My computer looks like a pack rat’s nest.  I freely admit to having a moderate case of hoarder syndrome. Downloads, websites that I mean to read, links to books that I read for a bit, then bookmark for future perusal, and on and on.

The efficient Blogstuff folder contains my friend Betsy’s Fractured Anecdote and this one.

There’s stuff labeled tech that seems to have disappeared. My research folder has libraries – Russell, Wesleyan, World Cat, plus Google News Archive.

There’s an organization problem between books and shopping. Barnes & Noble and Amazon show up in the shopping folder, but twenty-one books await purchase or borrowing in the Books folder. Among them: The Face of Connecticut, Cutting for Stone, and Marion Cannon Schlesinger.

The shopping folder also includes Ring It On! I would without doubt scratch my face! What was I thinking?

“Food” has one entry: Epicurious.

The myriad news sites include Slate, Marketplace, All Things Considered. The Courant, Patch and the Middletown Eye round out local sources. I am adding the Onion. Along with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it makes the most sense these days. I’m ditching the radio stations I listen to on iTunes but will keep jazzradio. Pandora and Spotify will go, since I never listen to them.

Stay tuned, there’s more.

It’s possible that I began making a difference today, though not in the way I expected. A few weeks ago I saw a call to volunteer for a study by the American Cancer Society. I filled out an online questionnaire.

Today I went to the hospital to do the first data collection. I had to fill out another questionnaire, mostly same questions as the online version. These new contact lenses impair my reading, but there were glasses on the table. I tried a pair and experienced a severe case of vertigo. Tried the second pair, not so bad. One of the volunteers took my questionnaire and put a bracelet on my wrist. It fell off as I removed my sweater. She put stickers on my questionnaire and handed me the rest of the sheet.

Then she measured my waist. No one explained why, but ACS cites a study from 2010 (that was the study 2, except that one used Roman numerals). Larger waist sizes are tied to increased deaths from cancer as well as other diseases. “Larger” means forty-two inches for women and forty-seven for men. “Smaller” is less than thirty for women and thirty-five for men.

Next came the blood draw, or I should say draws as they took four vials, which will be “frozen and stored for future analyses of genetic and biologic markers of disease.”  All those extra stickers went on to the vials. And then I was done, except that my bracelet fell off again, and I threw it in the trash.

The phlebotomist who drew my blood said one hundred twenty-eight people had signed up to volunteer just that day at just that location. She was headed to Weston on Saturday, and the woman next to her had been in Enfield a few days earlier.

It was nice to leave with a little sticker that says “Cancer Prevention Study- 3 Supporter.” I really hope that a great many people volunteer and that the study produces lots of terrific insights to help ACS wipe out this disease. Not knowing what to expect, I had looked up my grandparents’ causes of death. Turns out there was only one.  My maternal grandfather, Peter Clark Lane, died of carcinomatosis. I’m participating for him and for Mother, who died of pancreatic cancer, and Daddy, who died of esophageal cancer. Maybe I can help save other people’s mothers and fathers.

I’m still seething over the seizure of AP phone records, and over Holder’s reaction: He’s saying that it was in the top two or three leaks of his career. But last year, when AP wrote the story about the threatened bomb plot, the administration was saying there was no threat. So which is it? I agree with various folks who say that the feds knew the source of the leaks and went after AP to build evidence for a conviction.

To the Tea Party folks who are outraged over the IRS scrutiny: Welcome to the world that the NAACP and other organizations lived in under Nixon, etc. Tell Congress to write  guidelines to determine what constitutes a proper 501(c)(4) organization.

We are living again in the days of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. The sad part, the perpetrators of this current violation of rights hide under the progressive cloak.

The U.S. Department of Justice seized records of calls made twenty phone lines (including personal and cell phones) belonging to reporters and editors of the Associated Press. The records covered April and May of last year and included offices in New York, Washington, and Hartford. DOJ claimed the records were needed to find the source of a leak about a foiled al-Qaeda bomb plot. The feds have not responded to the AP’s request for an explanation, nor has they indicated what they were seeking.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that AG Eric Holder had to step aside from the investigation. He said the leak was among the top two or three worst he’s ever seen. Before the AP story ran the government said there was no threat to the American public. If there was no threat, where’s the harm in the leak?

