“How big is the number trillion?”

“A trillion dollars doesn’t even cover 10% of the national debt. How big is a trillion? NOT as big as it used to be….we owe a 11 trillion dollars to someone? That sounds bad.” – a hilarious Lin Brehmer podcast on WXRT. (I can’t figure out how to permalink just the one, so just scroll down to the 6/29/09 podcast.)

*the most hilarious part is the embedded Dennis Miller clip from back-in-the-day, when he did the news on SNL.

More Camera Obscura!

Camera Obscura performing “French Navy”  on the Craig Ferguson show….

“This business of blaming municipal failings on the faltering economy is a godsend to our elected officials. Like Lysol it works on many different things. I’ve even been telling my wife that my lack of attentiveness to household duties is due to the economy. Sweet.”

- letter in the local paper. Funny!

Camera Obscura: “French Navy”

I love this video because it feels like memory….

“One theory is that this grumpiness is triggered by the awareness that the dreams we set our hearts on as young men are never going to be realised. According to a recent survey involving over two million people in 72 countries, all human beings suffer from depression in middle age because that’s when we wake up and smell the coffee.”

Toby Young (via).

*I’m fascinated with novels, fiction, anything really, dealing with life transitions, whether the unsure early twenties or the grumpy forty-fifties. I love my field of medicine, but if I hadn’t chosen to practice my particular specialty, I would have liked to practice psychiatry and study these sorts of phenomenon.

*Yeah, I know I totally re-write things a bit after I post them. Eh, rules.

“The weight of the world. And the hurt and the dirt. Can make you disturbed….

….baby, be prepared to be surprised.”

- To Be Surprised, Sondre Lerche

* (embarrassingly, I am sort of a fan of the, er, youtube fanpage. I know. Be prepared – if you click, it’s music-y and picture-y! SFW, of course, because we are PG-13 around here.)

“Ayn Rand’s book is popular to this day because it embodies the primal ideas of freedom and creativity and hatred of the brute power of the state to destroy both.”

Lexington Green at Chicagoboyz.

*I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, but, what’s interesting to me, are all the copies of Ayn Rand I seem to see everywhere these days. Or, am I just noticing the books more, rather than it being some kind of new phenomenon?

At any rate, my ‘bobo’  inner-ring semi-urban neighborhood has a lot of bookstores, and, while they are generally fiction oriented, the political is very much what you might expect. So, the big fat copies of Rand I see lying around on piles of new and old books is interesting…..no?

Because, sometimes, you want to watch something undemanding and gentle….

Well, maybe undemanding and gentle isn’t quite right. How about: wry, genteel and utterly human?

“Can we please please please stop claiming that the AMA has anything to do with the supply of doctors. “

Commenter orthodoc at Chicagoboyz.

Can we please please please stop claiming that the AMA has anything to do with the supply of doctors. It doesn’t. It has zippo, nada, zilch to do with it. The number of medical slots is set by the AAMC (American Association of Medical Colleges), which has been trying for 15 years to INCREASE the number of medical school positions. The number of residencies is set by the Federal Government, which pays hospitals for the post-graduate training of physicians. As for “certification,” that’s done by the various state licensing boards, and by the American Board of Medical Specialties.

The AMA, which I don’t belong to, by the way, is an advocacy group and PAC. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Finally, doctors’ incomes are set for the most part by CMS via Medicare rates and the ICD/CPT/DRG system. You do procedure X, you get paid $Y. If you do a thousand X, you get $1000Y. As the reimbursement has dropped for procedure X, doctors have responded by doing it faster and trying to do more of them. Simple.

So, if documenting at work is kind of a drag, why do people like writing on their blogs, etc?

It’s just a different form of documentation.

Today:

1. Met my old friend Sam in the hospital cafeteria, he was having lunch with a bunch of people from his department, so I joined the group. I had the ’vegetarian voyage’. (A woman in line ahead of me asked about the fake meat used in the dish, and she asked it like this: ”that’s fake meat, right?”)

Naturally, the conversation at our table turned to the proposed changes in medicine. No one was optimistic.

2. Did a bunch of work.

3. At the gym, I watched people at the gym. I mean, I watched them on a little blinking t.v. screen. It was kind of weird using a stairmaster while watching a television character lift weights. It was sort of  like watching pro-gym propaganda or something.