Health Care for "Poor People"

Woven among the various reasonable arguments against health care reform was the complaint, “Why should I have to pay for health care for people too lazy to get it themselves?”

This, “blame the poor” argument is so cruel and ignorant it nearly takes your breath away. It’s just another example of how a personal bias can sound like the obvious answer - facts be damned.

The health care horror stories I’ve personally encountered in recent years have nothing whatsoever to do with poor or lazy people.

Last year I wrote about my friend, I’ll call her Cindy, who gave up her health care policy when she could no longer afford it. Cindy is a private business owner. She works at least 10 hours a day and often longer, at least 6 days a week. Each year as her health insurer raised rates (though she was healthy and never made claims), she increased her deductible to keep it affordable. Eventually her deductible reached a whopping $10,000. So she didn’t show up in the statistics showing tens of millions in the U.S. without health insurance; that is until she eventually couldn’t afford even that either.

Not long after I wrote about Cindy I got a mass email from a Noblesville health care reform opponent. It was authored by a doctor who described a derogatory stereotype of an African American, inner city “welfare queen,” and then asked, “And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care?”

It would be so simple if that’s what health care reform was all about – a distant, threatening, lazy minority. But it isn’t. The Doctor apparently isn’t aware that the average family living below the poverty line in America has at least one adult working full time.

Another Noblesville couple I know, I’ll call John and Sherry, also work long hours as private business owners. When Sherry needed radical dental surgery they didn’t even consider getting care in the U.S. They have dental insurance, but it came with a annual cap that wouldn’t begin to cover the cost of the multiple surgeries Sherry needed. So John and Sherry made two trips to Costa Rica and three trips to Mexico where Sherry was treated in first class facilities by American-trained doctors for less than a 3rd the cost of care in the U.S. (including the cost of travel). That they felt they couldn’t afford care right here in Indiana is nothing less than depressing. That they found it so inexpensive in a nearby and otherwise backward country is demoralizing.

Yet, in the Let It Out sidebar of the Indianapolis Star, over the past year I’ve read comment after comment moaning, “How can Obama make me buy health care for lazy people?”

That's an oversimplification on steroids?

Cindy and John and Sherry aren’t lazy or poor people and their problems with our health care system have nothing to do with how hard they work. The problem is a marketable product (health care) that doesn’t operate very well in a free enterprise system. That’s what my friend and client, Ben encountered.

Ben is also a private Noblesville business owner who found himself doubting he should purchase a home because of our dysfunctional health care system. A few weeks before closing on a modest Noblesville home he found he needed a heart stint procedure. In the years previous, he’d been paying an ever-increasing rate for health insurance. As a result of the procedure, he feared his insurer would raise his rates even more. The procedure went well and he got good care here in Noblesville, but he now knew he couldn’t shop for a new policy because he had a pre-existing condition. With so much financial uncertainty, should he buy a house?

He decided to go ahead with the purchase the same day President Obama signed the new health care bill into law.

As Ben and I stood outside the house chatting about his dilemma, he told me about a friend of his in a depressing, dead-end job. The friend is bright and hardworking and wants to quit his job and start his own business, but doesn’t because he’s afraid of leaving his family without the insurance his dead-end job provides.

So much economic activity has been strangled by our screwed-up health care system. And most of the problems have nothing to do with “lazy poor people.”

Remember just a few years ago when bankruptcy laws were reformed making it harder to file? TV and radio talking heads and politicians attacked bankruptcy filers as people living beyond their means, racking up debt they knew they could never pay back, “people who think the world owes them the good life.”

But a recent study conducted by Harvard University found that in reality 62% of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills. And here’s the killer - 78% of those people who filed for bankruptcy because of medical bills had health insurance when their illness began.

This doesn’t happen in countries with a national health care system. And these aren’t just numbers, they represent thousands of destroyed lives and devastated families every year.

