Mile high walk

I just walked the length of United's terminal B at the Denver airport and realized I've been flying through here for 25 years. How did that happen?

There is a food court near gate B39 that appears to have most of the original vendors... and I've eaten there many times. Overall the terminal has aged well. It's just strange to think about the flights I've taken here while in so many different phases of my life...

It's about time

The Obama administration has begun the process of lifting the 22 year old ban on HIV positive travelers entering the U.S.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31910664/ns/health-aids/

Protests continue in Iran

Tens of thousands return to the streets in the largest protests in the last couple of weeks.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31960928/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Why healthcare rationing isn't a bad thing

A great article from the New York Times talks about why healthcare rationing makes sense. While I'm including the following excerpt, the article covers a much wider range of issues. Highly recommended.

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.

Read it here.

Song for a sunny day

You gotta follow the link. My favorite song from the Buddha Bar series, Slow Train's "Trail of Dawn."

Song for the morning

Natalie Merchant's "Life is Sweet"

(Video link)

Ahh....

Just had a refreshing, post-cardio swim at 1:30am. One nice thing about summer in Vegas. :-)

Almost as much fun as sneaking into the municipal pool at this time of night to go skinny-dipping when I was a kid! (Shhh, don't tell anyone.)

Song of the day

Adele singing "Make You Feel My Love":

(Video link)

One of my favorite poems

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond" by E.E. Cummings:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Sorry for the small font, it's the only way I could get the line breaks right in this narrow blog format... You can also find it here.

Mashup of the day

I heard this in Portland and loved it. :-) I'm a big Journey fan, Lady GaGa, well, hit or miss. Here's Jimmy Stewart Jr.'s mashup of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and the Lady's "Just Dance."

(Video link)

A failure to master one's impulses

Before posting about David Brooks' latest column, I should have read this article about the tendency of people to say or do the worst possible thing... and how imagining doing so can increase the likelihood that we will.

:-)

David Brooks: No dignity

From his latest column:

First, there was Mark Sanford’s press conference. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was apparently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.

In each of these events, one sees people who simply have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigate the currents of their own passions....

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity.

I had to look up "equipoise." :-)

What is it with governors these days?

First Blagojevich trying to sell Obama's former Senate seat in Illinois. Then Sanford's diarrhea of the mouth concerning his affair. And now Palin's babble about why she's quitting her term early.

As for Palin, if the Republicans ever do nominate her as their presidential candidate, they now have plenty warning that they ought to pay EXTRA attention to their vice presidential pick. I mean, did no one tell her that being governor was a four year job???