb enough to draft Jason Varitek.


• Evernote – Free – If you’re not familiar with the Evernote application, you should. You use it to store notes, pictures, sounds, all kinds of stuff, for later follow up. See something in a store, and want to see if you can order it online? Snap a pic with your phone and store it at Evernote, then when you get home you bring it up on your lappy and search Amazon. I don’t use it as often as I should (mostly I just email myself).


• Dictionary – Free – The application version of Dictionary.com. Good search tools, reads the words to you if you’re unsure about pronunciation.


• Cleartune – $3.99 – The first app I ever decided to purchase. It is a chromatic tuner, accurate to fractions of a cent (1/100 of a semi-tone). An electronic device that does ONLY this costs 10 times as much. It is so awesome.


• Metronome – Free – Uh…it’s a metronome.


• Midomi – Free – Cute gimmick. If you hear a song you like, but don’t know the name or artist, open up Midomi, hold your phone to the speaker, and it’ll tell you what the tune is. Pretty accurate, although it’s not of much use outside of pop/rock/country. No knowledge of classical, for example.


• Slacker Radio – Free – Music program along the lines of Pandora, in addition to telling it a song you like and then having it guess at other possibilities, Slacker has prebuilt stations along normal lines (top 40, indie rock, buncha classical channels, etc.) There is a paid version that has no ads and allows you to “skip” as often as you want. Normally you can only “skip” songs 6 times an hour, although if you run out of skips and something by “Lady Gaga” comes on you can always switch stations. I also have Pandora installed, but rarely use it.


• Public Radio – Free – Finds and tunes into your local public radio stations. Wanna listen to NPR but no AM radio is handy? This is your app.


• Baseball – Free – The compiled statistics for teams and players dating back to the 19th century. Nice.

I have a lot of other stuff, but don’t necessarily use it much, or find cause to recommend it. I also have a lot of games, but c’mon, the iPhone is a business tool.

I dreamt about Rachel Maddow last night. Believe me, there was absolutely no sexual content, what with her dislike of wangs and the fact that I find her sisterly. She’s so cute! I just want to carry her around in a basket like Toto.

In the dream, she had made herself some kind of poster to have in the background during her show, except that the poster consisted of white cardboard letters pasted onto white posterboard. It did not occur to me at the time, but in retrospect I think that might be difficult to read, right?

Then we went into her office, which was large but very undecorated; white walls, tile floor, big picture windows. It kinda looked like a big dorm room, but with a desk in the middle with nothing on it. She revealed that during the summer, when (in the dreamverse) under normal circumstances the show would go on hiatus while she spent the summer on Fire Island, she would be permitted to appear on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday evenings doing her usual thing. We celebrated, and then Charles poked me in the eyeball and yelled “Wake up!”

Oddly, in the dream Rachel was very small, to fit in with my “cute” and “pockety” assessment of her; in real life she is apparently nearly six feet tall. I bet she plays a hell of a third base on a softball team.

I’m pretty frustrated with the rainouts affecting the Phils. They seem to get to play 2 games, then they have rain or a day off and their momentum is gone. Super frustrating, and as an added bonus I’m sure they’ll be playing a bunch of doubleheaders and 8-game weeks, burning out the bullpen. Please hold me, as I am scared.

On the other hand: that Raul “RBI” Ibanez sure can hit, caint he? The jury is still out, but I’m willing to consider eating a lot of crow on the subject. (I believe my take on his signing was expressing great dismay that we gave up Pat Burrell and replaced him with an older, pricier guy who’s slightly better defensively and bats left-handed when we already have two powerful lefties and a panload of switch hitters but not one reliable righty starter. Not only is that sentence horribly constructed and painful to read, I might be, horror of horrors, wrong.)

Here’s hoping a series against the 4-8 Brewers can help get the good guys back to .500 and salvage April.

I’m finally settling into a format, I think. I got rid of that weird freaky header and just have the picture of Charles, as you can see. Much better. The color format is kinda blasé, but we’ll work on that.

Jessica asked if that’s a tear there on Charles’s cheek; indeed it is. I took that in the kitchen about 45 seconds after putting my new Sigma 24mm f/1.8 lens on my DSLR, and he was the handiest thing to use to see how well it worked. As 34-month-old kids are wont to be, he had just been sobbing over some slight (I think Sarah refused to let him eat cat food, or something like that) so he’d been telling a tale of woe to Mr. G (his stuffed giraffe). As I snapped, he went from “sad” to “interested” to “smiling freakishly and yelling ‘cheese,'” a transformation that took something like 8 seconds.

Would that I could so easily change my mood. To get me from “sad” to “happy” requires two hours, a fifth of Aberlour, a bag of redhots, and 5 new episodes of the Simpsons.

BTW, something I forgot: if you’ve been following me via RSS (as you should obviously do, duh) you’re going to have to update your feed. Click the RSS button at the top right lower left to get the new link.

Everybody at Team Hearn has been fighting a nasty cough for the better part of, oh, 2009. It’s just going back and forth; Charles came down with it first, then I got it, went to Sarah, back to Charles, back to Sarah, back to me, back to Charles again. It’s icky. Worse yet, it resulted in Charles waking us up at 4am last Thursday with a 104-degree fever.

