"Furthermore, most of these people became millionaires through a relentless drive for self improvement and success, making sacrifices, and not taking the easy road."

"If you want to be on 'Cribs' get off your ass, and start *working* toward a goal. You may not ever reach it, but you'll get more of what you want by working for it than by watching it on TV and wishing for it."

Wanna suggest another warning label? E-mail burgerguy@gmail.com

Now, the fact that doctors are prescribing a new prescription medicine when a generic cousin is available is a problem that increases costs, especially in the light that the new medicine is not significantly better than the old one in any particular way. But the practice of dashing off a prescription and moving on cannot be blamed entirely on the doctors. It can be blamed to a certain extent on the way our healthcare system is structured.

Insurance companies do not have billing codes for 15-minute blocks of time. They have billing codes for office visits and patient assessments. Your doctor gets the same amount of money if they spend half an hour with you or 5 minutes with you. If they want to make enough to pay their mortgage, car payment, health insurance (you'd be surprised how expensive insurance is for doctors), they have to see a certain number of patients per day. Sometimes they work on salary for a clinic or HMO, but then they have to go through performance reviews which count how many patients they're seeing in a day.

Talk may be cheap, but not when you're talking to a lawyer, doctor, or other professional who expects a certain hourly rate far in excess of what you and I make. And insurers seem to have done the math and decided that they're paying less for prescriptions than they would for longer office visits.

But it's not just the insurance system that promotes overprescribing. We're Americans, goddamnit. If we go to the doctor and complain that hitting ourselves in the head with hammers is giving us headaches, we don't want our doctor to tell us to stop doing that. We want our doctor to prescribe the medicine we saw on TV that stops the headaches associated with hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. We don't feel better unless we walk out of there with a prescription in our hot little hands.

We already know "bed rest, fluids, Tylenol, and time" are what you do for a cold, and if we know that, we don't want to hear that from a doctor. We came to the doctor for expert advice, not common horse sense. And thus the doctor feels pressured to prescribe something. And that's likely a big contributor to the study showing nearly half of kids getting prescribed antibiotics for colds that won't even respond to antibiotics. I'm sure many doctors tried to put up a fight when they were young and idealistic, but got beat over the head so often by stupid parents who wanted a feel better pill, even if there wasn't one, they started handing out antibiotics just to avoid the argument.

High-priced prescriptions do add to the health care overhead. But so does procedure-based payment that encourages doctors to tag 'em and bag 'em. So do people who don't feel like they've been treated unless they get a prescription. So do people who would rather use pills to relieve the discomfort caused by bad lifestyle choices than suffer the self-denial of making good lifestyle choices. We're all to blame for our overmedication and the associated costs, and it won't get better until attitudes change in a number of camps.

April 26:

I need those "Clockwork Orange" thingies to clamp my eyes open this morning.

April 28:

I won't blame Obama for everything Bush did. I'll just blame him for letting so much of it continue.

April 29:

Some signs I've created to spice up my office decor.

April 30:

Sieze the day, hold it hostage, and demand chocolate.

April 30:

Your job as a parent is not only to help your child learn to fly, but to terminate with extreme prejudice any motherfucker who would try to shoot that child down.

May 3:

One time, after my oldest son had chattered nonstop from the backseat for a while, I told him I "ran out of hearing." He'd talked so much, he used it all up. And if he wanted me to be able to hear him again, he was going to have to be quiet so I could build up a new reserve.

The point that Seth makes is that for most projects, you have to be able to be able to categorize it. People don't want to know what it is, but what it's like. That gives them a quick, experiential point of reference they can build on. "It's like King Kong, but with a giant bunny" lets the audience's memory/perception quickly fill in a whole bunch of blanks so you don't have to.

On a rare occasion, though, your project is so unique, it defies a simple categorization. You can't get that quick hit of familiarity. You either have to describe it in full, without the aid of familiar references, or you have to say "it's like nothing you've ever had. Just trust me and try it."

People would ask me to describe my novel in just a few words, and I couldn't. It wasn't a "vampire novel" per se. It just happened to have a vampire in it. Some of the story was driven by Alain's vampirism, but a lot of it wasn't. There was a lot of borrowing from Dante, some from Milton... Categorizing it was very difficult for me. I was too close to it to be able to boil it down to a few catchphrases and keywords.

