Friday, September 11, 2009

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Joe Biden read this poem today during a September 11th memorial service

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Teen Caste Systems in 80's film and now

This is why I love cultural criticism.

Any article that can show how teen culture has changed by comparing the social structure of The Breakfast Club to the structure of Mean Girls gets an A+ in my book.

"Mean Girls, too, offered an absurd litany of cliques—listed at one point by a supporting character as, “ROTC guys, preps, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, Varsity jocks, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks.” "

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Complex Procedure = More Money for Doctors

The more specialized and difficult a medical procedure, the more Medicare money the medical office receives.

The following article argues that this creates incentives for specialist medical offices to recommend difficult procedures in order to receive more money from Medicare.

But more money for a specialist means less money for a primary care physician.

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