Mostly Safe For Work

Leighton Meester has a sex tape

This is bad news for her but good news for males across the world.  The dark-haired Gossip Girl actress look good.

Kristof on Canadian Health Care

Because the strongest weapon against better health care is vague anecdotes from distant relatives about bad experiences with the Canadian system, here's a counterexample:

Perhaps you’ve seen those television commercials denouncing health care reform as a plot to create a Canadian-style totalitarian nightmare, and you feel a wee bit scared.

Back in the election campaign, some people spread rumors that Barack Obama might be a secret Muslim conspiring to impose Sharia law on us. That seems unlikely now, but what if he’s a covert Canadian plotting to impose ... health care?

Rick Scott, a former hospital company chief executive, leads a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. He was forced to resign as C.E.O. after his company defrauded the government through overbilling and is now spending his time trying to block meaningful health care reform by terrifying us with commercials of “real-life stories of the victims of government-run health care.”

So here’s a far more representative “real-life story.”

Diane Tucker, 59, is an American lawyer who moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 2006. Like everyone else there, she now pays the equivalent of just $49 a month for health care.

Then one day two years ago, Ms. Tucker was working on her office computer when she noticed that she was having trouble typing with her right hand.

“I realized my hand was numb, so I tried to stand up to shake it out,” she remembered. “But I had trouble standing.”

A colleague called 911, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital.

“An emergency room doctor met me at the door, and they took me straight upstairs to the CT scan,” she recalled. A neurologist explained that she had suffered a stroke.

Ms. Tucker spent a week at the hospital. “The doctors were great, although there were also a couple of jerks,” she said. “The nursing staff was wonderful.”

Still, there were two patients to a room, and conditions weren’t as opulent as at some American hospitals. “The food was horrible,” she said.

Then again, the price was right. “They never spoke to me about money,” she said. “Not when I checked in, and not when I left.”

Scaremongers emphasize the waits for specialists in Canada, and there’s some truth to the stories. After the stroke, Ms. Tucker needed to make a routine appointment with a neurologist and an ophthalmologist to see if she should drive again. Initially, those appointments would have meant a two- or three-month wait, although in the end she managed to arrange them more quickly.

Ms. Tucker underwent three months of rehabilitation, including physical therapy several times a week. Again there was no charge, no co-payment.

Then, last year, Ms. Tucker fainted while on a visit to San Francisco, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital. But this was in the United States, so the person meeting her at the emergency room door wasn’t a doctor.

“The first person I saw was a lady with a computer,” she said, “asking me how I intended to pay the bill.” Ms. Tucker did, in fact, have insurance, but she was told she would have to pay herself and seek reimbursement.

Nothing was seriously wrong, and the hospital discharged her after five hours. The bill came to $8,789.29.

The Room

My cob-logger has a love for terrible movies that I don't really share.  In Entertainment Weekly, one of the best magazines out there, a couple months back, they had a write-up of The Room, a 2003 film that's gained cult status as possibly the worst movie ever made.  Movie houses have been doing late-night showings.  The director has gained cult fame.  The trailer:

To me, it just looks bad.  But here's the EW article:

At a midnight screening in a Los Angeles multiplex, the atmosphere hovers somewhere between rambunctious and mildly terrifying. Whenever a framed photograph of a spoon appears on screen, which it frequently does, audience members throw fistfuls of plastic cutlery. They also perform skits, at one point gathering at the bottom right of the screen and shouting, ''Down here, Tommy!'' anticipating the moment when the face of the lead actor, Tommy Wiseau, looks in their direction. And they comment loudly on blurrily shot scenes (''Focus!'') or inadequately introduced characters (''Who the f--- are you?'').

Late-night showings of cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Showand The Big Lebowski are known for their rowdy and strange behavior too. But people who go to see Rocky Horror and Lebowski think those films are good. Tonight's movie, an obscure, five-year-old drama called The Room, holds a different place in the hearts of those present at West Hollywood's Laemmle Sunset 5. ''It's absolutely terrible,'' says Chris Bonk, a talent-agency assistant who has seen the film more than 15 times. ''The script is not the best. The acting is certainly not the best. The music is horrible.''

The Room is a San Francisco-set love triangle involving a banker named Johnny, his friend Mark, and Johnny's fiancée Lisa, who is sleeping with both men. The film does seem to be beset with problems. Various subplots are inadequately resolved or simply disappear altogether, including the throwaway revelation that Lisa's mother is suffering from cancer. The film's many rooftop shots feature an unrealistic San Francisco backdrop, thanks to some less-than-impressive greenscreen work. There are lengthy, unerotic sex scenes, the last of which prompts a section of the audience to depart the auditorium temporarily in mock protest. Finally, in one sequence, a sharp bone seems about to erupt from Lisa's neck for no reason at all.

The film's so-bad-it's-freakin'-awesome vibe has attracted a devout army of aficionados whose membership includes the cream of Hollywood's comedy community. Role Models star Paul Rudd and Arrested Development's David Cross are both fans, as is Jonah Hill, who uses a still from the movie as his MySpace photograph. Heroes star Kristen Bell hosts Room-viewing parties at her house and last year attended the film's monthly Laemmle screening with Rudd, Hill, and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright. ''There is a magic about that film that is indescribable,'' she says.

The Room has even infiltrated the halls of cinematic academia. ''It is one of the most important films of the past decade,'' says Ross Morin, an assistant professor of film studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. ''It exposes the fabricated nature of Hollywood. The Room is the Citizen Kane of bad movies.''

Most Hipster Thing Ever?

I don't know why these people decided to remake the dancing sequence in Breakfast Club to a different song, but I like it and the tune:

If a Tree Falls in a Forest...

Okay, a discussion of this age old question was on the front page of Yahoo right now, and since I've been drinking 40s all night by myself in celebration of the last birthday of my twenties, I thought I'd respond to the "best answer." I fugure that, like most people, all of my best philosophical thinking is done after three quarts of Budweiser.

Summary of 'best answer': The energy vibrations caused by the tree falling never reach the 'organs of hearing,' so the tree makes no sound.

Fact: My wife has been upstairs asleep for hours and I have chosen to pee in the backyard all night, so the 'light vibrations' from the downstairs toilet haven't reached anyone's 'organs of seeing' in quite sometime, but I'd still bet my brand new 42" TV that it's still there. Is this any different? Budweiser tells me no...emphatically.

What a stupid question.

- Dr. T