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Why ads paint dads as buffoons:  This is so true, and I hate it.  Men get portrayed as complete idiots in advertising, always.

In commercial after commercial on TV, the image of the modern husband and father is one of the buffoon – trapped in a shed he built without doors, staring blankly at spilled juice, gorging on dog cookies until his ever-capable wife comes to the rescue.

Such ads are a mainstay because they work: They make viewers laugh, and they sell. And, also, critics argue, because such stereotyping remains socially acceptable.

"WASP men are the greatest target in advertising. The reason I say that is they are the only safe target in advertising,"

This insanely freaky picture of a realistic Popeye is part of a page full of realistic depictions of cartoon characters.  Some of them are really interesting – I love the cast of Charlie Brown.

Here’s a neat picture of an airplane graveyard in Airzona.  Click here for a larger version.  (Apologies to the owner of the Blogspot account where it’s hosted, but I can’t find the front page of his blog…)

My understanding is that the broken planes in the center had to be left there so Soviet spy satellites could photograph them, as they were destroyed as part of the SALT II treaty.

The O’Reilly Procedure: Ebert writes about a pet peeve of mine – political commentators, both on the right and the left.  They drive me nuts.

Ebert discusses Bill O’Reilly in particular. Understand that Ebert is a self-admitted liberal, but his points hold true for about anyone.

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O’Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for not shouting.

[…] There is little comfort to be had from today’s polarized shouters. They are discontented, and they think you should be, too. They inspire fear and suspicion. There is a conspiracy, and you are the target. Dark forces are at work.

If you get too far out on the right or the left, you lose sight of the middle.  So, both sides suck.  O’Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh – all wretched.  Olbermann, Garofalo – no better.  Maddow hasn’t done anything to really piss me off yet, but she’s new, so give her time.

Worse than the bullying is the predictability.  Just recently, there was the dust-up between Sarah Palin and David Letterman about his off-color joke.  As much as I can’t stand Palin, I actually sided with her on this.  Letterman, whether he intended it or not, was out of line and should have apologized.

But Olbermann, jumped in for Letterman, saying something like this:

Sarah Palin doesn’t understand that you don’t pick a fight with someone two or three times more popular than you are. […]

Really?  You don’t?  So, just because more people like Letterman than Palin, she just has to lick her wounds on this one?  That’s patently ridiculous.

But what really killed me is thinking about the opposite.  If Palin had made an equivalent joke about Letterman’s five-year-old son, Olbermann would have jumped all over her.  He would have spewed forth enough vitriol to make you think Palin was the antichrist.

So, he’s a lemming – dutifully taking one side, no matter of the merits, marching down his happy little path of righteousness.  In that sense, he’s no better than the commentators on the right doing the same thing for their side.

When, as a society, did we surrender our opinions to these idiots?  Why do we have to have these people to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong?  I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on, your side is not always right.  But commentators like this polarize us to one side or another, and drill into us that anyone who thinks different is wrong.  Or can’t be trusted.  Or is evil or worse.

I hate them all.

Doctor rescued from Antarctica in 1999 dies at 57: I think it’s safe to say that this lady was kick-ass.

After finding the lump in June [while stationed as the sole physician at the Antarctica research station], she diagnosed herself with breast cancer and began treating herself using chemotherapy agents that the U.S. Air Force parachuted to the station the next month.

It was later revealed, according to a March 2009 article in the Detroit Free Press newspaper, that Nielsen — an emergency room doctor from Cleveland, Ohio — performed a biopsy on herself with the help of non-medical crew, who practiced using needles on a raw chicken.

While treating herself, Nielsen carried on her duties as the sole doctor for the 41-person research group. She consulted with her doctors in the United States by e-mail and teleconference. They recommended that she return as soon as possible for treatment.

Sad to hear she won the battle, but ultimately lost the war.

How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs: Here’s an interesting article about what the supermarket chain Safeway is doing about health care costs.  First, they start with an important point: the only way to curb health care costs in this country is for us all to get healthier.

Health-care spending has outpaced the rise in all other consumer spending by nearly a factor of three since 1980, increasing to 18% of GDP in 2009 from 9% of GDP. This disturbing trend will not change regardless of who pays these costs — government or the private sector — unless we can find a way to improve the health of our citizens.

And here’s the elephant in the room that no one likes to talk about:

The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

It’s true – the most dangerous thing to the U.S. economy right now is a fork.  And I say this as someone who eats too much generally, and someone who has struggled with my own weight.  As a country, we’re getting bigger and unhealthier by the day.  I’ve started to do better – I workout now, eat better, and have lost about 20 pounds – but I’m still a perfect example of the problem.  I take two medications for diabetes and one for high cholesterol.  And I’m only 37.

Safeway has implemented an incentive program to entice their employees to get healthier.

If they pass all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and $1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan year.

At Blend, our group health insurance company recently informed us that our second year premium was going to go up by 35%.  It’s simple math – they budgeted $X  for costs last year and our employees went over that.  In a small company like Blend, you’re one emergency condition away from everyone having to pay substantially more.

So, the trick to keep health insurance costs down in a small business is to keep our employees out of the doctor’s office and the emergency room.  How do we do that?  Well, that’s what we’re discussing.  What decisions can we as a company make to get our employees healthier, both for their own good, and to keep our insurance costs from exploding over the next 10 years?

