Archive for December 15th, 2009
In 1980, I took a part time job at a men’s clothing store so I could make a few extra bucks for Christmas. While it is true that I suffer from Fashion Deficit Syndrome, that wasn’t much of a hindrance, since most folks who came into the store already knew what they wanted, and if they didn’t, hey, it was 1980. Everything looked ridiculous. So it was low pressure sales job, and that suited me. But because it was Christmas, the customers wanted their purchases gift wrapped.
I don’t know why I was so bad at wrapping presents. It was a skill I had never mastered, and the harder I tried the worse I got. I carefully observed my co-workers take a rectangular box, a sheet of paper, some tape and ribbon, and transform those simple elements into a masterpiece fit for Santa’s tree. It looked so easy. Full story »
Read it and weep:
Over 6,600 uninsured veterans will die by 2013: estimate
A Raw Story analysis, based on a recent Harvard Medical School study, estimates that 135,000 American citizens and over 6,600 US veterans will die due to a lack of health insurance before current proposed healthcare reform measures would take effect.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand US lives far exceeds the total number of Americans who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the attacks of 9/11 combined. The lives of over 6,600 US veterans is more — by over 1,300 — than the total number of US soldiers who have thus far died in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-author of the Harvard Medical School study, called Raw Story’s estimates “quite reasonable.”
Read the rest… (great insights from experts throughout, including a veterans’ advocate who discusses the correlation between lack of proper healthcare and the military’s suicide epidemic)
by Rich Herschlag
We have never known more about others and less about ourselves.
How bad did this decade suck? Well, let’s put it this way. The damn thing never even got a name. Not one that stuck. The aughts never did it for me, nor did the ‘00s do it for anyone else, which is really saying something for a nothing decade.
But it’s worse than that. There is almost no mention of this sorry decade’s impending end. Saddam Hussein’s funeral was better attended. This decade is headed for a burial in the Potter’s Field of cultural history. You might argue that we’re still hung over from all the VH1 top one hundred lists at the close of the last millennium, but ten years was certainly enough time to string together a few clips of a doped up Paula Abdul stammering on American Idol and call it a retrospective.
This was a decade during which the Dow opened around 11,600 and closed around 10,500. Meanwhile, the national debt began around $5.6 trillion and reached around $12.9 trillion. Don’t worry, though. Lots of people got rich. Just not us. Full story »
 We all know that many modern Christmas carols and songs derive from earlier versions. Musical history is full of these little evolutions. Some of our favorite carols turn out to be something that someone was singing 400 or 500 years ago, and that’s pretty cool, actually. Good Christian Men, Rejoice, for example, derives in a pretty straight line from In Dulci Jubilo, which first appeared on the scene, so far as anyone can tell, in 1328, written by a German mystic monk named Heinrich Seuse. And composers ever since then have taken this theme and reworked it in interesting ways. There were, in fact, multiple Renaissance versions—but this is what Renaissance composers specialized in, trying to one-up each other (that’s why we have something like 35 Armed Man Masses). But I sang a dramatic version of this by Robert Pearsall just last year, in fact. Pearsall was a 19th century English-German composer who worked hard to revitalize plainsong and Renaissance polyphony. A good song is hard to keep down. And occasionally we find albums that highlight some of these developments.
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