Saturday, October 31, 2009

Friday, October 23, 2009

When I win the lottery

I am going to buy myself a new car. Not just any car, it's got to have a heated drivers seat. Until then I will just have to content myself with green-eyed jealousy of some burdz on the internets.


funny pictures of cats with captions

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Once more unto the breach, single payer advocates, once more

Wednesday, Oct 15, is Lobby Your Representative Day

If you are in Washington DC and can join Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care in their lobbying efforts in support of Weiner's substitute single payer amendment and Kucinich's state single payer amendment, do so.

House lobby day – Wednesday, October 14th

* Lobby for Weiner HR676 substitute single-payer amendment votes
* Lobby for protection of Kucinich state single-payer option amendment

We’ll have two sessions of lobbying effort – one early and one later in the day as we may catch more Members as they finish their floor work. Meet your fellow LCGHC members and friends in the Rayburn House Office Building cafeteria at 10 a.m. on Wednesday if you’d like to help lobby Congressional members from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; and if you’d like to come in the afternoon, meeting in the Rayburn HOB cafeteria at 2 p.m. to hear reports from the morning crew and get marching orders for the afternoon lobby efforts

If you can't get to DC, drop by your Rep's office in your town, always assuming your representative cares enough about you to have an office near you [need talking points? or handouts?] and as always, call call call!



x-post at corrente, fdl, dkos

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Who needs expensive, store-bought

fluffy, when you can have home-made for so much less?

funny pictures of cats with captions

That's how we do things here at chez hipparchia.

[for reference]

KFF slides on Medicare

KFF timeline of Medicare

MedPAC charts of Medicare beneficiary demographics

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Game on!

Friendly bet, lazily monitored, you got it.

Two years? We can make it easier than that [maybe; if they close my library it could take me a couple of years]. Of the top 100 books of all time, only 42 have been banned or challenged [I was a tad confused in my earlier post], which means we can cross Rand and Wolfe [and a host of others] off the list without even batting an eye.

The Revised List
bold = banned
red = I've read
tiny text, with strikethrough = not gonna count those

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster

53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James

88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Thursday, October 01, 2009