When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.
Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:
Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.
Right?
You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.
- US College baseball season has begun.
- Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.
Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.
Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.
- A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
- Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
- Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
- I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?
That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.