I enjoy a good beer as much as the next man, but I drink too slowly to ever get a real buzz on. Fortunately, someone has been good enough to come up with an aerosolized form of alcohol. Now, this is something I can get behind. I just need to design some kind of adapter that will let me stick the delivery system in-line on my ventilator tube. Then I can breathe and get drunk at the same time. Good times.
One little-noticed provision of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act is one that will severely limit the right of Medicare beneficiaries to receive in-person hearings in front of an administrative judge. These hearings usually occur when there’s a dispute about whether Medicare will pay for a certain service. In the past, beneficiaries would usually present their case to a judge in person. Now, hearings will be presented via videoconference. This has a lot of disability advocates concerned, and rightly so. It’s a lot more difficult to give a judge a complete picture of a person’s health when you’re communicating through a television screen. Sure, you can submit a whole forest’s worth of medical records, but that’s not the same thing as letting a judge see a person’s severe arthritis or labored breathing. One quirk of human nature is that we usually react most strongly to the things we can see ourselves. A stack of medical records doesn’t measure up to seeing someone sitting in front of you. But these are tight budget times and certain sacrifices must be made, I suppose. Let’s just hope that the video screens are high-definition.
I finished Cloud Atlas yesterday and it is, without a doubt, one of the most memorable books I’ve read in the last couple years. I wasn’t familiar with David Mitchell’s previous work, a fact that I will soon remedy now that I see what a dazzling talent he is. The book consists of six interlocking stories; just how they are connected doesn’t become clear until roughly the midpoint of the book. The stories are a melange of genres; historical travelogue, epistolary bildungsroman (my English profs would be proud I remember those terms), thriller, science fiction, and satire. I’m also not giving too much away if I also reveal that the stories move forward through time, from the early 19th century to the distant future, and then twist back upon themselves like a Mobius strip.
Mitchell, unlike a lot of “literary” authors, seems to have a great respect and fondness for the traditions of each genre. He plays with some familiar tropes in each style, but his writing is so vivid and assured that I never felt like I was reading a pastiche. The stories intertwine on a more thematic level as well. Mitchell uses the stories to explore oppression, free will, consumerism, and the cyclical nature of history.
This book lost the Booker Prize to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I’ll have to check out that novel to see if it really surpasses the virtuosity that made Cloud Atlas such a joy to read.
And a big thanks to Jessa at Bookslut for making me aware of this book in the first place.
The blogroll on the right side of this page has received a much-needed update and redesign. Have fun exploring the links and let me know if anything is broken.
Also, a big shout-out to my homie PZ Myers, who has a great op/ed piece in today’s Strib criticizing efforts to introduce intelligent design theory into our public schools. ID theory is basically creationism dressed up in a fancy suit and PZ does a good job of explaining why it’s pseudoscientific garbage.
I’m canceling my Time subscription. I was already annoyed with its red-state pandering (witness recent cover stories on the racy media and God/Jesus/Christianity), but the cover devoted to Ann Coulter sealed the deal. Besides, I’m woefully behind on my New Yorkers, a dilemma which I apparently have in common with other people. I really do try to read my New Yorkers. I don’t just leave them lying around to impress the hypothetical female visitor with my intellectual sophistication. Well, maybe I do, but I still try to read them.
If I have an extra hundred bucks lying around, I plan on using it to participate in National Geographic’s Genographic Project. You send them a DNA sample on a cheek swab and they’ll sequence it to determine your deep genetic ancestry. In other words, the results won’t tell you the identity of your great-great-grandmother, but it will show you your genetic connection to the earliest human beings and the specific migratory path of your ancestors as they journeyed from Africa and spread around the globe. If I had to guess the trajectory of my own ancestral migration, I would assume that they crossed from Africa into the Arabian peninsula and eventually into Eastern and Northern Europe. But I’d be really curious to see the actual results. I hope this project gets participation from a wide cross-section of the population, including indigenous peoples. Some people are already accusing the project of bio-prospecting for future genetic patents, a charge which the project directors vigorously deny. I can only imagine the number of hoops the directors had to jump through to get approval from their IRB (Institutional Review Board). Still, the collection of thousands, or even millions, of DNA samples will one day be attempted by a for-profit corporation with substantially fewer scruples. If we’re not careful, we could see human genomic research become the basis for future military or weapons applications. The general public gets all in a tizzy about cloning, but I think the real concerns lie in the fact that governments and corporations will eventually figure out how to make all those As, Ts, Cs, and Gs in the human chromosome do their bidding.
