nbdog
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Gold Mountain Golf
Posted in Golf on 16-Jun-2009
Health Care
Posted in News on 14-Jun-2009
We’re doomed! I just read Atul Gawande’s June 1 New Yorker article (“The Cost Conundrum“) on the huge regional variances in U.S. health care costs. Just as in the banking calamity the problem has its roots in simple greed. Doctors and hospitals make more money in a system that allows them to see selected patients on a piece-work basis, order multiple tests, prescribe numerous drugs and operate on as many of them as possible. The profit is in quantity not in quality of care; and certainly not in preventative medicine. Thus were a nation stuck with mediocre health care at the highest per capita cost in the world. I can’t imagine the lobbyists in DC will permit any real changes in this cash cow.
Class of ’69 Forty Years Later
Posted in Personal on 13-Jun-2009
Whew! Forty years ago today –on Friday the 13th no less– I waltzed out of the University of Toledo with a B.A. degree… and no more sense of what I was going to do than when I first registered. What a wondrous four years it was! I couldn’t get enough of any discipline; well, except calculus. There was botany, astronomy, logic, economics, social psychology, state and local government…, it was all fascinating. Oh and my official major, of course, Spanish and those countless hours memorizing dialogs in the language lab. I recall the delightful discovery of Baroque music as I spent many afternoons studying in the “music listening room.” Certainly, I spent way too many hours as well playing basketball, sometimes first thing in the morning and again until the gym closed at night.
- Nixon sworn in as President
- Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon
- Beatles gives their last performance
- first ARPANET (later the Internet) link established
- Jets beat the Colts in Superbowl III
- most powerful tropical storm in history, Hurricane Camille
- Wendy’s sells its first hamburger
- Mets win the World Series
- Seseame Street debuts
- martial law declared in Madrid
- first Led Zeppelin album released
- WalMart opens for business
- Chicago Eight trial begins
- the first artificial heart transplant
- British troops deployed in Northern Ireland
- initial flight of the Boeing 747
- Manson/Sharon Tate murders
- Woodstock
- first ATM machines installed
- draft lottery reconstituted
Front Yard Touch-Up
Posted in Around the house on 7-Jun-2009
We finally finished our rock walls and new plantings in the front yard. It took three trips in the little Volvo to get the almost ton of rocks we needed. We like this new way to manage the slope from the east side of the yard and it gives us a new space to highlight some colorful bushes and flowers.
Golf Getting Better?
Posted in Golf on 5-Jun-2009
Summer Already
Posted in Weather on 3-Jun-2009
Today it hit 91 degrees on our backyard thermometer. Given that the average May high is just 64 it was a pretty toasty day. And it marked the fifteenth consecutive day without any rainfall–halfway to the record of twenty-nine.
Golf Success
Posted in Golf on 1-Jun-2009
Finally some good golf news. I finished third in this weekend’s two-day Ron Lee Invitational Golf Tournament at Mt. Si GC. This is the competition I finished last in last year and won in 2007. I played steady golf both days–good enough to not have any big numbers on any holes and ended with par-bogey-par-birdie on the last four holes; an important stretch since we got into third place by a single stroke. That final birdie came on a 43-foot putt: a very satisfying end to the competition.
Celtic Woman Concert
Posted in Entertainment on 18-May-2009
I’ve seen these ladies on PBS several times and thought it might be fun to see them in person. It was certainly a lavish production given the smallish setting of Seattle’s Paramount Theater. The sound was excellent, the lighting spectacular. The music was OK but oddly impersonal. It’s definitely a group performance so you don’t get any sense of involvement with the artists; you just kind of watch the spectacle. There’s wasn’t room for a full orchestra so the music was an unusual mix of prerecorded and live sound. I was also disappointed that there was no dancing. All that said, the music was nice especially Enya’s “Orinoco Flow,” “Fields of Gold,” and the one song in Gaelic. Noteworthy, too, was the stupendous work of the group’s two percussionists who played on more than twenty drums, a dozen cymbals and a bunch of other instruments I don’t know the names of. In the end it was a relaxing couple of hours and a good break from our intense weekend of yard work.
Front Yard Revision
Posted in Around the house on 18-May-2009
We’ve been tweaking the landscaping of the front yard over the past couple of weeks and wrapped up work today. We added a small rock wall behind the bench, redistributed the barberries and added a few small ground covers and edge accents along the creek. Not visible here are the (now tiny) azaleas under the picture window that replaced the twiggy, twenty year old originals. We may have to do something with the viburnum at the lower left; they were heavily munched on by the elk over the winter.
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Guns and Burgers
Posted in Commentary on 17-Jun-2009
And thanks to recent federal legislation it will be legal to carry all those munitions in national parks.
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