Weekly Comments Archive
Archived Issue
Sunday, April 4, 2010
ISSUE #597
#597 April 4, 2010

Will gets pain from Devils and another source

COLUMBUS: All I know is what I read in the newspaper, and I’m not the only one. President Obama got angry with John Deere when he read a newspaper report claiming the new health care bill would cost the company an extra $150,000,000. Caterpillar, AT&T and a bunch of other companies made similar announcements, adding up to Billions.

Well, the President can pretend it was news to him, but these folks had been hollering for months. I suspect the Democrats kept their ears stuffed full of cotton until the bill passed, and now they are shocked at what they are hearing. Take John Deere for example. Suppose half of the $150,000,000 gets passed down to the farmer in higher tractor and machinery prices. Then it gets added on to your food bill. Now who’s hollering? For Cat, it means your new road construction will cost more. AT&T will jack up phone service prices.

There was some good news for new jobs. Of course half of what we added was census takers. This jobs plan is working so well, the President may propose we take the Census every year.

Tiger Woods is ready to play golf again. It has a whole different meaning than it used to when he says he wants to “play a round.”

In basketball, “Hoosiers 2” plays Monday night in Indianapolis as little Butler takes on mighty Duke for the championship. Saturday night Butler knocked off Michigan State, then Duke won by 21 over my favorite, West Virginia. On Easter Eve, Almost Heaven was desecrated by the Devils.

I better quit joking about doctors and veterinarians. In the middle of this week I was struck by a pain, in my middle. This led to my first professional visit to an ER in more than 40 years. The doc who checked me out said, “It’s probably diverticulitis, but we’ll run you through a CAT scan to be sure.” For anybody who has not had this experience, it is somewhat like taking you car to the shop, and the first thing they do is connect it to a computer to pinpoint the problem. Well, the CAT scan took only 5 minutes, and the woman running it told me that machine scans 150 to 200 people every 24 hours. Mighty efficient. After looking over the internal images, the doctor came back in and said, “It’s a kidney infection, not diverticulitis.”

See, he was only off a couple of inches, but with help from that machine he pinpointed the problem and saved me from a few days of medical experimentation. These folks who complain about the increased cost of health care, and want to go back to the way it was 40 years ago, well, the CAT scan had not been invented yet. Neither had the MRI and a thousand drugs and other medical advancements. Before sacrificing any of those, I would rather give up the computer analyzer for my Ford.

Historic quotes from Will Rogers:

(While watching his first golf tournament, in Los Angeles) “These fellows was doing just what I had seen those others do on a Long Island golf course, just walking around monkeying. Here, I had seen golf all the time and didn’t know it. It is the only game in the world where practicing it and playing it is the same thing. Seeing a man walking around a golf course hitting a ball is like somebody handling a ukelele. You can’t tell whether they are playing it or just monkeying around… The main thing that struck me about the game was the amount of skill they had developed in getting near the hole, and how little they displayed getting into it.” WA #163, Jan. 24, 1926

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