But still last week I saw someone post on Facebook, “I think the government should just stay out of health care and not take money from me to pay for lazy poor peoples health care.”

Complete and utter ignorance. And with so much blatant evidence to the contrary, it’s willful ignorance.

What Dreams May Come

I’m seated at a table. Someone is behind me, their arm wrapped round my neck holding me tight to the chair. As I struggle, another unseen person grips my left arm forcing it flat against the tabletop. A third person lays the head of a huge snake on my arm. It slithers forward and bites my hand, it’s fangs pierce the soft skin between two fingers. Across the table, my 15 year-old daughter sits crying.

I woke with a start, breathing heavily and my heart pounding. I stared at the ceiling in the darkened bedroom thinking, “Where does this shit come from?” It took a half hour to get back to sleep.

Next morning when I drove my daughter to school, I described the dream to her but left out the part about her being in it. It was just too weird.

I’ve always been baffled by the origins of dreams and never accepted the psychological explanations. Still they’re fascinating.

Years ago the younger of my two sisters described a troubling, reoccurring dream. In it, she can fly, but is trapped in a large house. She’s pursued by crowds of people. She strains to fly out of reach, her flapping arms bumping the ceiling as the fingertips of her pursuers graze her stomach and chest. As the room fills with people reaching for her, she crashes through a set of French doors into another room, and again flutters against the ceiling, just barely out of reach.

I remember my older sister’s ex-husband, a psychologist, listening intently as the dreamed was related, searching his mind for a clinical explanation.

My wife’s dreams are every bit as weird as mine and come in predictable themes. When she tells me, “I had an upsetting dream last night,” I often reply, “ Let me guess, you’re in your hometown back in Michigan and you’re outside a familiar house and someone is either chasing you into the house or watching you menacingly from it.”

When my kids were little I often dreamed that they were in danger and I couldn’t reach them or was too late to help. These often contained a location or circumstance of importance from the days leading up to the dream.

Nineteen years ago as my wife was pregnant with our 2^nd child, I did some roof work on our house. I don’t like heights, but I had to crawl across the highest point of our steep roof to do the work. It took me forever to scoot along the ridge on my butt and do the work that an experienced roofer could have done quickly.

A couple nights after that I dream I’m back up on the roof scooting across the ridge, looking down at the street and neighboring rooftops. I hear the scratch of footsteps behind me. I turn to see our oldest son, two and a half years old at the time, walking toward me playfully along the narrow spine of the roof with a half eaten cookie in his hand. The familiar scuff of sleeper suite foot-pads scratches along the shingles.

He’s going to fall. Of course he’s about to fall! And I’m battling my own fear of heights to get at him before he does.

But neither of us fell. I woke in terror before it could happen, then walked to his room in the dark and peered over the crib to see him sleeping safely in the drug-like sleep of children.

In another puzzling dream, recalled from my college days, I’m a defendant in a courtroom accused of something terrible. I mean really terrible. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something so vile and unforgivable people are sneering at me.

I’m innocent. How can I make them understand? I look to the judge and jury, slowly scanning their faces, only to realize that they’re all girls I dated in high school or college. My heart sinks, thinking, “I’m screwed!”

What could that possibly represent? I’m really a pretty nice guy. Sure I’ve made some foolish and selfish mistakes in life, but c’mon.

After knee surgery this past January one would have thought the soothing, narcotic painkillers would have made for restful sleep. Instead, the drug held me sloppily along the shoreline between sleep and waking. I would fall into a dream – a handful of nails, a hammer and pile of lumber – I’m building something, then suddenly awake staring at the ceiling. Close my eyes again and the waves take me down into another vision – tripping down several stairs – I reflexively jerk awake again, look around, close my eyes and sink into yet another vision.

Greta and I exchanged weird dreams stories over dinner recently. Our daughter, Sally eyed us both suspiciously. “My dreams are always good,” she shrugged.

“What? You’re kidding me?” I asked. “Always happy?”

