A return to the gym

I rejoined the Shepherd University Wellness Center (read “gym”) after a six month absence.  They have built a marvelous new facility which I plan to go to at least three days a week to try and get my weight down once again.

I used to go to the old gym primarily because they had a scale which showed weight over 300 pounds (and I am a good 40 or so pounds over that figure… OK, that’s my fatman admission). The new gym has replaced that scale with an electronic one that doesn’t go over 300 … when I stand on it it gives an ERROR message.

I didn’t check out the locker room before I joined, so now I’m paid for the year and I have to find another scale somewhere. I don;t know if the old gym, in another building half a campus away, is still there. I’ll check tomorrow and see if I can weigh in.

There is also a new danger built into the new gym: The Wellness Cafe. Now I have a gym where I can get coffee… and EAT… after working out. This is a big problem for one with minimum control like me. I’ll get through it, though.

Cartoon of the Week

Tim Goheen in the McClatchy Tribune:

Mormons and rightists and conservatives and Republicans… your world is soooo beautiful!

Now a Republican Repudiates Limbaugh and Gingrich

Let’s hear it for John Cornyn!

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com One of the top Republicans in the Senate, John Cornyn, is repudiating recent comments by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich which claimed that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. Cornyn, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NPR’s “All Things Considered”: “I think it’s terrible… This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.” Cornyn dismissed Limbaugh and Gingrich, adding: “Neither one of these men are elected Republican officials. I just don’t think it’s appropriate. I certainly don’t endorse it. I think it’s wrong.” In recent days, Limbaugh and Gingrich have made headlines and stirred up controversy, along with condemnation from the White House, with their comments.

Sam Maloof Dead at 93

Sam Maloof, my favorite furniture designer, has just passed away at age 93. This from the catalog of the Smithsonian exhibition of his work and life:

Maloof, entirely self-taught, is one of only a handful of furniture designer-craftsmen to make his livelihood through working full time with his hands. Although his furniture has a sculptural quality and has been exhibited in major museums, he doesn’t consider himself an artist, but rather a woodworker, and lets it go at that.

Maloof’s distinctive furniture style has developed slowly and steadily over decades. New designs evolve from existing ones. As a result, his furniture has a timeless, classic look, its form directly related to its intended function. Evolution, not revolution, is the hallmark of his style.

As beautiful as it appears, a Maloof rocking chair is remarkably comfortable. Art at the service of utility is the essence of Maloof’s philosophy of design. It is a motto that has sustained a tradition of fine craftsmanship.

No two Maloof pieces were exactly the same… but they will keep him a known designer for generations to come.

What are the Republicans doing?

The slow suicide of the Republican Party, represented by their three most covered spokespeople, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, is breathtaking to behold.

They have tromped on their most bipartisanly popular members, like Colin Powell; they have built their platforms on fear of attack by terrorists, as Gingrich did on Meet The Press; they have stressed their hopes for the current administration to fail, as Limbaugh has done repeatedly. All of these actions have lowered the perception of Republicans among average Americans.

After making sure that fewer people are eligible to join their number, based on their restrictions on moderate beliefs and their outrageous access to the media, they are now focusing on the nomination of Sotomayor as Supreme Court Justice.

Prominent in this brouhaha is the Twitter tweet from Gingrich that popped out yesterday and is making the rounds:

Imagine a judicial nominee said “my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman” new racism is no better than old racism.

Trying to make Judge Sotomayor a racist is having the effect of putting an insurmountable wedge between Hispanic Americans (and most of the American southwest) an their party.

One can only watch all of this with a sense of amazement.

Tech Week – Every Night at the Theatre

We open Importance of Being Earnest on Friday night and I just hope everything is ready. Fortunately I have very few light cues.

Did Anyone Hear Norm Coleman’s Statement on Judge Sotamayor?

So Norm made a statement about Obama’s Supreme Court appointment today, tu wit:

“When debating judges, I was firm that I would use the same standard to evaluate judges under a Democrat President as I would a Republican President. Are they intellectually competent, do they have a record of integrity, and most importantly, are they committed to following the Constitution rather than creating new law and policy. When I am re-elected, I intend to review Judge Sotomayor’s record using this process. Certainly, the nomination of a Hispanic woman to the nation’s highest court is something all American’s should applaud.”

Geez. Doesn’t he know that the State Supreme Court comes back with their decision next week and he is going to have to accept Al Franken as Senator (or take it to the SCOTUS – although Pawlenty should have to approve Franken anyway)?

I wonder what medication this asshole is on.

And you don’t think we need to change the whole Healthcare system?

Then read this article, Referral System Turns Patients Into Commodities
in the NY Times. Here’s an exerpt:

In 2006, Tenet Healthcare Corp., based in Dallas, agreed to pay $21 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit asserting that a hospital it owned in San Diego had paid kickbacks to physicians for referrals. (Tenet did not admit wrongdoing.) That same year, a New Jersey teaching hospital was investigated for giving sham salaries to community doctors in a reported attempt to increase the number of referrals to its cardiac surgery program. Two cardiologists pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.

But there are gray areas in practice. The Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services has investigated office space rentals, for example. Across the country, mobile medical imaging companies have made arrangements with internists to perform, in their offices, cardiac ultrasounds, which the companies send to cardiologists for interpretation. Insurance companies that cover the imaging pay the companies, and the companies pay rent to the internists. By law, these rent payments must reflect fair market value and be unrelated to the volume of patients referred by the internists for imaging. But according to doctors familiar with these agreements, that isn’t always the case.