I was at a Minneapolis advisory committee meeting yesterday and we started talking about Nicollet Mall. Nicollet Mall is in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, a few blocks from my perch on the 19th Floor. It’s supposed to be our city’s version of a pedestrian mall but it’s really not designed as such. It does have wide sidewalks and most street traffic is prohibited, except for buses. That’s one problem right there. Nicollet Mall has a lot of restaurants with sidewalk cafes. One of the pleasures of living in Minneapolis during the spring and summer is sitting outside on the Mall with friends. Until a bus comes rumbling down the street, temporarily drowning out any conversation and adding a lovely diesel aftertaste to the food. And the sidewalk cafes don’t leave much room to navigate with a wheelchair. There have been times when I’ve completely stopped pedestrian traffic on a whole block because I’m trying to squeeze between a table and a light post. If I had the Mayor’s ear, I’d tell him to get rid of the street and make the whole Mall one big sidewalk. That’s what I really liked about Lincoln Mall in Miami. No vehicle traffic and plenty of room to walk. Minneapolis shouldn’t try to imitate Miami, but the Mall’s design doesn’t currently support its image as an urban thoroughfare for pedestrians.
Hope you all had a righteous 420. Yeah, you know what I’m talking ’bout. You don’t? Well, just do a Google search. Hell, they talked about it on Morning Edition today. How underground can it really be?
I had a really weird dream last night. I was at some kind of awards dinner with the rest of the Humphrey Fellows. It felt like the Golden Globes or something. We had apparently made a movie that was getting all kinds of awards, but I have no idea what the movie was about. But I’m pretty sure Julia Roberts was at my table. I guess you had to be there. The dream had this weird internal logic that most dreams have while you’re experiencing them. This was such a weird and quirky dream that I felt compelled to mention it. So there you go. Let the psychoanalysis begin.
According to the Post, Bush’s efforts to “competitively source” federal jobs may be jeopardizing some federal employees with disabilities. Thousands of federal jobs are being reviewed to determine whether a private contractor can perform the same duties at a lower cost. A lot of these jobs are in food service, administrative support, and the like. Federal employees with disabilities may need additional support or supervision, which may put them at a disadvantage with a private contractor when doing a pure cost analysis.
For a president who likes to tout his so-called New Freedom Initiative, which includes the integration of people with disabilities in the workplace, this news only serves to illustrate Bush’s hypocrisy. The federal government has long been a leader in the employment of people with disabilities. Every administration since Truman’s has recognized the important role the federal government plays in creating job opportunities for people with disabilities. The employment policies of the federal government eventually filtered into the private sector, creating even more jobs for people with disabilities. During the Schiavo circus, Bush made it a point to say that he was fighting for the rights of the disabled, or as he put it: “those who live at the mercy of others.” Apparently, his advocacy doesn’t extend to the day-to-day issues that really matter to people with disabilities, like jobs and health care.
To be fair, the agencies questioned in the article have said that employees will be retrained and given new assignments if necessary. However, it can take a worker with a disability a long time to build the system of supports that lead to success for that individual. Forcing a sudden job change is disruptive to both the worker and the employer. I realize that employees with disabilities can’t be shielded from every eventuality, but they deserve to be supported in their continuing quest for independence and integration.
Ann Coulter was down in Northfield yesterday, trading insults with the students at St. Olaf College. And she’s on the cover of this week’s Time. Why the media still pays attention to this woman is beyond me. She’s not particularly clever or insightful. She’s about as unfunny as some of those Borscht-Belt comedians from back in the day. But I guess she does sort of embody the Republican feminine mystique, if there is such a thing. She’s white. She’s blonde. She’s thin almost to the point of being anorexic. She’s Protestant. And she wears really short skirts. And she pretty much finds people who aren’t white and Protestant kinda icky. In some conservative circles, this constitutes being a hottie. Personally, she strikes me as someone who is desperately trying to hide how boring and unoriginal she
really is.
It’s like summer here in the Twin Cities! I wore shorts the other day! The brilliant whiteness of my legs almost blinded me, but damnit, I wore shorts! And other people are wearing shorts! Beautiful people! Life is beautiful! I’m so giddy I’m going to end this sentence with two exclamation points!!