At a White House press conference last [July], President Obama conceded that we may never achieve 100 percent health-insurance coverage without a single-payer system, “because there’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get health care … and then, unfortunately … they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room, and the rest of us have to pay for it.”

How did “getting hit by a bus” come to mean “unexpected tragedy”?. Juliet Lapidos explains.

• $240,000 Zimbabwean dollars
• $100 Rand
• £83 Pounds
• Owners manual for my Tilley
• A South Carolina detailed coastal expeditions map
• Well-worn street maps of San Francisco and Paris with hand-written notes
• A ferry schedule for the Aran Flyer in northwest Scotland
• Used ticket for Saimsa at the Claddagh in Galway

Fun stuff.

I’ve been listening to Joe on Red Sox radio my whole life, and with any luck, he’ll keep covering the games long into my unborn child’s life — similarly to how Johnny Most covered the Celtics until he practically couldn’t talk anymore. We’re still a month away from meeting Baby Healey, but I’m of the opinion you can never start preparing someone too early to become a member of Red Sox Nation.

A quick search for “1979″ turns up nearly 150,000 snapshots from the year I was brought into this world by the best parents any son could ask for. Thanks Mom and Dad. And happy birthday to me.

It’s not surprising because I never really understood Twitter from the beginning. I never learned what “RT” meant, why a “#” was prepended to certain words, and why Direct Messages only showed up in my email. For the 195 Tweets I posted, I can only think of a few instances when I had something to say in less than Twitter’s max 140 character limit. I followed acquaintances on Twitter — people I knew but don’t know — as well as real-life friends. I can’t knock it (I don’t think) because Twitter has millions of users who seem to Tweet all day and all night. But something’s wrong. Twitter’s two founders can’t figure out how they’re going to make money off their invention. Pogue can’t figure it out. And there are rules and snobs. It’s just too much.

In the end, I’m with Pogue: it’s just another time drain.

Dear Mark Healey,

Thank you for using GEICO’s online services and thank you for your feedback.

State insurance regulations sometimes prohibit the online transmission of certain policy documents.  However, we reviewed your policy and found you received this email in error.  We are working to correct the problem and we certainly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I’m not sure who’s to blame: state insurance regulators for being so dumb, or Geico for not standing up against such ridiculous laws.

FedEx has my new MacBook Pro in an infinite loop somewhere in California

Obama with two campaign constants: his BlackBerry and his chief strategist, David Axelrod (via NYTimes.com)

Last week, I wondered what Obama used his Blackberry for. The man has dozens of aides and more than enough to think about. The NY Times printed an article this morning suggesting that Obama, as the 44th president, might have to turn over his Blackberry by law. G.W. Bush had to cease using his AOL.com email account 8 years ago because of those out to embarrass.

I’ve had this hammered home to me lately, that if I want to manifest peace in the world, I have to find peace in my mind.

They say a peaceful mind makes a peaceful man. A peaceful man makes a peaceful family. A peaceful family makes a peaceful village. A peaceful village makes a peaceful country. A peaceful country makes a peaceful world.

Peace. Kindness. Sustainability. It’s all the same to me.

My yearbook photos from '54 through '94.

Make your own at Yearbook Yourself. (via Kottke)

Gerard McDonnell, 37, an Irish engineer climbing with a Dutch team, wrote on his blog when the start date was set: “Let luck and good fortune prevail!!! Fingers crossed.”

But luck did not hold. On the way up the last 2,000 feet, a Serbian climber fell to his death, and a Pakistani porter died trying to recover his body. And on the way back, a chunk of glacier splintered and came crashing down, sweeping at least four climbers on ropes to their deaths and leaving a handful of others trapped in the death zone above 26,000 feet — desperately cold, starved for oxygen and without ropes.

Over the next few hours and days, some of those still left on K2 battled their way to safety, some fell to their deaths and others were simply lost forever in the cold wastes of the mountain.

via The Matador Pulse.

I’m still running WordPress — which is even better than ever now in version 2.6 — and have applied WP Super Cache for public-facing pages, plus Google Gears for local “turbo” mode. Overall, the pages are on this new site are startling fast. The Flickr photos in my footer are cached smartly, too, thanks to FlickrRSS.

The biggest switch of all is the move to a new domain: markhealey.org. I own the .com and the .net variations, but the .org suffix is most perfectly suited to this new site. It was fairly easy setting up .htaccess files to handle the heavy lifting for the many hundred of permanent redirects needed to get from markhealey.net to markhealey.org. One side affect of this switch, is that your RSS reader might show a few dozen “new” posts — sorry ’bout that. There shouldn’t be a single hiccup but be sure to let me know if you experience any issues. 

Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the new digs. The old site now lives at v4.markhealey.net.

Diabetes is treatable with the proper medication, but you cannot beat it nor can you erase the effects it has on your body.

Diabetes is anything but minor. It wreaks havoc on the entire body, affecting everything from hearing and vision to sexual function, mental health and sleep. It is the leading cause of blindness, amputations and kidney failure, and it can triple the risk for heart attack and stroke.