“Yep,” she smiled. “Always good things.”

You lucky dear. I hope it’s always that way.

Ruth & Jefferson Face the Modern Media

In our modern era, the private lives of public figures are laid bare for all to see. But what would have happened if our modern media existed in the eras of Thomas Jefferson or Babe Ruth? We might have found out that Babe Ruth makes Tiger Woods look like a Promise Keeper and Thomas Jefferson makes John Edwards look like a choirboy.

The basic facts in the following stories are true, while the media outings, public outrage and personal apologies never happened.

Babe Admits to Loving the Babes

People Magazine

NEW YORK, New York - The bizarre life and moral transgressions of basement slugger Babe Ruth (a.k.a. George Herman Ruth) have bubbled to the surface with the death of his wife, Helen Woodford Ruth.

Ruth is a hero to American kids who think of him as the home run king. But that may now be history. Ruth’s lucrative sponsorships are in doubt and his baseball career is on indefinite hold.

Ruth’s secret life unraveled when his wife died in a house fire at the home of Watertown, Massachusetts dentist Edward Kinder. While those close to the couple thought they were divorced, Helen had apparently only separated from Mr. Ruth and was living as the wife of Dr. Kinder. The couple never legally divorced.

In the wake of this tragedy, people started asking more questions about why Helen left the marriage. Friends and family all agree Helen Ruth left the Babe as a result of his repeated extramarital affairs.

In the weeks since Helen’s death, a steady stream of women in cities with major league baseball teams have come forward to admit affairs with Ruth. The Babe apparently had a babe in every town where the Yankees played.

In a tearful address to Yankee fans, Ruth, looking pale and bewildered, admitted to moral failings and apologized to his family and fans.

“I know I have severely disappointed all of you. I have made you question who I am and how I have done the things I did. I am embarrassed that I have put you in this position. For all that I have done, I am so sorry. I have a lot to atone for.”

Ruth admitted to a sex addiction and promised to seek treatment. He asked the scrum of reporters who have stalked his every more and staked out his house around the clock to back off and give his family the required privacy to “heal.”

No sooner did the Babe make that peace offering than his adopted daughter Dorothy Ruth went public, claiming to actually be the biological child of Ruth and one of his extra-marital girlfriends, Juanita Jennings.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Guilt

YouTube video from the television newsmagazine, Inside Edition

[Scene opens with blonde anchorwoman at desk. Over her shoulder a video screen displays a grainy photo of a disheveled Thomas Jefferson, one hand raised to block the camera. Heading above photo reads, “Declaration of Guilt.”]

“Hi. I’m Deborah Norville for Inside Edition.

“The long simmering scandal surrounding founding father and former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson has reached a rolling boil with Jefferson’s admission that he fathered several children with his African American slave, Sally Hemings.

“Inside Edition broke the story last year when our investigative team staked out the slave quarters of Ms. Hemings.”

[Grainy night-vision video shows Jefferson, with shirt untucked and unkempt hair leaving the house of Sally Hemings. A microphone is shoved in Jefferson’s face.]

“Sir, is it true you’re here visiting your lover Sally Hemings and the children you have fathered with her?”

The surprised ex-president puts up a hand to block the camera’s view. “Err, uhmm, I’m just here visiting a sick friend. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

[Norvelle at desk.]

“Just days after we broadcast that video, another of Jefferson’s slaves sold their story to the National Enquirer, revealing that the Jefferson/Hemings affair began when Mrs. Jefferson was still alive and perhaps when Ms. Hemings was still a teenager.

“Jefferson has been secluded for the past year in his Monticello compound, but today finally admitted fathering Heming’s children in a statement released by his attorney.

‘“It was wrong for me ever to deny that these are my children. I have been providing financial support for them and have reached an agreement with their mother to continue providing support in the future. To all those I have disappointed and hurt these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry.’

“Response from 24 hour news network talk shows has been quick and unforgiving.”

