Jonathan Ramsey

Lately, I’ve noticed Dr. Roger Starner Jones‘ careless letter –of 23 August 2009 to the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger- making the rounds of the anti-healthcare-reform blogosphere. Jones, an ER physician University of Mississippi Medical Center.

During my last shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ring tone.

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

She smokes a costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our president expects me to pay for this woman’s health care?

Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture — a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Starner Jones, MD

Jackson

He doesn’t mention that the woman actually told him how much she spent on these extravagances, and when. He says the gold was recent, but did he do better than just assume that? Gold crowns generally cost the same or less than porcelain crowns. Maybe someone else insisted on paying for that. At any rate, I doubt seriously that the woman in question was spending $800/month on smokes, beer, ringtones, phone service, and tattoos. She could easily spend much more than that on individual health insurance.

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I read and hear so many wrong things about the proposed healthcare reform bill. I would love to find a reasonable response to it, but it doesn’t seem to exist. Faux News Channel spews so many false statements daily, that somewhere a counter must be spinning. There are way too many Americans that have been taken in by the scare tactics of those opposed to a reasonable option for the uninsured. First, the government isn’t “taking over” healthcare. That would, in fact, be “socialized medicine”. That’s what the U.K. has. It is not what France, Germany, etc. have. It is also not what we would have. There will be a new payer option, in addition to the big profiteers that many of us currently spend countless hours on the phone, trying to get medical expenses paid.

Check out this video. It takes liberties with the terminology, presumably to counter the falsehoods stated. I don’t really know, though, if the creator(s) don’t understand the difference between socialized med and the current plan, or if they’re being ironic.

Watch, though:

What d’ya think? Try to make intelligent comments. I will probably delete any totally ignorant ones.

Cheers!

As a quasi-vegetarian, I must admit this is a bit disturbing. As I sit in wait for the post-apocalypse, that I think isn’t here yet, though, this might just be genius. It’s a “business card” made from beef jerky, with a laser-inscribed name and message.

We’ve waited forever for a breakthrough like this.

Actually, is there a Li-Ion card with built-in solar charger coming? How about a card that will electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, so I can run my car on it?

What about a business shotgun, axe, or ball bat. That would help fight off the zombies that are sure to come.

What do my ‘net peeps think about this meat madness? Is it just mad?

Could they make a vegan version? Dried Peach Cards?

Raisin Cards?

Maybe I’ll stick with the shotgun card.

If you want your bizniss on a slab-o-dried-beef, check it out at MeatCards.com. Yum!

iPhones, iPods, Zunes, Archos, and the many other portable music and video players have lots of things in common. One of the hottest things, though, is earbuds. All of us who carry devices and their earbuds have the same problem, too. How do you safely store your earbuds.

DIY sites on the internet host thousands of tips on cheap, easy ways to stow those earbuds, but, invariably, the advice is bad. The most commonly touted “clever” solution I’ve seen is the old “wrap the cord around a credit card” trick. Please don’t wrap your cord around a credit card. A credit card is the worst thing to wrap your cords around. Any time you bend a cord, you put stress on those bend points. Doubling a cord back on itself around a credit card, a library card, or a piece of cardstock is a horrible idea. What happens when you repeatedly bend a paper clip back and forth? It wears out and breaks. It may take several times. It may take several hundred times, but that’s a shortened life for an earbud cord. Wrapping around your hand or your iPod itself is better, but it still puts stress on the cord. So, what do you do?

The best way to wrap a cord is in a circle, the bigger the radius the better. You could wrap some duct tape around a toilet paper tube, a short piece of PVC pipe, a 6oz water bottle.

If you don’t feel up to making your own, you can always purchase the ready made type. Some of these are merely cases, but you can neatly roll the cord up into a circle, and place it gently within.

Cable Turtle ($4.00 and up in different colors), iBeatle (how cute and only $6.49 at time of writing), and JLab JBuds Case (around $10 and several different colors). All available at Amazon.com.

Sometimes, though, I just roll up the cord and place it neatly into a freezer “zip” bag (Glad, ZipLock, Target, etc.)

Okay, here’s the real numero uno, the big cheese, the first one I did, a few days ago, and should have posted on Sunday.

Well, yeah. It’s a rough mix of “Mein Hut er hat einen Pickel”, a little “folk” tune that I’ve plagiarized a genuine folk tune to create.

Anywho, this is a little something that’s been bugging the dark places in my brain for a couple of years. It will have an animated video to go along with it.

Mein Hut er hat einen Pickel Play

If you’re still haven’t voted, and you’re sitting around wasting all your time, reading my stupid blog, get the *$%# off your bed, couch, or bean bag chair, and drag your arse to your polling place. Being an American is hard work, whether you were born here, or are naturalized, but somebody has to do it

Video Source.

Thank you.

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you’re reading this in English, thank those selfish emmer-effers that sailed to and overtook your homeland and killed off the younger of the country’s males, degrading your forebears’ language and culture, till there was nothing left.

John Lennon rehearses Give Peace a Chance at the Montreal Bed-In. Photo by Roy Kerwood. Source: Wikimedia.org.

Merlin Mann put our artist lifestyles in perspective, “Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.”

‘Tis true, Merlin. ‘Tis true. I’d hope he’d have been better at ignoring the stuff than I am.

Questions? Comments?

I gotta tell ya. After three missed years, there, including the third –I think- in which the store that housed it closed soon thereafter, I’m so gonna campaign to play at this show. Maybe I’ll just make some kit up, and apply for a booth. We’ll see.

Yes. I’m finally getting around to getting some new videos up. I was tweaking and experimenting with settings in the editing software, trying to get the video ready to YouTube. So, I looked for some advice on such settings. I found this instead. This is where I should have started.

That’s how you make a good music video.

Thanks, guys!