I’m leaning towards losing a little sleep Sunday tonight to watch the results of the Mars Curiosity landing. The whole retro-rockets-and-skycrane landing method still strikes me as audacious, but I’m also not a rocket scientist. Best of luck to the teams at NASA and JPL as they embark on another expedition of the Red Planet.
Any review or commentary regarding Game of Thrones and the subsequent books in the series is almost certain to mention sex. Violence and cruelty permeates almost every chapter, but it’s the sex that gets the attention and, occasionally, the condemnation. Author George R.R. Martin has this observation on our bipolar attitudes regarding sex and violence in popular culture:
I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.
I’m guessing that the libidinous Tyrion will be one of the few characters left standing when the series reaches its conclusion. But given Martin’s history of executing main characters, I’m hesitant to place any bets.
Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.
Andrew Sullivan points us to a blog post written by a young pro-life mom who moved to Canada and discovered that universal health care is not so scary after all. But she makes some curious statements about people with disabilities:
With Universal coverage, a mother pregnant unexpectedly would still have health care for her pregnancy and birth even if she was unemployed, had to quit her job, or lost her job. If she was informed that she had a special needs baby on the way, she could rest assured knowing in Canada her child’s health care needs would be covered. Whether your child needs therapy, medicines, a caregiver, a wheelchair, or repeated surgeries, it would be covered by the health care system. Here, you never heard of parents joining the army just so their child’s “pre-existing” health care needs could be covered. In fact, when a special needs person becomes an adult in Canada, they are eligible for a personal care assistant covered by the government. We saw far more developmentally or physically disabled persons out and about in Canada, than I ever see here in the USA. They would be getting their groceries at the store, doing their business at the bank, and even working job, all with their personal care assistant alongside them, encouraging them and helping them when they needed it.
Why, she could be talking about me! Except my nurses just give me quizzical looks whenever I ask them to write my policy papers for me.
I’m not sure where the author lives now, but I’m fairly certain people with disabilities live in her general vicinity, buying groceries and working jobs. And many of us receive Medicaid, which has that same great socialist flavor as Canada’s health care system. That’s not to say that life on medicaid is plush, but I’m willing to bet our Canadian brethren have similar gripes about finding quality assistants and jumping through the hoops of the pre-authorization process.
What say you, Canadian gimps? Are you better off than Yanks like me?