AP also asked for the return of the records, which DOJ has so far refused. Now, the feds have to confront heavy media hitters Cox, NPR, the NYTimes, and Politico, led by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. These folks will not let the issue fade until they receive a satisfactory response.

Congress is adding its voice. I’m not generally a fan of Connecticut’s senior senator, but in this case I hope Dick Blumenthal goes for the jugular.

If journalists have to try to do their work with the threat of Big Brother tracking their phone calls, we will all suffer.

The Center for Community Partnerships ended on a thought-provoking note with the presentation of Middletown’s foray into urban renewal. I knew nothing of this era in the city’s history, which began in the early 1950s. I had witnessed the last stages of the plan in action with the elimination of the African American neighborhood in the South End circa 1974.

It turns out that the original renewal was intended to compete with such towns as Hamden, by enticing businesses to the central part of the city.

Earl Lin’s presentation stressed the democratic methods involved in the early stages. Voters approved the first steps by a ratio of nearly two to one. The turnout was spectacular given that people had to travel through a blizzard to vote.

The man behind the plan was a thirty something who happened to be president of Wesleyan University, destined for Princeton and Harvard. He proposed razing a cluster of tenements that occupied several blocks between Main Street and the river and replacing them with commercial and government buildings, including a new city hall, which is now bursting at the seams.  While there is some commercial activity today, much of the area is occupied by parking lots (not free) and the palatial courthouse (a state project), which lurches out at anyone driving by on Route 9.

The unanswered question for me was, what happened to the displaced residents? Lin said they were not poor but rather working- and middle-class even though they lived in squalid conditions. A trip through the city directories of the 1950s and 1960s should provide the answers.

A final observation about the Center’s project: Based on the engagement between the Wesleyan students and the audience, I would recommend expanding the program by approaching high schools in Middletown and the surrounding area. As my headline indicates, the history presented here is dynamic, involving real people, and siginficant events. No dead generals to bore us. I also suggest that Comcast use some of its required community access hours to film these presentations, supplementing the papers that will be available online.

Please forgive any typos. My contact lenses are not playing nice.

My brain was spinning yesterday, so I decided to wait until today in hopes of producing a more coherent account of the Center for Community Partnerships’ final presentation of the year. This one featured students from Professor Ron Schatz’s class on the history of Middletown. They used primary sources, gleaned from venues in Middletown and Hartford, and created an image of a dynamic town/city that had an impact on the history of this country from before its founding up through the middle of the twentieth century. I’ll probably do another entry on the origins of urban renewal in the 1950s. For now, a visit to the more distant past.

The students mostly felt they talked too long. I say most could have added ten or fifteen minutes and the “town and gown” audience would have continued to listen and respond with enthusiasm and great questions.

Adam Marcu, the most dynamic of the speakers, talked about the brownstone quarries in Portland, justified because Portland was once a part of Middletown. He grew up in a brownstone in New York, lived and studied in more of those buildings at Wesleyan. His talk covered the transition from English to Irish to strike-breaking Scandinavians, a demonstration of class and cultural differences. The big surprise was the number of mules and horses that travailed in the quarries along with the men.

I learned two amazing pieces of information:  Zachary Vinci told us that Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, spent time in prison in Middletown during the Revolution for handing out pro-Loyalist propaganda. He proved incorrigible and wound up in solitary in Litchfield, before his father disowned him and he moved to England.

Some sixty years later Middletown became the town with the first public high school in the state and one of the first in the young country. And it was co-ed! In the 1840s! It is still not clear whether it admitted “colored” students. My guess is no, based on the reception Prudence Crandall received for her efforts up the road in Canterbury.

My favorite anecdote came from Professor Schatz, who said that a few years ago a student had not yet found a topic as Halloween approached. She went to a local farm stand and heard an employee in the back yell up to the front, “Hey, Jim you goin’ to the Klan rally tonight?” She told Professor Schatz that she wanted to research the state of the Klan. He replied, “Not on my watch!” But he told her she could focus on the organization in the 1920s when it was active in Durham and surrounding areas.

CCP should consider inviting students from the area public high schools to attend these sessions. This one was a dynamic way to present material and shows why history “matters.”

