Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Part II

This is the bureaucrat between you and your doctor *now*

Remember that time your cable company had you on hold for a half hour and routed your call, finally, to someone who was thoroughly unable to assist you with your problem? Let’s back up a step here. If your cable company or ISP is anything like mine you probably had to go through a dozen asinine automated steps where you had to verify your computer was plugged in as well as turn it on and off at the recording’s prompting. Or when that voice helpfully advises you to go to the company website... after you already indicated via the touchtone menu that your Internet is out. Efficiency at its finest. Or how about the time your credit card company did this to you? Or the time your airline bumped you for little to no reason? Or lost your luggage? How about the time your computer manufacturer charged you hundreds of dollars to pay for their expertise of getting you to open up your own computer and see inside? I’m sure you have your own horror stories of dealing with any number of … [Read more...]

Drawn Into Failure

Big Eyed Slug

Quick, how do you draw a political cartoon? If your snarky answer is “very, very carefully” then you’re demonstrably wrong. If your answer is “with an eye towards elucidating complicated subjects in a visual medium” then I will have to laugh most heartily for thou art a silly one. Ultimately, political cartooning is one of the most addicting, unedifying, and destructive media in the press at large. Some webcomic authors, all of whom are young people, are already mocking the so-called art. It’s not a slight against the artistic talents of the men and women who draw them, mind. Some are quite good. The problem lies with the almost self-satirising silliness of the medium they’re forced to work in. One that uses almost comically overdone visual metaphors that fail so much they have to be brazenly labeled in order to be intelligible to the reader. Ever since the peerless British satire programme The Day Today (a sort of forerunner to fake news shows like The Daily … [Read more...]

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Part I

I have a knack for being snarkily dispassionate about politics, taking a leaf from George Carlin's playbook about being a disinterested observer with no investment or stake in political horsetrading. The current debate about healthcare, however, is one time where I have to trip and stumble back into the abyss of giving a shit. It's too personal for me not to. My own personal stake in the healthcare crisis as an uninsured woman is irrelevant. It's the people I know personally who lack insurance despite health problems that are eminently treatable but for want of money that drive my feelings on the matter. I've been told that I'm unusually passionate about this issue. Well, so be it. If I'm going to be vitriolic and passionate about anything it might as well be this. When you know someone who is being slowly murdered to support a wealthy business interest or an ideological point of discussion that tends to get one's dander up just a wee bit. So let's get started. This week … [Read more...]

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