Home | Away

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Quick pix

Three items on another busy summer day.

One, from The New York Times:

Medicare Law Is Seen Leading to Cuts in Drug Benefits for Retirees

WASHINGTON, July 13 - New government estimates suggest that employers will reduce or eliminate prescription drug benefits for 3.8 million retirees when Medicare offers such coverage in 2006.

That represents one-third of all the retirees with employer-sponsored drug coverage, according to documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.

This is an outrage!  I imagine that the CIA is to blame.  They probably screwed this up just the way they gave our President that bad information about Iraq!  I’d like to find out more about that bad information, by the way, but I won’t, and neither will you.

Two, an intriguing publication calling itself The Believer (i.e., not The Baffler or The Riddler) has a long, thoughtful piece on the Modern Language Association convention last December in San Diego (which I didn’t attend).  Those of you familiar with the genre know how bizarre it is that a piece on the MLA can be prefaced by the words “long” and “thoughtful,” but Gideon Lewis-Kraus does a pretty solid job.  With blogger, Bad Subject, and PAC-10 basketball fan Charlie Bertsch as either Virgil or Beatrice (you make the call!) to Lewis-Kraus’ Dante.

Last but not least, although this humble blog does not ordinarily offer baseball commentary, goddamn, it’s good to see Roger Clemens hung out to dry by those doughty American League sluggers.  Let’s see now, Ichiro doubles, Pudge triples, Ramirez homers, Giambi reaches on an error (ha ha!), Jeter singles, Soriano homers, and that’s all in the very first inning.  You don’t suppose Mike Piazza had something to do with this?  “Manny,” he must have whispered to Ramirez after Clemens had shaken off his sign five or six times, “it’s the slider, and it’s going to hang.” Thanks, Mike!

UPDATE, July 15:  A reader writes in to say that the shelling of the Rocket is all the sweeter because Clemens, a Texas republican, was pitching in Enron Field.  Quite true, and we shouldn’t let the name of Enron be flushed down the memory hole by this “Minute Maid” nonsense!  We should also point out that Clemens came out of retirement to pitch for the Houston Enrons, and that the inning played havoc with Clemens’ En Ron Average!

Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 02:34 AM
(7) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages