Quick intro, for those not in the loop: I’m visiting our work call center in Cork, Ireland for two weeks as part of a big call-center-agent-training project that I’m kinda responsible for. Yes, I have indeed earned the ire of many coworkers who discovered I got a free trip to Ireland just to *observe* training. Mary Beth, immediately upon hearing of my trip, announced she was coming along too.
K: “Well, you know I’m just going to be working all day, right?” MB: [cheerful] “Oh that’s okay!”
So we’ll see how many euros she spends on Guinness- and potato-themed trinkets during my workday.
I’m watching “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” the documentary cobbled together out of rehearsal footage from Michael’s farewell concert series (which, of course, was cancelled due to a sudden onset of death).
Michael's replacement kept trying to eat the choreographer.
I could spend this whole post describing the strange contradiction that Michael represented. He was a certified weirdo, made even weirder by an unlimited spending account; a freakish and very public example of body dysmorphic disorder; and if not a pedophile, certainly a man who didn’t have a typical notion of how to behave around kids.
And yet. And yet! Watching him prance around onstage, in his skinny pants and oddball jackets, I was involuntarily sucked into the performance. Michael had infinite stage presence and wrote timeless pop songs that were totally unlike anyone else’s. As Chris Rock so elegantly put it:
“How much do we love Michael Jackson? We love Michael so much, we let the first kid SLIDE!”
On Sunday morning, myself and a few friends drove to the Alamo Drafthouse for one of their famous “feasts”—expensive, multiple-course menus paired with a movie marathon. This time it was the Back to the Future trilogy, for which they pulled out quite a few of the stops. Three shiny DeLoreans were parked out front. BTTF-themed collectibles were raffled off. And in the best part of the day, Christopher Lloyd himself made a surprise appearance for a Q&A—he very rarely does these.
He's the Doc Brown-looking guy in the middle.
Prior to the show, one of the Alamo employes warmed up the crowd briefly and pointed out how, on a weekend where we could see remakes of The Karate Kid and The A-Team back-to-back, the notion of a modern Hollywood remake of Back to the Future is all but inconceivable. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try, of course, but his point remains valid. What’s so special about the time-travel movie?
(Just visiting? That’s cool; see the bottom of this post for my favorite quotes from the show.)
This weekend, from Friday afternoon until early Sunday morning, a group of eight hardy improvisers at my spiritual home, the Hideout Theatre, performed 41 continuous hours of improv comedy, with miniscule breaks in between and help from a wide range of fellow improvisers who brought a new format each hour.
Check out the full schedule for an idea of how it went down. I’d heard from last year that the final hours were the ones to see, so I set my alarm for 5:00 this morning and turned up for the final three hours. That’s right, I wanted to see improvised 1960s Batman, and oh boy was it worth the early wakeup.
The final hour saw eight haggard individuals, miraculously upright, ready to do one final long-form narrative. And maybe the audience’s own sleeplessness helped somewhat, but oh, it was one of the finest hours of improv I’ve ever seen. Continue reading Hour 41 of the 41-hour improv marathon→
(Just a quick post to get this down for posterity, and in case you were curious.)
It certainly does strike one as odd that the federal government is requiring its citizens to buy a specific type of product—a health insurance plan—with the 2009 health-care reform. Even a fan of big guv’mint like me can, at first blush, jump back to his libertarian instincts when it’s described like that. It can really be boiled down to two questions: can they do something like that, constitutionally? And second, should they?
Real quick followup to my previous post: I poked around and discovered that, indeed, the HCR bill includes some promising provisions for expanding the use of accountable-care organizations (ACOs) like you see at the Mayo Clinic and in other communities.
We’re about to talk about abortion for awhile, so let’s start off with a precious kitty:
Except it's a baby, which reminds you of abortion. Dammit.
Okay, so. It seems like the abortion issue is one of the more bizarre aspects of the debate—and it’s been a very bizarre debate—because people have been so diametrically opposed on the facts of the matter. On the one hand, a Republican yells out “Baby killer!” (or It’s a baby killer, depending on who you believe) during debate on the bill. On the other hand, some liberal blogs I’ve read have described the bill as the “biggest step backwards in reproductive rights” in many years. So conservatives think the HCR bill loves aborting fetuses, whereas liberals believe that it firebombs Planned Parenthood clinics on its days off.
3/22 Update: One thing that my list below didn’t convey is how much of the plan will be rolled out over time; for example, the Cadillac plan tax isn’t implemented until 2018. This excellent Reuters article outlines the whole plan in chronological order:
In the interests of not exploding from near-constant frustration, I’ve deliberately avoided blogging about (or, as much I can, thinking about) the health-care debate as Congress has been even more ridiculous than usual bringing it to fruition.
To review: on November 7, 2009, the House passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act by a vote of 220-215. On Christmas Eve, the Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (what’s with these names, honestly) by a vote of 60-39. In the 2½ months since, Congress has done a spectacular job getting a whole lot of nothing done, and the filibuster, that most delightful of obstructionist legislative tools, has turned into the Republicans’ new best friend:
Way to govern, amigos.
But. Despite the GOP’s most valiant of efforts… despite President Obama being surprisingly aloof through most of the adventure… despite the American public becoming justifiably fed-up with the whole affair… it’s finally come together. And even in its worst, most compromise-weakened form, it’s still the most dramatic reform of American health care since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
First of all, just the facts. Rumors and implications and unintended consequences aside, exclusions and rejected ideas aside, what does this bill actually do? Well, a whole hell of a lot, actually. Unlike the vast majority of Congressional legislation, it’s a grab-bag of new laws, restrictions, taxes, allowances, and three or four kitchen sinks. Continue reading Health care: Okay, so what’s in the bill?→
It takes some encouragement to get me downtown to a show in the middle of South by Southwest. I’m not the most musically-inclined guy on earth, and my tastes in most things are pretty damn conventional. (Quick, ask me to name my favorite Cheap Trick song …actually, any Cheap Trick song.) So the musical side of SXSW, and the allure of wandering a crowded downtown just to see what acts I happened across, wasn’t the first thing that I felt compelled to do.
But then Ben Rector had to come along and screw it up for me.