“It is a disease that does have the ability to eat you alive,�? said Dr. John B. Buse, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who is the diabetes association’s president for medicine and science. “It can be just awful — it’s almost unimaginable how bad it can be.�?

More at well.blogs.nytimes.com.

The No Impact Man is not suggesting you drop everything and do them all today, but pick a few and start changing your life. After all, it doesn’t take much to start making the world a better place. Jude and I are actively doing about 90% of the items in Colin’s list below, and it feels great.

No Impact Man’s 42 Ways to Go Trash-Free

1. No soda in cans (which means we’re probably less likely to get cancer from aspartame).
2. No water in plastic bottles (which means we get to keep our endocrines undisrupted).
3. No coffee in disposable cups (which means we don’t suffer from the morning sluggishness that comes from overnight caffeine withdrawal).
4. No throwaway plastic razors and blade cartridges (I’m staging the straightedge razor comeback).
5. Using non-disposable feminine-hygiene products that aren’t bad for women and are good for the planet.
6. No Indian food in throwaway takeout tubs.
7. No Italian food in plastic throwaway tubs.
8. No Chinese food in plastic throwaway tubs.
9. Taking our own reusable containers to takeout joints (except that now we’re eating local so this tip is out for us).
10. Admitting that we sometimes miss Indian, Italian and Chinese takeout.
11. Hopping on the scale and celebrating the loss of
    my 20-pound spare tire since I stopped eating bucketsful of Indian,
    Italian and Chinese takeout.
12. Buying milk in returnable, reusable glass bottles.
13. Shopping for honey and pickled veggies and other goods in jars only from merchants who will take back the jars and reuse them.
14. Returning egg and berry cartons to the vendors at the farmers’ market for reuse.
15. Using neither paper nor plastic bags and bringing our own reusable bags when grocery shopping.
16. Canceling our magazine and newspaper subscriptions and reading online.
17. Putting an end to the junk mail tree killing.
18. Carrying my ultra-cool reusable cup and water bottle (which is a glass jar I diverted from the landfill and got for free).
19. Carrying reusable cloths for everything from blowing my nose to drying my hands to wrapping up a purchased bagel.
20. Wiping my hands on my pants instead of using a paper towel when I forget my cloth.
21. Politely asking restaurant servers to take away
    paper and plastic napkins, placemats, straws, cups and single-serving
    containers.
22. Explaining to servers with a big smile that I am on a make-no-garbage kick.
23. Leaving servers a big tip for dealing with my
    obsessive-compulsive, make-no-garbage nonsense, since they can’t take
    the big smile to the bank.
24. Pretending McDonalds and Burger King and all their paper and plastic wrappers just don’t exist.
25. Buying no candy bars, gum, lollypops or ice cream (not even Ben and Jerry’s peanut butter cup) that is individually packaged.
26. Making my own household cleaners to avoid all the throwaway plastic bottles.
27. Using baking soda from a recyclable container to brush my teeth.
28. Using baking soda for a deodorant to avoid the plastic containers that deodorant typically comes in (cheap and works well).
29. Using baking soda for shampoo to avoid plastic shampoo bottles.
30. Using the plastic bags that other people’s newspapers are delivered in to pick up Frankie the dog’s poop.
31. Keeping a worm bin to compost our food scraps into nourishment that can be returned to the earth instead of toxins that seep from the landfills.
32. Switching to real—meaning cloth—diapers which Isabella, before she was potty-trained, liked much better.
33. Not buying anything disposable.
34. Not buying anything in packaging (and count the
    money we save because that means pretty much buy nothing unless it’s
    second hand).
35. Shopping for food only from the bulk bins and from the local farmer’s market where food is unpackaged and fresh.
36. Forgetting about prepackaged, processed food of any description.
37. Being happy that the result is that we get to eat food instead of chemicals.
38. Giving our second-hand clothes away to Housing Works or other charities.
39. Offering products we no longer need on Freecycle instead of throwing them away.
40. Collecting used paper from other people’s trash and using the other side.
41. Using old clothes for rags around the apartment instead of paper towels.
42. Talking with humor about what we’re doing because
    making a little less trash is a concrete first step everyone can take
    that leads to more and more environmental consciousness.

Instead of printing this list, save it as a bookmark and return often to try something new.

I was anxiously awaiting the release of WordPress 2.5 and after taking less than 10 minutes to upgrade, the collective fraternity of coders and designers at Automattic and Happy Cog didn’t disappoint. After a momentary refresher course of what my plugin installation looked like, I added a few more from Mike D’s list and I’m off and running.

Look for more soon.

It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.

I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species — just for a while — that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long strand of its being. I will never have even an idea of what that’s like.

Thanks, Todd. Happy New Year.

“Sign board as one leaves Zim and arrives into Musina, South Africa…for the Zimbabwean border jumpers, sort of (they don’t use the roads)”

The sign reads (in small print): just remember, your country still needs you… come home at election time and vote for FREE. A sign of desperation for Mr. Mugabe? I should think so.