Author: Aaron Weber

Insurance for a house on fire

So, the lesson is that If you have insurance, don’t use it, or you’ll never get insurance again. What’s the point of health insurance if you’re afraid to get care when you need it?

When I went to my unemployment seminar lo these many months ago, the one thing everyone wanted was health insurance. Most of the crowd there had been at Bay Bank or Fleet for years and was part of the giant Bank of America buyout/layoff. Many of them were getting close to retirement. They’d have been happy to retire early, but they needed insurance. For the rest, the feeling was “I don’t care how bad the job is, or what the pay is, as long as there’s insurance before my COBRA runs out.”

It’ll get worse before it gets better, especially since political discussion these days seems to consist of illiterate xenophobes advocating English-only policies when their parents should have been practicing abstinence-only policies, and social discussion is limited to Paris Hilton in a pink leopard-print sailor outfit.

Would you like to see my new hat?

Via Slate:

The New York Times called this answer “artful.” That’s not the word I’d use. Artful should be reserved for things that hide the truth but don’t deceive. A hat is artful. A toupee is a lie. Bush’s answer was toupee-like. Even if it was technically true that Bush had not talked to Snow about “resignation,” the president knew his confected statement was deceptive. I’m reluctant to call it a lie, but the president abused our trust.

Clever language, except where he kind of waffles on it. Go ahead, point out that the president has no hair. Do it.

And while we’re at it, I want a pony and an impeachment.

The Guardian on College Sports

The Guardian has a great piece on the Duke lacrosse scandal and what it means for college sports. Apparently it’s been circulating at UVA and other sports-heavy colleges around the country. The upshot: hot teams bring recognition and tuition-paying undergrads. They also bring down academic standards and increase corruption, violence, binge drinking.

Great stats: “One survey showed 50 students die each year from alcohol poisoning. American students spend $6bn a year on alcohol, more than on books, snack food and all other drinks combined.” “The fact is that male student athletes, who make up only 3 per cent of the student population, account for 19 per cent of campus sexual assaults. Professor Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics of Sport at the University of Central Florida believes that one in seven female students is sexually assaulted at college. Yet few incidents are reported and even fewer lead to prosecution.”

(If the crimes go unreported, how do the reporters know the real numbers? My guess is that the data comes from surveys, or possibly from a disparity between medical-center reports and criminal charges filed…)

Of course, to me, the Duke scandal just confirmed everything I have thought about lacrosse players since junior high school.

Now with employment!

I start full-time work June 1 at Top 10 Sources, as an editor and researcher.

In this job I will not be matching the earnings of my high-school clasmates like Terence or Nat. However, those guys have to wear pants when they go to work, and I don’t.

Right now I’m having trouble coming up with ten good Spanish-language baseball blogs, so I may have to switch to just blogs sobre deportes or something like that.

The Family History

My grandfather Will Stone was a radical Jewish labor organizer of the sort that got investigated by the FBI for all sorts of things, some of which he did, and many of which he didn’t. I know he tried to sign up for the Abraham Lincoln brigades in the Spanish Civil War, but I don’t know if he went. I know that he was an avowed Communist, well after Bob Hope had dropped the “noble Russian Bear” line from “Thanks for the Memory,” when it should have been obvious to everyone that Stalin was not the kindly “Uncle Joe” pictured with the allies at Yalta.

I know that some time around 1948 he left my grandmother and my father alone in New Jersey, and that my father didn’t hear from him for twenty-some-odd years. I don’t know what it was like to be a godless Communist divorced single mother in the 1950s, but it cannot have been easy.

I know that my biological grandfather later claimed he had not written or sent money in order to protect the family, because he was being investigated and followed. I don’t know how many of those anti-Communist forces were real and how many were imaginary, but I imagine it was some of each. I don’t know how much his siblings agreed with his politics, but I don’t think it was much. I never met him and I don’t know when he died.

I learned all of this just last weekend, at my second cousin’s bat mitzvah. I’d never met anyone from his side of the family before. The only two people of my grandfather’s generation in attendance were his youngest brother Sam, with his wife. Sam told me the story about the Spanish Civil War, and said that my father looked just like Will. Sam’s wife told me that Will had never been an easy one to get along with, that his preaching about labor rights seemed cultish and his preaching about women’s rights hypocritical. She also told me she once went on a date with my great-uncle Paul, way back in New York when dinosaurs and Studebakers roamed the earth. She and Sam both remembered my grandmother fondly.

Sam had been my grandmother’s favorite of her half-dozen brothers-in-law, but I doubt they had spoken since the divorce (that’d be nearly sixty years, if you’re counting). My dad called and put her on the phone with him and they talked for a few minutes. Then we all had cake and promised to keep in touch.