And now a word from the health-care trenches:

I am reading "God and Empire" by John Dominick Crossan. In it, he gets to talking about the sociological aspects of health, illness, and disease. He quotes a book entitled "The Illness Narratives" by Arthur Kleinman. In it, Kleinman quotes a young internist named Lenore Light, who is from an affluent black family but works in an inner-city ghetto clinic. Here is how she describes an encounter with one patient:

Today I saw an obese hypertensive mother of six. No husband. No family support. No job. Nothing. A world of brutalizing violence and drugs and poverty and teenage pregnancies -- and just plain mind-numbing crises, one after another after another. What can I do? What good is it to recommend a low-salt diet, to admonish her about control of her pressure: She is under such real outer pressure, what does the inner pressure matter? What is killing her is her world, not her body. In fact, her body is a product of her world. She is a hugely overweight hulk who is a survivor of circumstances and lack of resources and cruel messages to consume impossible for her to hear and not feel rage at the limits of her world. Hey, what she needs is not medicine but a social revolution.

Adorable Video: Buttercup the duck receives a prosthetic foot.

And a check from AFLAC.

http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/2484879/

8:26 pm here in Indy and I hear fireworks already.

They seem to start earlier every year.

Attention "Walking Dead" fans:

Marathon on AMC right now. Looks like Season One.

"The Men Who Built America" is on History.

God, what is it about that nasty little Frick that makes my skin crawl and my blood pressure shoot up? He makes today's CEO's, bad as they are, look like boy scouts.

Just saw "The Call." **NO SPOILERS**

When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded stupid. But I rented it from RedBox anyway. It was much better than I thought it would be. And the actor playing the psycho killer looks so much like The Governor in "The Walking Dead," I thought it was him. It wasn't, but if the ever need two guys to play brothers, they're it.

I wonder what actors think while they're playing roles like this, pretending to do things they would never dream of doing in real life.