I didn't know if it was that unique, or if I just didn't want to categorize it. To categorize it feels like you've not only limited it, but you've taken away a degree of its uniqueness. So, as the creator of an "artistic" work, it's quite possible I was merely resisting categorizing my story rather than the story itself resisting categorization. Every child is unique, right? Even if they aren't.

But when you're trying to sell a work, saying "just trust me and try it" is not a great approach if you haven't built trust with the person. Furthermore, when you say "this is unlike anything else," you have to be 100% sure it is unlike anything else. If someone gives you the benefit of the doubt, reads it, and says "this is just like...", you're screwed. You asked them to trust you about it's uniqueness and lost.

I'm still on the fence over whether my novel is resisting categorization or I'm resisting categorizing it, but Godin has given me some insight that is helping me look at it more honestly. If I want to sell it, I need the best answer for "what's it like" that I can find.

http://www.wramc.amedd.army.mil/WRResource/SupportRecoveringAmericanSoldier.pdf (requires a PDF reader)

For ideas on how to support our troops at Christmas, they recommend...

www.americasupportsyou.mil
http://www.usocares.org/
http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/tooursoldiers/

Additionally, the Red Cross is offering a program to deliver holiday cards to our troops and their families, but cards have to be received (not postmarked, but actually in their hands) by Monday, December 7th.

Red Cross Holiday Mail For Heroes

Please feel free to share this info.

So I tried to think what I could give up for 25 hours that would make me feel denied... Computers. No internet, no e-mail, no digital cable, no cribbage or solitaire on my phone, no CDs, no DVDs, no MP3s, and since all my radios have digital tuners, no radio. So, basically, I get to read real paper books and go for walks. Although all my phones have chips in them, I'm making an exception for phone calls because a potential employer may try to contact me or my kids' day care may try to contact me, and I need to take those.

Computers and TV are such a part of my daily routine, it's going to actually be hard. It's not even a matter of addiction so much as force of habit. You have to be on your guard against ingrained behaviors. You want to do these things because they're your ritual, and by not doing them, you have to leave your comfort zone.

Hopefully God will appreciate the sacrifice.

I've blogged on this, so I copied a few bits out of that blog post, edited it a bit, and replied to all with:

Amazing what you'll do for luck, [friend's name].

What kind of good magic threatens you with bad luck? Any magic that does harm is black magic... evil magic.

Basically, you're not sending people good luck. You're sending them bad luck that they must pass on to others to avoid. And if they do what the evil magic tells them, they will be rewarded.

If you pass on chain letters like this, you become a tool of evil. So by sending this to all of us, you proved you're a tool.

He didn't respond, but two people did. His sister e-mailed to agree with me. And the woman who sent the chain letter to him (a conservative whom I've chided in the past for some racist crap disguised as "humor", and who I added to the "reply all") wrote this:

How to tell Greg's a liberal:
Read his manifestations. If he's angry about stupid little chain letters, there's a good chance he's a liberal.
Lighten up, Dude.

Hire [her name] http://www.geocities.com/[rest of URL obscured so no one harrasses her]

So I responded...

Who's upset? Did my suggestion that sending on chain letters is evil make you feel defensive?

How to tell [her name]'s a conservative:

She'll talk conservative values and then engage in petty acts of black magic (i.e. chain letters).

That kind of hypocrisy can only be found among conservatives.

"What the heck" isn't a valid excuse. If you believe it can confer good luck, then you're giving credence to its claims, and the other claim is that it will confer bad luck. So in a selfish act, you send it to all your "friends" so you can get good luck, ignoring the bad luck you're potentially passing on to them, because you got what you wanted.

Also a typically conservative mindset: the "I got what I want, so screw everyone else" philosophy.

And her signature still sports a Geocities URL, despite the fact that Geocities will close in less than 2 months and she was told about it over 3 months ago (by a liberal who put his differences aside to help her).

Just like a conservative, she sees a problem and does nothing. Guess she's hoping magic chain letters will make her so lucky she doesn't need to do something about it.

