Nothing funny about feldspar

I’ve just read an article about the President promoting Health Savings Accounts.

There are a couple of ironic things here — he gave the talk at Wendy’s, by some accounts one of the factors causing the “obesity epidemic” and its related health issues, and a major user of the part-time minimum-wage labor supply (i.e. those unable to afford private health insurance, and ineligible to receive it through work).

Plagioclase and I looked into starting a HSA (then called an Archer Medical Savings Account) when we could no longer afford the insurance offered through our association with the local chamber of commerce. (This was several years ago.) We were paying over $600 a month for the two of us, and would have been eligible to buy high-deductible insurance for $450 a month. The expectation, of course, was that we would put the other $150 in the MSA/HSA, and earn interest “tax-free!” and have some money set aside to pay the $4,000 yearly deductible.

If I had been able to afford that, I would have stayed with the old insurance.

I haven’t been to a doctor since.

And maybe the week

I think cornish pasties should now be called ‘Stuffed Meaty Shoes of Jesus’.

The University of Michigan is offering free blogs to its students, faculty and staff. That’s not so special.

If you can get past the annoying opening paragraph, you get to the real interesting bit — they’re going to archive them at the Bentley Historical Library. That is special. Not satisfied with just a Google cache, they’re going to catalog those self-nominated blogs that are deemed to have “the greatest potential for historical value.”

But who decides what is going to have historical value in the future? The same people who always have: librarians.

Maybe I’ll go to library school…

news.scotsman.com informs us that dogs sound like their owners.

They had people record into an answering machine, then get their dogs talk to it too. I can’t get Albite to do more than tilt his head at the phone, so his Ohio Appalachian accent will have to go unremarked…

Mondays suck.