Amazing News After a Long Time-Out

Good to be back after the wilds of the dentist chair and other unsavory episodes.

A lot has happened in the past weeks, but it was only today that things really got hot.  Here we go on a quick catch-up on the universe.

1. Here in the USA, Obama announced that 8 million have signed up for Obamacare.  Yep, count 'em  -  eight million!  No, don't count them.  Eight million is too many to count.  Plus another ten million are newly signed up in Medicare and CHIPs.  And some large number of under-26s, previously uninsured, can stay on their parents health insurance. Total those numbers and you'll see we're moving toward thirty million newly-insured, which is getting close to the total estimated number of America's uninsured before the Health Care bill was enacted.  Plus 1/3 of the 8 million newly insured are under 35, enough to make the program fiscally possible.  

So the sign-up site sucked but the sign-up succeeded. Now let's hear some drum beating!

2. In Eastern Europe John Kerry says that Ukraine, Russia, NATO and others have agreed to resolve the Ukraine crisis peacefully.  It's always a good day when we learn we will not be having a nuclear war.

3.  Not all news can be good.  On my TV is a hideous note of doom crawling across the screen:  A cocoa crisis is looming in South America and Indonesia that will not only drive up the cost of chocolate but force a change in its flavor.  I have gotten through 77 years of the wild ride of life by hanging on to chocolate.  It was known in our family as "brown medicine".  Why doesn't science do something useful and develop a cocoa plant that grows in the USA?  Like on my patio?

4.  Out in space about 500 light years away a planet has just been discovered that is "virtually a twin to Earth".  Now here's the big question, and it's not about there being life on the twin.  It's about the twin's cocoa crop.  If the crop ain't that great, let's not bother with the place.
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During the entire Crimea/Ukraine crisis a few folks in Ukraine kept on reading old posts of this blog.  Were they trying to escape their own reality?  Looking for guidance to their madness in ours? In any case, I am touched.  If 2012 pieces about Paul Ryan being Eddie Munster have proved useful to the Ukrainians, I'm glad.  And I hope whoever they are that they are safe and hopeful, maybe even laughing. And stay that way.  

And the same wish for all of us.  Even for my dentist.