Kisses,

Greg

P.S.: It's not just me who dislikes chain letters. You sent the chain letter to [friend's name] using your Yahoo! Mail account. Let me quote from the Yahoo! terms of service.

6. MEMBER CONDUCT

... You agree to not use the Yahoo! Services to:

...g. upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation, except in those areas (such as shopping) that are designated for such purpose (please read our complete Spam Policy);

You agreed not to send chain letters. But I guess calling someone on breaking their word is just another liberal trait, seeing as how we had to do it so often during the Bush administration.

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

But for once I wasn't angry about this claptrap polluting my inbox. In fact, I want every Republican I know to keep circulating these jokes and I'll tell you why.

In November:

A month ago:

Since the election, a time when people tend to identify more strongly with a political party, the Democrats have lost 10% of their support. The Republicans have lost a whopping 34% of their support.

Time and time again, the credit for the huge losses in support has gone to the abrasive ideologues who have been taking control of the Republican party. Limbaugh, Cheney, and their ilk have been compared to GOP Neros fiddling while the Republican party burns.

And that's why I encourage the distribution of these unfunny jokes. These ideological rants, thinly disguised as humor, are helping liberals accomplish a lifelong dream: the marginalization of the Republican party. So please keep distributing them guys. Nothing better than watching a political party self-destruct.

I can already envision my Republican friends (you know who you are) responding by posting comments about some sin they believe the liberals have committed.

I'm going to cut you off right now. That doesn't matter. That's a deflection. Nancy Pelosi's statements about the CIA have nothing to do with why over 34% of the people who called themselves Republicans in November have defected from the party, why you're down 16% from just two months ago. Nancy Pelosi's mistakes, Obama's mistakes, and Harry Reid's mistakes can't explain why people don't want to call themselves Republicans.

If anything, mistakes by the liberal side should be increasing your numbers. The more convincing your arguments for why the liberals are screwing everything up, the worse you look. If all your rhetoric about the bad liberals is right, how freakin' lame are you that your numbers are dwindling at a time when potential converts should be flooding your way?

So please, keep sending out these jokes. Please keep drilling the talking points on Fox News. Please keep putting your feet in your mouths with veiled racial slurs. Please keep doing all the obstructionist stuff you accused Democrats of when you held majorities, but doing it more blatantly and obnoxiously so it's really easy for the media to show you doing one thing and then quote your condemnation of the very same thing from a few years ago.

Stay the course, guys. It's working so well for you.

The idea was a web site where concerned neighbors of such stands could set up on the sidewalk in front of them (on public property) and take photos of the cars and people who patronized them, then post those photos to a web site which would make a searchable/browseable database of the license plates. I'd even suggest that people put the camera on a tripod and put a sign under it saying "Congratulations! Your car's photo and license plate will appear on coffeperverts.com within 48 hours. Enjoy your coffee!"

The tech to do the site is actually not difficult. I could probably build the site inside of a week. The difficulties are to find people willing to stand in front of these places and take photos, then enter them into the site, plus covering the site's legal butt when a business owner or customer sued over being in the database.

I'd win all the suits. Neither the businesses or their customers have an expectation of privacy regarding commerce conducted not only in public but in plain view of a street. But I'd still have to pay lawyers to win the suits for me. And if one of the users made a typo on a license plate... not sure what the liability might be there.

So I figured I'd throw the idea out to my readers and see if any wanted to run with it. If you think this is a venture you'd like to pursue, coffeepervs.com and coffeeperverts.com were both available for resgistration at GoDaddy a couple of minutes ago.

Let me know if you do it. I've got some time to go shoot some pics at Java Juggs.

I read this story about Ed Chrisman, an 88-year-old American who was recently given a humanitarian release from a Mexican jail. I'm not going to go into the details of why he was there or a rant about his treatment. Read the full story if you want all the details.

It was the second-to-last paragraph of the story that just made my blood run cold:

"He told one story - one of the guards there had a guard dog inside the prison and the dog had pups. The rats are so thick in there that rats came and started to drag off the pups and eat them," said Don.

I told this to a person who isn't a "dog person," and even she gave a sympathetic whine for those poor puppies. If you want a way to describe the squalid conditions in a Mexican prison, puppy-eating rats hits it right on the freakin' nail.