I’ll be writing on the weekend to make up for today’s omission. Took a glorious trip to O.S. today and put lilacs on the graves of Grammy and Mother. Problem: I started sneezing before I was a mile from the house, and my eyes are still itching almost eight hours later. New contact lenses have not yet settled in, so I’ll be writing about my great trip through Middletown history when I can see.

Another quick hit tonight because I got new contact lenses today. First time since 2008, when I lost one in the craziness of having work done on the house and attending the funeral of Ken Robinson, my boss at the Record-Journal.

Please excuse any typos.

How times have changed. First I noticed that the new lenses were much thicker than the old ones, so at the four-hour mark I’ve got little lead weights sitting behind my eyelids.

Atter wearing them for some time I realized that my distance vision is much improved. The little halos around all the lights have nearly disappeared. Up close, though, the world is fuzzy.  I haven’t figured out the right distance to hold reading material. Having experimented, it almost feels as though I’m not getting enough light through to my eyes. But since I can read perfectly well without lenses, I’ll manage.

And best of all — a true sign of the times — my insurance is covering these expensive little babies! A first!

I’m taking poetic license with the headline as I’m still trying to wrap my head around the unbelievable disparity in hospital charges and Medicare reimbursements. And the even larger disparity among the charges but Medicare knocks them back. My own bills for medical visits, tests, x-rays, etc. of course show that the insurance company negotiates lower rates, but hospital charges bring us into the world of the fantasy fiction, except that these numbers are all too real and all too painful.

Before I reached the reimbursement column, I had a revelation, having always thought teaching hospitals cost more and charged more because of the burden of training all those docs-in-training with the faculty members, extra equipment, library, and so forth. Not so, as smaller hospitals often have much higher fees than, say, Yale-New Haven.

One reason for the outrageous charges may be the number of people it takes to translate the numbers and procedures into English. Here’s just one example, courtesy of the Hartford Courant’s database.

Do we have a laparoscopic cholecystectomy W/O CDE W CC or laparoscopic cholecystectomy W/O CDE W/O CC/MCC? At Middlesex Hospital the “w/o cde” would be charged at more than $53,000, but the average payment would be about $12,000, based on thirteen discharges.  The second procedure is charged at just under $35,000 and paid at $8,000 for the same number of discharges. The much larger Hartford Hospital up the road with twenty-three discharges, charges $43,000 and receives $15,000 for “w/ cc” and $24,500 for “w/o cc/mcc,” receiving $10,500 with twenty-nine discharges. Yale had an average charge of $52,000 and payments of nearly $17,000 for twenty-six discharges “w/cc.” The ‘w/occ/mcc” based on eighteen discharges, came in at $33.000 vs. $12,000.

What’s depressing about the example given in the main story is that a “simple case of pneumonia,” which can cost between $5,000 and $25,000 nationwide, can be prevented with a vaccine. Many of these charges are probably added on because patients are already in the hospital and contract pneumonia because they can’t get up and move around.

I could spend all night sifting through this info, but it would drive me nuts! I can see shopping around for non-emergency joint replacements or gastric bypass, but how often do we get to choose if there’s a burst appendix or (God forbid) an “intracranial hemorrhage or cerebral infarction,” with our without cc? Presumably the heroic EMTs and paramedics will get the patient as fast as possible to the first place capable of stopping the bleeding and restoring function.

The lesson here is don’t get sick!

As regular perusers of this blog know, I love crunks, errors and the stories behind them. I particularly enjoy newspapers goofs. (“Regret the Error”). My favorite to date has been the NYTimes correction that wouldn’t quit following the death of Walter Cronkite. “Boy, Do They Regret the Error!”

The folks at Times may have just lowered the bar, or raised it depending on how one looks at such issues. The headline in Poynter caught my eye. I wondered how often the words “obituary” and “Megadeth” had appeared in the same sentence. Then I wondered how often the band’s name had been misspelled. With dethly frequency, I’ll wager.

The story improved on the headline, as the subject of the obit played guitar for the band Slayer. And the error came to the attention of the folks at the Times via the FB page Louder Than Hell. Since posting the correction on Saturday, the LTH has received more than 1,000 likes. Turns out Louder Than Hell is the name of a book published earlier this year, which debunks the myth that Slayer was neo-Nazi. The guys were merely fascinated with “history and evil.”

Rock on, NYTimes.