“Obviously you get more rent if you provide 50 patients than if you provide 5,” an internist on Long Island, who did not want his name used, told me.

When I asked whether it wasn’t just a form of a kickback, he shrugged.

“When the companies take more time, they have to pay more rent,” he said. “You don’t say it is per patient; you say per hour. But patients equal time.”

Though he no longer participates in these contracts, he was open about the payments — about $100 per patient — and he saw nothing wrong with them. “As internists, we don’t bill for procedures, so we have to figure out another way to make money,” he said. “Every little bit helps.”

And I wonder, how many doctors have made money referring me?

Obama to announce Supreme Court Appointment this Morning.

It looks like 10 AM is the time Obama will put out his choice for his first Supreme Court appintment. The odds are that it will we a woman. The chances are good that it will be a Hispanic woman. The chances are also good that the Republicans will try to filibuster the appointment … perhaps with the assistance of some (Southern) Democrats.

According to Huffington Post:

<blockquote><i>The New York Times reported Monday that the president has narrowed his list to four: two federal appeals judges, Sotomayor and Diane P. Wood of Chicago, and two members of his administration, Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.</i></blockquote>

MSNBC is betting on Sotomayor, says the Morning Joe show. That will certainly raise issue with Conservatives.

Stay tuned for more…

_________

QUICK UPDATE: NY Times is now saying it IS Judge Sotomayor.

Memorial Day

A day off from work while we remember those who have died for us in foreign wars, either necessary or politically motivated by idiot politicians.

I did my annual amount of thought about my late uncle Butch (Irving B. Tchakirides) killed in Viet Nam by what is referred to as “friendly fire”… how friendly it is when it leaves a dedicated Marine dead is beyond me…, his name enshrined forever on the Viet Nam Memorial in DC.

I remember photographs I have of my maternal grandfather, Louis Barsale, in uniform during WWI, and my father in his Navy blues during WWII. They, thankfully, survived war, meaning that I am here today.

I have my usual feeling of sadness for all the families who have lost children so George W. Bush could take out Saddam Hussein who embarrassed his Father, George H.W. Bush.

Knowing that this world decides things with war and that we are probably a good five centuries (if we last that long as a species) away from developing a world civilization that can give up the beliefs (so many of them religious) that allow us to settle differences or advance economies by mass murder, I wish everyone a responsible Memorial Day.

I’m at an age my father didn’t get to…

…and, frankly, he deserved it much more than me. This morning at 4:30 when I came downstairs because I couldn’t sleep, I stared at his picture on top of the living room bookshelf… there he is, a slight smile, in his white pharmacist’s jacket (it’s a colorized picture… the original black and white was, I think, a promotional picture for Bristol Pharmacy) reminding me that he worked all his life and pretty much succeeded in the things he did.

At different times he grew and developed hus drugstore business, owned buildings, sent two children to prep school and college, from time to time (when my mother didn’tnag him out of it) he bought and flew his little Stinson airplanes, had houses at different times in Connecticut, on Cape Cod and in Florida… and worked right up to the time Lymphoma brought him to Hartford Hospital where he died.

I’ve outlived him by 10 years now. Something I never thought I’d do, and have no idea where I may be going from here.

I wish my Dad was still around.

Cartoon of the Week

Bennett in the Chattanooga Times-Free Press:

Yeah, that’ll do it.

Tomorrow is my 63d Birthday and the Opening of my Wife’s Art Exhibit in Shepherdstown

Elly and I spent the morning hanging her show, Past And Present, which combines her 35-year-old photo realist paintings with her new digital art, in this case a Seven Deadly Sins series. It’s a great looking show and after tomorrow’s opening it will run during Full Circle Theater’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest (the gallery is outside the theatre in its very large lobby.)

One of Elly's great photo realist pieces from the 1970s.

Tomorrow’s opening is at 5:00 PM and I think there’s going to be a good crowd coming. Hey, FREE FOOD!

This is the new Under The LobsterScope location…

Last night, something happened at Blogger (read “Google”, who owns it) and the blog I’ve written since 2004 disappeared. When I tried to get back in as the owner, I was told that a robot had found a bad file (somewhere around a 2004 entry on artist Tom Wesselman’s obituary) and the URL had been removed. I wasn’t allowed back on and it disappeared from my account list.

9 hours of filing Google forms and trying to get through to a HUMAN BEING proved fruitless. I joined a forum of like problem-havers and discovered that Google had done this with many innocent sites and all of them had the same problem of trying to get back up.

Right now I have sent a form to get a review and have been told it could be three weeks until it happens.

So I am restructuring my blog, unfortunately without my 5 years of archives, at WordPress.com. It will take some time before folks find it, I know. Maybe if they search for Under The LobsterScope it will come up with this address. We’ll see.

If you find this site and know any friends who are used to coming here, please pass on the new address (http://underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com) and maybe we’ll all get to discuss politics and theatre and art and other things that this 63-year-old (as of tomorrow) blogger can think of. As always, all comments are welcome (as long as they stay on topic and are not selling something unrelated to our work here or are not obscene, etc.)

Have a nice day.

- btchakir@mac.com