Holy crap!

Let's start with the pledge: "I pledge to join the Hunger Challenge starting April 20 and experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day." Plainly and simply, you can't experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day in the space of five days, mostly because it's only five days.

In my freshman year of college, I took a class on civil rights and the disabled to satisfy a humanities requirement, and the professor said something that stuck with me. All those experiments where you try to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a day or two are fine and dandy, but they miss one very important part of the experience... the knowledge that this isn't going to end anytime soon. You can spend a week in a wheelchair, but when it gets really hard, you have the knowledge you'll be able to get out of the wheelchair in X days as well as the choice of saying "I quit" and getting out now.

The hunger challenge is the same. If you're hungry or unhappy with the food on Wednesday, you know that you'll be able to go to your favorite sushi bar on Saturday night when it's all over. And if it gets too hard, you have the option of quitting and calling for a pizza. You can't know "firsthand how it feels" because you know exactly when this will end, you can quit it whenever you want, and you're never faced with the depressing situation of having it stretch before and behind you for months.

But the 5-day outlook makes things artificially harder too. This challenge has the fallacy of trying to buy all your spices and oils on a budget of $7 a day for five days. You cannot build a monthly budget that allows you to take a longer term outlook and stretch purchases like that (or a 10-lb bag of rice, or a large bag of beans, or a large sack of sugar) over a longer horizon.

I'm not saying that you can eat like a king on this budget, but that the 5-day period makes your situation both better and worse than people who have to live like this and it gives you a skewed concept of what it's like to be on food aid. It's basically dipping your toe in the coldest part of the pond and saying you know what it's like to swim in it.

A home economics class, where you had to prepare shopping lists for a family of four on this budget for a month, would give you a better concept of the rigor and planning that has to go into living like this. A five-day experiment like this just makes me think of upper middle class people who think they know what it's like to be poor because they drove through a slum and saw all the sad little people who just broke their hearts.

This is the foodie form of limousine liberalism and it just annoys me.

Giant burgers are nothing new, and the Travel Channel's "Man V. Food" has featured some bigger burgers in its hard-not-to-watch orgy of gluttony, but I guess this is the first time such a huge burger has been offered at a ballpark. Presumably added to the menu to get some press about its novelty, it did just that, making the wire services and getting stories in newspapers nationwide.

That attracted the attention of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Although dated April 1st, the open letter from dietitian Susan Levin was released to press sources yesterday and another round of press for the Whitecaps began almost immediately.

Levin asked for the following warning label: "WARNING – Eating meat is associated with increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and death."

I like a different quote from her letter that many of the press outlets ignored: "I venture to guess that your monster burger harbors more synthetic hormones than most professional baseball players."

Woo-hoo, the humorless killjoy tries to make a steroid joke, and almost pulls it off. Most of the letter, though, is about how too much meat and cheese causes most of society's medical ills and riffs on "what kind of example are we setting for the children?"

Honestly, I think this is just bandwagon PR. Look at how much mileage the PCRM got out of one little press release. Just like the story on the burger, it got on the wire services, got picked up by lots of outlets, and it's provoking a reaction. Used to be that the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was the best known food-issue grandstander. One of their more memorable campaigns was trying to expose all the dangers of movie theater popcorn. More recently, they've been suing beer makers over making caffeinated alcoholic beverages they're calling "alcospeed."

Still, good intentions aside, mercenary attempts to ride on the coattails of someone else's publicity aside, the claim that the burger needs a warning label is just insulting on so many levels, and that's probably what's made people take notice. It's not so much that the "food nazis" are at it again, but they're calling Joe the Plumber an idiot again. And people are getting pissed off at the arrogant, humorless twaddle coming out of activistville yet again.

Susan, this is why people hate you. You talk down to them. You think they're not capable of making their own decisions and need or want you to interfere. So here's my proposed warning label.

WARNING: There are some people in this country who believe you're potentially stupid enough to mistake a 4-pound burger with cheese, chili, and corn chips on it for health food. Humorless blowhards like this are known causes of irritation and stress. Please use extreme caution when listening to these pompous twits.