[Video jumps to Sean Hannity’s FOX News program]:

HANNITY: “Well let’s be honest, Jefferson’s always been one of those free-thinking (Hannity jabs quotation marks in the air, sneering) “liberals,’ so you can’t be too surprised by this, but what has it done to his legacy as a founding father and author of the Declaration of Independence?”

JAMES DOBSON (leader of the evangelical group, Focus on The Family): “With this Jefferson has revealed himself as a disgrace to America and the family values that made this nation great. Focus on The Family has started a grass-roots movement to get Jefferson’s signature whited-out of the Declaration of Independence.”

[Norvelle at desk.]

“It’s reported that Jefferson and Hemings have taped a tear-filled, confessional episode of the Oprah Winfrey show set to air next week.”

*(Perhaps most amazing of all, historians believe that Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton were half sisters, as Martha’s father fathered Hemings with one of his slaves before giving the family of slaves to Thomas and Martha.)

Noblesville Schools Referendum: A Matter of Responsibility

Noblesville voters are faced with some tough decisions as the May 4^th primary vote approaches. There will be two school funding referendums on the ballot that, if approved would increase property taxes.

Nobody wants to pay higher taxes, but if we want to live in a first class community, we need to vote yes.

The arguments I’m hearing against approving this tax increase oversimplify our traditional moral mindset regarding education and trivialize our responsibilities as citizens.

When Times are Tough

Folks like to say, “When times are tough families have to tighten their belts, so schools should have to tighten their belts, too”

Noblesville Schools have tightened their belt, to the tune of $4.6 million in the past year. The 2010 budget is lower than it was in ‘07 yet student enrollment has increased by 700 pupils. That means overcrowded classrooms and fewer educational programs.

There’s another thing families do when times are tough; they dig deep and take care of their own. In my day job as a Realtor I’ve encountered many families who have stepped in to help a family member struggling in these tough times.

As a community, the schools are our own. And as our schools go, so will go our community.

A Matter of Personal Responsibility

It might seem like a needed dose of tough love to vote down the referendum, but we’ve got to be careful we’re not all “tough” and no “love.” Getting that balance right is a matter of accepting personal responsibility.

Folks like to say, “Those tax dollars are my money.” While that’s of course true, who owns long-term public financial responsibilities – like the responsibilty to fund schools?

We do.

That’s true for any town, but the responsibility to make sure Noblesville’s kids get the best education they can goes deeper for Noblesville voters. One of the reasons our schools need more money is because of a dramatic increase in students. And those students and their families are here because we invited them.

Think you didn’t? Think again.

If over the past 20 years you voted for multiple Noblesville Common Council candidates who won, then the overwhelming odds are that you repeatedly voted for council members who approved huge waves of residential growth.

Consider the approval of the Noble West subdivision on our southwest side. If you voted for the council members who approved Noble West back in 2002 you put people in power that approved a subdivision the size of the town of Sheridan. It required the building of an entirely new elementary school, which we all paid for, and sent a new wave of children into our higher grade levels. Just one lonely councilman, Alan Hinds, voted against it.

People I interviewed within the school system a couple years back told me City officials never once asked them if they could handle the extra students.

That’s just one subdivision and one council. Time and again, election after election, Noblesville voters elected and reelected not just pro-growth candidates, but pro-unlimited growth candidates.

Noblesville voters knowingly and repeatedly participated in a rapid growth policy that brought hundreds of new students each year to our school system. How can we repeatedly vote to be a big-growth town and then vote against paying for the consequences?

Take a look at Zionsville. They could have been a big-growth town. They had builders and developers banging on their door. But their community leaders took action over the past decade to moderate the pace of growth. Though now facing similar budget shortfall issues as Noblesville, their school system’s enrollment isn’t increasing as fast as ours – because they didn’t grow as fast, therefore the measures required to bridge the budget gap are not so severe.

