Our health care system is a joke. Donna’s Broken Wrist is an example of the kind of “service” we get. Why do we tolerate this? I have the same insurance plan as she does, and I just hope I never need to use it.

Random Ask Jeeves Question of the Day: “What is the best thing to eat on Sunday mornings?” I was looking for, I dunno, waffle recipes or something. The answer: “Starving Millions Eat Grass.” Kinda puts the waffle/pancake dilemma in perspective, I guess.

I had a lengthy post written here and then Blogger wasn’t responding so I managed to lose it. I am annoyed. Anyway, the post was about a page about the old SHAZAM! tv show from the ’70s. I used to love the show, but maybe it was just because I thought the actor Michael Gray was cute. SHAZAM! was his last acting job, according to the IMDB; now he apparently runs a florist business in LA.

Oooh! The Sims are coming to the Mac! Like I need another timesuck… but you know I’m going to get this one.

I had a Lite Brite once, but I lost all the pegs. This one is a JavaScript virtual LiteBrite, not quite as cool as the real thing, but a nice moment’s diversion. (It says it only works in Netscape, but it seems to work fine in Mac IE5.)

The other day I was driving down to Southcenter and happened to pass by the Hat & Boots gas station. The place is in a terrible state of decay. Won’t some dotcom millionaire with a taste for kitsch buy and restore the place?

Tasteless, rude, and offensive (so of course I’m linking it here): Rejected Easter Candies.

Ok, maybe the guy does have too much time on his hands. But Quinn’s Schmoo is way cool. I miss Fisher-Price Little People. The things they call “Little People” nowdays are phonies that don’t deserve the name “Little People.”

Rob has been mentioning Bendos in his journal a lot lately, so I finally checked them out. It seems to be an attempt to start a Beanie Baby-like craze, complete with retiring a few Bendos every couple of months. But, dammit, they are really cool. How can you not like a character named Sir Wincealot? And Shark Man is neat, though as a supervillain he falls a little flat. If there is a League of Substitute Villains, he’d fit right in.

No, I haven’t dropped off the planet. I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had much time to read anything interesting online. I’ve been adding new songs to d23Radio, shipping rubber stamp orders, grading papers, and dealing with other personal stuff.

Oh, yeah, we went to a Mariners game on Friday. They won.

I’m going to my first Mariners game of the season tonight. It’s probably going to be cold. Brrrr!

I never had a Commodore 64, but my husband did, so he would probably like this.

After the painful excesses of the 1970s, baseball uniforms actually got relatively sane for a while in the 1990s. But now they threaten to get out of control again. Please, God, don’t let it get any worse!

This interview with Ask Jeeves cracked me up. Perhaps I’ll do my own interview and see what results I get. Jason told me that if you ask Jeeves “are you gay?”, you get an amusing response. And you do.

When I was a kid in the ’70s there were still a few soda fountains around, though they were already long past their heyday. They’ve gotten scarcer and scarcer, and that’s a shame. Every neighborhood needs a good soda fountain. If you agree, sodafountain.com is for you: history, recipes, soda ratings, ice cream information, and lots more. Note that the recipe section has recipes from 100 years ago, and a disclaimer at the beginning states:

“The use of raw eggs can cause salmonella,?
the use of sassafras can cause cancer, and cocaine is no longer an acceptable ingredient in soft drinks.”

I guess they lived dangerously back then.