We gave him a big cup of water, which he chugged, and then threw up on my pillow because he drank it too fast. Sarah mopped it up with a towel, but he refused to sleep near it, instead taking up almost my entire side of the bed. I, an official Large Person, had to sleep in a section of bed roughly 9 inches wide.

In the morning his temps were down in the 101-102 range, but we decided he shouldn’t go to my parents for the day as he would normally do, so Sarah stayed home in the morning and I came home around noon so she could hit the office. He perked up a bit in the afternoon, which was good to see. He had napped intermittently through the day, which messed up his sleep schedule, so he came into our room at 2am early Friday wanting to play; his temperature was 99. Yay!

Friday morning, however, he was back up to 104. We medicated him as usual, and then Sarah had doctor’s appointments of her own, so I took him to my parents. But his temperature didn’t come back down as it had the previous day, so the decision was made to take him to the doctor. Sarah called our usual family doctor’s office, but despite the fact that they have something between 8 and 19 doctors on staff, no one could see Charles that day. Not one doctor had 15 minutes to look at our sick son. Sarah and I are baffled by this. I could understand if we saw one pediatrician, but this is an office full of MDs and DOs and other various and sundry post-nominal letters! Not one of them had a moment to spare.

So we were forced to take him to the ER at AI Dupont Children’s Hospital. I met Sarah there and was tasked with carrying Charles, since he was 40+ pounds of sadness and plush giraffe. He was miserable. The only things he was willing to say were:

• I don’t wanna see the doctor!


• I wanna go home!


• Daddy, make my beaver [fever] go away.


• There’s a jeep.

(Even in his saddened state, the boy’s Jeep radar remained active.)

The hospital staff had us triaged, documented, hand-stamped, tattooed, and retina-scanned (I may be hazy on some of the admission process) in half an hour and in a doctor’s care in under an hour. Yay doctor! She took one look at his ears and determined that both were infected, and prescribed Amoxicillin for the infection and Tylenol for the fever. Within a half-hour of dosing him up, he was asking for food and polished off a bunch of crackers and some Froot Loops. A half-hour after that, he was running out of the place under his own power to go look at ambulances.

In short: boo usual doctors, hooray AI Dupont Children’s Hospital!

Well, I tried to do this smoothly, and as you can see I was about as successful as the Bay of Pigs invasion.  (Too soon?)  Anyway, I’m converting the whole thing to a WordPress format.  I did it in a subdirectory with a copy of everything, and then moved the whole thing into place in the public directory and it was like I had taken a dump all over everything.  It didn’t work, um, at all.  So in short: I’m very nearly starting from scratch. Bear with me while I get everything working, and feel free to tell me if you spot anything that doesn’t work (broken links, for example).

As I said a few weeks ago, the plan is for more frequent, smaller updates, rather than the previous format of “once a week with something long but boring.” Word up.

Update, 2115EDT: I’m basically done. Got all my links up, posts are imported, Twitter is there. The old “quote” functionality, when installed, makes everything go to hell; I blame WordPress, or perhaps Linux, or something. I’m still not sold on the header image I made, it seems to completely describe me and yet also be ugly as hell. (What that indicates, I refuse to say.)

I’ll probably futz with it for a while, particularly if I can get my quote thing working, I would miss that.

I don’t get this whole Susan Boyle thing. If you’ve been hiding in an oil barrel this week, the latest internet sensation is a 47-year-old Scotswoman who appeared on “Britain’s Got Talent” over the weekend. Go watch the video; I’ll wait.

Okay, welcome back. Are you as confused as I am? I mean, she certainly has a nice voice. Is it opera- or Broadway-ready? Of course not. She needs a lot of training, if only to try and put a governor on that vibrato, which is wide enough that a fellow could drive a double-wide through it. It’s certainly not better than several local sopranos I’ve sung with, and that’s just in the Delaware Valley.

Obviously, there’s notability in the fact that the woman is hideously ugly and has led a pretty sad, boring life (never had a boyfriend, never been kissed, never waxed her eyebrows), and yet has this semi-remarkable voice. I put a “What’s the big deal?” post on Twitter, and one reply said, “Everyone with a negative spin on Susan Boyle is missing the point. She’s a phenomenon because talent doesn’t discriminate.” Which is a bit like saying “water is interesting because it can be both hot and cold.”

Of course talent doesn’t discriminate; most everybody has a talent in one thing or another. The feeling I’m getting from the masses is, “Look everyone! Even ugly people can be musicians!” Um…duh. The point is, I suppose, that we shouldn’t pre-judge someone’s abilities based on how they look, but on what they actually do. Can’t judge a book by its cover, and all that.

What’s odd is that the reason that she is popular disproves the reason that people say she’s popular. Yes, talent should trump physical appearance. But in this case, it’s not the talent: her skill is reasonable, but it’s the juxtaposition of that skill and her disturbing looks that interest people. It’s notoriety, not musical ability. Ask Kevin Federline how well notoriety sells albums.

I hate being a “hater.” It’s not a role I do well. I wish Miss Boyle all the best, but I have a feeling that once the news cycle is done with her, all she’ll have left is her voice, which isn’t really any better than an especially good church soloist (trust me, I’ve heard dozens). That’s going to lead to heartbreak for her, but by then no one will care a whit.