Somebody once told me, “All growth ever did was make Noblesville rich.” That’s not true. Choosing to be a big-growth town also came at a price. One of those bills is due now. The large numbers of new people who came here in the past decade or more are a part of our community. Their children, our children and grandchildren and our neighbor’s children all need a quality education.

My purpose isn’t to blame newcomers, it’s to emphasize that this is our responsibility as a community. We chose the circumstances that created May’s referendums.

Our ever-larger school enrollment, unlike all the things we bought or borrowed when we were riding high, cannot be resold or let go now that things are tough. There’s no chance of reworking or refinancing or walking away like you might from a house you can no longer afford. There’s no bailing out. We have to see this through. It’s our responsibility.

I want to live in the sort of town that’s willing to accept that responsibility, not just enough to get by, but in an A+ manner. Noblesville has always been that kind of town in the past.

So much so in fact, the quality of our schools is one of the big reasons we’ve won so much national attention in recent years as a great place to live. The outcome of the school funding referendums this May will decide whether or not we make anyone’s list of best places to live a year from now.

Next week I’ll take a little deeper look at the referendum and it’s costs, and how the state’s new property tax law leaves us overcharging those least able to afford it.

Viral Emails Follow-up

The very day I posted the previous piece, I got another viral anti-Obama email claiming that he was trying to force our troops to buy their own insurance to cover their wounds and basic health care. The email included two quotes attributed to Obama that were incredibly disrespectful of our soldiers.

The email was sent by a local retired military man to his entire addressbook, which included a large number of other retired military folks.

Problem is, the email was a lie from start to finish.

This is another example of a smear email campaign that takes a grain of truth and builds a new and false reality around it.

If you actually go to the snopes web-site or other fact check web sites, you'll find that there is no evidence that Obama ever uttered the vicious quotes attributed to him in this email. Those quotes instead came from a comic parody written and performed by a conservative comedian.

The non-quotation parts of the email were also false - or more accurately, are blatant lies.

What someone on the president's budget committee actually proposed was that the military bill soldier's existing private health insurers for the health care the military provides to soldiers (saving the Federal Government $540 million a year). It was a dumb proposal that was quickly put in the trash. In reality, no one ever proposed the ridiculously sinister plan outlined in the email.

With our country facing so many challenges, it's heart breaking to think someone takes the time to concoct such a vicious bundle of lies, and then emails them around the country. Scarier yet, is that there are so many people so eager to believe such stuff.

The day ofter I got this email, I got another one claiming that Obama's America is just like Germany as the Nazis were taking over.

I meet so many people who believe these emails and build their political views around them, I'm afraid for our country.

In the Land of Viral Emails

The email describes a 44” snowstorm in northern Michigan with 90 MPH winds that cut power to tens of thousands and stranded hundreds of motorists.

The email snorts that Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Hollywood’s elite, and FEMA didn’t offer assistance and that victims didn’t demanded $2,000 debit cards or FEMA trailers. It brags, “We did not wait for some affirmative action government,” or “ a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.”

Though I got the email last week it’s nearly word for word identical to an email sent in 2005 about a supposed North Dakota blizzard. In other words, it’s a viral email masquerading as truth, manufactured to make a political point.

The comparisons to Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and the racial overtones (ala, we white people take responsibility and don’t whine) are obvious, but did it occur to any who got and resent this email that snow up to your eaves and rushing water up to your eaves are not the same? One is a temporary inconvenience and the other destroys your home, your neighborhood, and the place where you work.

But we live in an era of digital germ warfare when mass viral emails are sent and resent, acting as the gossip mill for smear campaigns.

Remember the, “Obama is a Muslim,” and, “Obama won’t wear a flag lapel pin,” and, “Obama wasn’t born in the U.S,” emails that were easily proven false? I still encounter people who believe all three – who in fact get angry as hell that you don’t believe. Why do they believe? Because they got the emails and they want to believe.

Maybe you got the Dr. Starner Jones email. This one’s real, but disturbingly narrow-minded.

