Xark!

Think Warm Thoughts

News outlets are reporting that Hillary Clinton has unveiled her plans for national health care. I don't know many of the details, but if the picture accompanying the story is anything to go by, it looks as though they are planning on keeping costs down by offering low tech colonoscopy exams for everyone!

Think healthy, people.

Germfree: A Brief Rant

A few weeks back, a friend sent me a link to yet another article about the hipness of germaphobia in U.S. culture.  Listen up, all of you:  I don’t mind your touchless toilets, faucets, and towel dispensers.  I’ll put up with standing in long lines at the sink while you repeatedly wash your hands.  I’ll buy all the antibacterial lotions my son’s school suggests I send in with him.  However, my gym has made a move that is taking things one step too far.  While it is customary to spray down and clean the cardio equipment (elliplitcals, treadmills, bikes, etc.) because people perspire heavily while using them, we now have individual towels and spray bottles at each weight machine.  So, despite the fact that I place a towel on the seat before I use the machine, despite the fact that I’m not heavily perspiring when I lift weights, now I have to spray down and clean each machine, or get death stares from my prissy fellow patrons?  I can’t imagine the lengths of cleanliness we’ll be reaching for in 10 years.

Death Becomes Us

At the insistence of my son, who is a dedicated fan of both Pi and Requiem for a Dream (I only marginally enjoyed Pi and skipped Requiem), I went with him to see Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (OK, I also agreed because I have crushes on both Rachel Weisz and Hugh Jackman).  Without getting involved in an argument with any of you about this film, which has encouraged highly disparate readings from its audience, it’ll have to suffice to say that I was equally bored and intrigued, equally impressed with the story and repulsed by its pretensions.  What I have been taken with, however, is the number of people I know who found themselves mulling over one of the questions the film asks: “What if you could live forever?,” and I’ve been wondering about what drives such an obsession.

A wild idea about poverty

Our friend JanetLee from Kittens on the Keyboard wrote a post about the cycle of poverty, and that was all the excuse I needed to inflict an overly long comment on JanetLee and her unsuspecting, innocent readers. How can we break the cycle? Well, how about physically removing people from the places where it occurs?