For Ruth Madoff, New York Is the Loneliest Place:  Isolation by association.

Ruth Madoff, 68, has not been charged with any crime or even questioned by prosecutors. But she has become perhaps the most vilified spouse of a financial rogue in history. When her husband, Bernard Madoff, divulged his Ponzi scheme, a $65-billion fraud for which he awaits sentencing later this month, Mrs. Madoff’s life was also ruined. Although no evidence has emerged to date that she conspired or even knew about her husband’s crimes, her plight has evoked no apparent public sympathy. She has been pilloried and turned into a pariah.

What’s the big fat deal?: Funny essay from Nia Vardolas, star of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” on the continual questions she gets about her 40-pound weight loss.

[…] they don’t want to hear the truth: I had a blood sugar problem so my Doctor ordered me to lose weight, it was really hard but I did it through diet, exercise and it took a year.

This is when the boredom sets in on the querying person. I might as well just shove an Ambien up their nostril. The gleam in their eye fades and they get sleepy.

No one wants to hear the facts about weight loss. It’s simple. Take that bag of Doritos and throw it as far as you can. Now chase after it. Pick it up, do it again.

What’s funnier is that she apparently titled the essay “What’s the big ass deal?” but was edited down by CNN…except for the URL, which still reads:

/2009/06/12/whats-the-big-ass-deal/

I kept hearing about Susan Boyle being “Scottish.”  Then I was reading the Wikipedia page on Bonnie Tyler and she was described as “Welsh.”  I was confused.  Weren’t these people British?

I consulted my buddy Chris for assistance.

Britain comprises three major geopolitical areas: England, Wales, and Scotland.  So, you can be English, Welsh, or Scottish…and still be British.

My friend Chris is from England, so he’s English.  He’s also British.  But he’s not Scottish.  And calling Susan Boyle “English” (or “Welsh”) would be all sorts of wrong.

So, to recap:

• British
  • English
  • Scottish
  • Welsh

It gets a little more confusing when you toss Northern Ireland into the mix.  They are Irish, of course, but not British.  Northern Ireland and Britain together form the United Kingdom.  Wikipedia claims that the United Kingdom and Britain are the same thing, and that someone in Northern Ireland can be called “British.”  Chris disagrees.

Incidentally, this concept of naming someone after their country (an “American,” a “New Zealander,” etc.) is called a demonym.

The Cost Conundrum: This is brutal article, which, if accurate, is a damning indictment of the business of medicine.

The writer (a physician himself) went to McAllen, Texas, which has the highest cost of medical spending in the country, to find out why medical care is so expensive.  The bottom line turns out to be that the doctors here (and elsewhere, one presumes) have turned medicine into more of a business than a service.

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures.

The surgeon came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ”

This meshes with what a doctor friend of mine once told me.  He says that a patient can come in with something easily diagnosable and curable, but doctors today will still order a dozen tests and procedures “just to be sure.”  These are things they wouldn’t have done in the past.  Based on what my friend told me, and the contents of this article, here’s why they do this:

1. To avoid any chance of malpractice (“My son wouldn’t have died if you had just ordered this extra test…”)
2. To rack up fees for themselves.
3. To rack up fees for their colleagues (my friend revealed “a lot of tests get ordered because some guy they graduated with owns a lab somewhere…”)

The article states it plainly:

Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen.

[…] there are the physicians who see their practice primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after all.

I don’t believe all doctors are greedy, but I think that the trend in this country – the way doctors are trained both formally and informally – these days, is to shotgun medical care.  Do everything possible, even things that might be even distantly related to the problem, perhaps out of a genuine desire to provide the best possible care.  But, can we afford this as a country anymore?

What’s scary is that if one of my children was a patient for some life-threatening disease, I’d want the doctor to do everything possible – order every test, order every procedure, consult every specialist – to heal them, costs be damned.  But, looking at things objectively (read: thinking about other people’s problems), I can sit here and say that we’re going broke on needless medical care.

This isn’t lost on the writer of the article.

I remember when my wife brought our infant son Walker to visit his grandparents in Virginia, and he took a terrifying fall down a set of stairs. They drove him to the local community hospital in Alexandria. A CT scan showed that he had a tiny subdural hematoma—a small area of bleeding in the brain. During ten hours of observation, though, he was fine—eating, drinking, completely alert. I was a surgery resident then and had seen many cases like his. We observed each child in intensive care for at least twenty-four hours and got a repeat CT scan. That was how I’d been trained. But the doctor in Alexandria was going to send Walker home. That was how he’d been trained. Suppose things change for the worse? I asked him. It’s extremely unlikely, he said, and if anything changed Walker could always be brought back. I bullied the doctor into admitting him anyway. The next day, the scan and the patient were fine. And, looking in the textbooks, I learned that the doctor was right. Walker could have been managed safely either way.

In the end, I think this problem will self-regulate.  We just can’t keep paying for medical care at the rate we’re paying.  Something has to give in this country, and perhaps the market will sort itself out.  When people can’t pay anymore, and when insurance companies start taking huge losses, when there’s no more money, then perhaps sanity will return.