Secretly Ironic

There was a lot of bad news this weekend but this Times story about the intersection of failures in medicine and immigration policy was pretty damn terrible. Nobody wants to send an injured man home to die, but nobody wants to pay the bill for taking care of him either. What happens? Well, he goes home to die.

That, and the one about the dramatic rise in jellyfish population throughout the world. It seems that the ocean fishing industry is re-enacting the classic Tragedy of The Commons story.

On the plus side, given that the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket, I feel better about my own failures as a human being. Pass me the employer-subsidized health care and a basket of dolphin chips, would you?

Someone shipped 32 pounds of marijuana to the wife of the mayor of a small Maryland town just outside of Washington DC. The mayor came home, found a box on the doorstep, and brought it inside. Then a SWAT team broke down his door, shot his two Labrador dogs, and took the dope. Now, if that was the mayor’s weed, or the mayor’s wife’s weed, that was very very strange. But what if it wasn’t?

What if someone wanted to teach the mayor about what it’s like to have cops break down your door and kill your dogs? Having drugs delivered to his house would be a good way to do it.

If you search Google for “Edgar Sawtelle” I come up somewhere halfway down the second page of results. So I don’t know how so many people are finding my short review of it, and commenting, even weeks after I wrote it. But I’m somewhere between pleased and thrilled, even though not every comment is positive. This is not your typical summer read and it’s not your typical book about dogs, but it’s also not your typical pretentious novel that I’d recommend to someone. It’s a gripping story that’s also thought-provoking, and that’s really difficult to do.

It turns out that a significant number of those luxury granite countertops that, together with fingerprint-prone stainless steel appliances, will become the most regrettable style cliche of the early 21st century, are not only ugly and difficult to maintain but also radioactive. Not just radioactive in the sense that nobody will buy your house and that you’ve overextended your credit, but radioactive in the sense that the exotic granite sometimes has more uranium than usual and gives off radon.

Spend too much time cooking or screwing on your new luxe kitchen and you might end up sterile or dead. Well, you’re bound to end up sterile and dead one way or another, of course. Just sooner than you’d otherwise expect.

This really is a very good diagram of the Bush scandals.

Some people like to say that “Friends don’t let friends read Slate,” because they tend to ask a lot of the wrong questions, especially about the war. But I think their coverage of health care and finance is good.

And I do love a good chart!

I took this picture in midafternoon from my office window when the clouds over Boston got kind of freakish.