Yikes! Today’s advertisement-laden Seattle Times weighed something like five pounds.  A real monstrosity.  Even worse though, is the home page of the Times online edition.  Is this one of the ugliest things you’ve ever seen?

The King County Library System has been named the “Library of the Year 2011.”  We don’t use the Library often but I’m always impressed when we do.  The facilities, even the little local buildings like those here in North Bend and Snoqualmie Ridge, are just excellent.  And with an easy to get library card, you get access to all kinds of online reference services.

Forty years ago today UCLA engineer Charley Kline sent a two character message to colleague Bill Duvall at Stanford, an event regarded as the first Internet transmission. There’s a superb book recounting the efforts of now famous individuals to link multiple computers at various research facilities: Where Wizards Stay Up Late. What’s really fascinating are the numerous problems that had to be solved: after all, everything was being done for the first time.

I clearly remember July 20, 1969, the date of the first lunar landing. It was a Sunday and I spent most of the day making tossed salads and shrimp cocktails at Dolly & Joe’s Restaurant lamenting that I was going to miss the live TV transmission of man’s first step onto the moon while I chopped lettuce and sliced carrots. I did have a small transistor radio on the shelf above me so I could listen to events early that afternoon. I was thrilled when I realized that the astronauts had several hours of preparation after touchdown before they would step out onto to the lunar surface. So I was home and in front of the TV well before Neil Armstrong stepped into the lunar dust at 10:39 pm. I’ll never forget that grainy, black and white image–it’s still a thrilling memory forty years later.

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.