Dr. Jones complains about a Medicaid patient with a new gold tooth, expensive tennis shoes and an R&B ringtone on her phone (again, note the racial overtones). He writes, “She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care?”

Defining health care reform as a giveaway to the lazy is an immoral oversimplification. Some facts:

1) The majority of families living below the poverty line have an adult working full time.

2) Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills and over two thirds of those happen to middleclass people with health insurance.

3) Health insurance premiums paid to America’s largest insurers by middle class families have increased 87% since 2002.

4) During the same period those top 10 insurance companies’ profits rose 428%.

And Dr. Jones suggests health care reform is about buying insurance for lazy welfare queens?

Where are the angry emails about those bankruptcies, insurance premiums and insurance company profits? Kinda makes you wonder who actually authors and distributes these emails.

Another viral email is titled, “An Actual Commercial From the 50s.” In it, black & white footage shows people listening to a recording of a Ronald Reagan speech. You hear Reagan warn against the evils of socialized medicine and it’s slippery slope towards communism.

If you watch that footage and truly believe it’s an actual commercial from the ‘50s, I’ve got some magic beans to trade for your cow.

While the audio is a real Reagan recording, it’s heavily edited and from the early ‘60s. Reagan was talking about Medicare, but the email never mentions this. In the full speech he claimed that if Medicare passed, people in the future (the 1970s, '80s, & '90s presumably) would look back wistfully at what life was like in America back when people were free, before Medicare took our freedoms away.

As it turns out, Reagan was entirely wrong. Medicare did nothing he said it would do.

Our doctors are not socialized. The government has not seized our hospitals and clinics nor nationalized the drug companies. America is not a communist country and is in no danger of becoming one. And there's nothing about current health care reform that would do that either.

Of course, health care reform is what the email is really trying to effect.

Medicare is a remarkably popular and effective government program. If it's so bad, will the elderly who oppose health care reform renounce their single-payer, socialized, government Medicare and pay out of pocket - the free enterprise way?

No.

The Reagan address was not a wise and dire warning from the past, it was a prediction that history has proven wrong. Still, the viral email’s impression is made and it’s transmitted from person to person like germs on a doorknob.

I haven’t even mentioned the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant emails I’ve gotten from Conservatives lately and I don’t have space for the ridiculous emails that compare America today with Austria and Germany just before the Nazis took over.

I’ve come to believe that few of these emails originate with regular Joe’s concerned for their country. Instead I’d be willing to bet most are authored by lobbying firms, paid political strategists, and corporate public relations departments. Send them to a couple hundred of the faithful, then wait and watch while the germ spreads across the country, sent and resent by people ready and willing to believe anything that reinforces their fears or confirms their prejudices.

It’s interesting that I don’t get these kinds of emails from liberals attacking conservative beliefs. And I’m a liberal with plenty of liberal friends. Oh, I got a couple humorous email jabs at Bush during his 8 years, but they were obvious jokes. I get at least two of these half true conservative-leaning emails a week.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, these viral emails are here to stay. Why? A study conducted recently by Elmhurst College in Illinois found that they’re very effective in shaping people’s beliefs.

Contrarian's Favorites for 2009

You’ll note I didn’t title this the “Best of ’09.” There’s no such thing as the best. There’s only what you like and don’t like. Here’s the music, movies and television I’ve enjoyed most this year.

MUSIC

Favorite Song: Mirrorball, by Elbow, from the album, The Seldom Seen Kid

I heard this song early in ’09 on Internet radio and was immediately captivated. What’s it sound like? Think Peter Gabriel. Think Massive Attack – at their most melodic.

An opening loop of repetitive keyboards and guitars gently rise and fall like sirens in the distance before lead singer Guy Garvey’s chalky voice breaths, “I plant the kind of kiss, that wouldn’t wake a baby.”

Mirrorball is as lush and beautiful a love song as you’re likely to hear these days. Set in a cityscape, the poetic lyrics describe how everything ugly is seen anew after falling in love:

We made the moon our mirrorball,

The streets an empty stage,

The city sirens violins,

Everything has changed.

The album version is the best by far, but on YouTube you can watch Elbow perform Mirrorball in the Abbey Road studios with the BBC orchestra. If you like Mirrorball, also try the track, Weather to Fly.

Favorite Album: Hold Time, by M. Ward

M. (Matt) Ward is one of those folky/rocky/country artists that there seem to be a lot of in the alternative music world lately, but none as talented and lovable.

Ward’s guitar work, mostly acoustic, is hook-heavy and highly proficient, backing his trademark echo-affect vocals. Hold Time is packed with diverse gems; the rollicking rockabilly ode to Jesus, “Fisher of Men,” the folky and optimistic, “Shangri-La,” the brilliant folk-rock of “Jailbird,” the joyful stomp and shout of his Buddy Holly remake, “Rave On,” and the haunting little classical guitar etudes Ward sprinkles throughout his albums.

Honorable Mention: Last year there was a growing assortment of young alternative bands who build their sound around harmonies, inspired by the Beach Boys, The Hollies and perhaps even Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but in many cases with up-to-date touch. Some recommended download samples:

-Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear

-He Doesn’t Know Why by Fleet Foxes

-Forever by The Explorer’s Club (you’ll think you found an unreleased Beach Boys track)

-My Girls by Animal Collective

TELEVISION

Not sure why, but other than Lost, I watched no hour-long dramas regularly this year. Can’t get into any of the CSIs. Tried HBO’s Big Love, but that failed, too. Loved the first few episodes of HBO’s True Blood, but the whole vampire thing just got too silly. Even tried a few episodes of Mad Men, and while the costuming, staging and acting are as wonderful as the critics say, the show is so cold and cynical I couldn’t take it.

All my favorite shows this year were half-hour comedies.

1^st- Curb Your Enthusiasm: This HBO show follows Larry David, the real life co-creator of Seinfeld in his fictional daily life. This year Larry resolved to stage a Seinfield reunion show as a ploy to get his ex-wife back. He convinces the original cast members to appear as themselves working on the reunion show. It is rude, funny, and priceless. Seeing the old Seinfeld sets recreated and hearing the old gang act out what would actually make a pretty damn good Seinfeld show made for my favorite show this year.

2^nd -The Office: This show continues to be inventive and clever, parodying with painful accuracy the American office worker. (my kids tell me that if you don’t recognize yourself as one of the characters, you’re Michael)

3^rd- Bored to Death: Jason Schwartzman (who you’ll recognize from The Darjeeling Limited) stars as a struggling New York writer who moonlights as a private detective. Also stars Zach Galifianakis (the bearded nerd in The Hangover) with hilarious performances by Ted Danson. Well written, well acted, and a loads of goofy fun.

Runner Up –Glee: You’ve probably read and heard enough about this show. Good, original television.

MOVIES

My two favorite films this year are both animated and both brilliant.

Up: It’s not often a film is so universal in it’s appeal that it can entertain a 5 year old, a teenager, a 45 year old, or an elderly viewer all at the same time.

If you’re like me, animated clips of an elderly man with balloons tied to his house looks like a promo for a PBS children’s show, put that our of your mind and just watch it. It will touch your heart and put a very big smile on your face.

Avatar: I had my guard up against this one as well. But halfway through the 3-D version I was reaching out for the insects fluttering in front of my face and wishing I could fly on dragons. It reminded me how Star Wars made me feel when I was a teenager in the ‘70s. You leave wondering if perhaps you just saw a glimpse of a revolution in.

And like Star Wars, the plot of Avatar is as trite as an after school special, but it so thoroughly transports you to a new and amazing place, immersing you in compelling reality that can’t possibly exist and is so brilliantly conceived and executed, you’ll forgive the plot shortcomings.