Pens and I have a very uneasy relationship. Most people don't realize that doctors, especially those who don't do surgery, write for a living. In the hospital, almost everything I do with a patient involves writing. I write daily notes, I write orders, I sign papers, I fill out forms, I complete death certificates. I write more than I do any other single thing, except talk to patients and possibly talk on the telephone. Since I spend so much time writing, my pen is important to me.

You don't spend 3-4 hours a day using an instrument without developing some very specific preferences. Because I am left handed, I prefer fast-drying ink, the smudge-proof kind. My pens also need to flow very easily, so I can make bold and legible lines in patients' records without wearing my wrist out with bearing down. I am restricted to black or blue-black ink, since most hospitals require it for legal purposes. Sometimes my records will be faxed and photocopied, and occasionally the copies will be copied and the faxes faxed, so clarity is an important matter.

For a long time I preferred retractable pens, but I found that too often I would absentmindedly replace the pens in my breast pocket without retracting them. I have a row of lab coats in my bedroom closet with little black dots on the bottom of the front pocket that prove I am indeed absentminded. To address this problem, I switched to capped pens. My initial resistance to capped pens was that my pens come in and out of my pocket thirty times or more over the course of a day, and capping and recapping a pen would be too difficult. The flip side is that I have to think about the cap every time I replace the pen in the pocket, which takes me out of my absentminded state and forces me to mind the pens. This is the classic psychological trick of making something slightly harder so it commands the attention necessary to get the job done properly. A little like putting the alarm clock across the room so you have to get out of bed to turn it off.

The cap gambit worked. For a long time, I was replacing the cap each time the pen went into the pocket. Until last month, when I forgot.

That put me back to square one. Retractable pens didn't work. Capped pens didn't work. That left the dreaded pocket protector.

Pocket protectors, as it turns out, are almost impossible to find. In fact, the only place I was able to find them was on-line at Amazon. Unfortunately, pocket protectors have such a strong association with computer geeks and clueless science majors that even computer geeks and science majors don't want them any longer. But they work. They are a simple, though inelegant solution to my problem of staining shirts and lab coats with ink. I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of purchasing them, but in the last accident I lost a $40 lab coat and an $80 shirt. That is a ridiculous cost for the benefit of using my favorite $2 pen. Hopefully they won't look too bad. I have the option, since the lab coats have a side pocket, of stashing the pocket protector on the side and keeping the pens there instead of in my breast pocket where the pocket protector will be seen.

Incidentally, when you put a pocket protector in your cart on the Amazon website, do you know what Amazon suggests you also consider buying, based on what other people bought with their pocket protectors? A pair of Buddy Holly style eyeglass frames, a hat with a propeller on top, a "Nerd Herd" novelty ID tag, rainbow suspenders, and clip on bow ties.

Somebody needs to tell Amazon I already wear bow ties. And frown on the clip-on kind. I have standards, dammit.

Actually, I'm a scientist. And like a scientist, I draw conclusions by collecting the available data and figuring out what it means. Data have nothing to do with politics, no matter what the politoidiots say.

So I guess you are going to tell us you are convinced.

Quite. What struck me about this book was how uncontroversial global warming is. There is no one who studies climate data who thinks the climate is not warming. This isn't even a question. What scientists are debating is how it is happening, and how fast it is going to happen. Kolbert uses a nice mixture of anecdotal evidence and hard statistics to show that the temperature is warming, and shows that it is happening faster than scientists expected it to. She points out the obvious -- that the sea level is rising, the polar ice cap is melting, and observed temperatures are increasing. And she points out the not so obvious -- that species of birds and butterflies are being found in places that were previously too cold for them, frogs mate earlier than they have only a few decades ago, and a hibernating mosquito has adapted its hibernating pattern in a way only explained by temperature change.

One of the strongest reasons to believe in global warming is indirect effects like animal behavior. These effects were not predicted by climate change models, but have been observed anyway. One test of the truth of a theory is that it explains effects that the creators of the theory would never have anticipated. Climate change theory does this in spades.

Climate change can explain why there has been a .1 change in pH in the oceans. There is no competing theory to explain that.

What is the most surprising thing you learned from this book?

Climate change theory is not new. In fact, the first scientist to predict global warming was the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who won a Nobel Prize for seminal discoveries in the behavior of electrolytes. In 1895, he argued that a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures by six degrees. Although Arrhenius left out several complicating factors that make his model simple compared to modern calculations, his prediction is close to what today's scientists predict.

Thus, the argument that global warming is some kind of a plot cooked up in the 60s by a bunch of flower children looking for fame and fortune is historically wrong. Just flat out wrong.

What is the strongest argument Kolbert makes?

Not argument, arguments. What makes this book persuasive is that Kolbert shows that there is evidence for global warming everywhere scientists look. Glacier experts, lepidopterists, evolutionary biologists, oceanographers, and even epidemiologists have found direct and indirect evidence for it. And all this evidence fits together. Anyone who denies global warming has to explain away a who lot of coincidences that are explained by it.

So everyone should read this book?

Yes, unless you don't care that the choices you are making right now could cause billions of people to suffer within the next 100 years.

To complete the boards recertification, I had to sit for an 8-hour examination (fine), and then do 100 hours of learning modules (not so fine). It's one thing to have to sit for a test every 10 years to prove you know what you are doing. But for the Board, taking an exam wasn't enough. I also had to complete 100 credit hours of personal study modules in addition to the exam. And it is those study modules that I want to complain about.

First of all, it's not as if I just sat for the test. Far from it. I studied for months to prepare for that exam. But studying for, taking, and passing a fairly difficult exam wasn't enough for the Ol' Board. They had to lay some lard on that there butter. So they added a whole additional array of requirements for recertification. Just a bunch of stuff I could knock out in my free time. On top of maintaining a legal medical license. And practicing medicine every day. And fulfilling the 20 hours of medical education I have to complete (and document that I have completed) annually to stay licensed in the state of Mississippi.

The truth is, I learned little or nothing from these modules, and my time would have been much better spent studying areas in medicine directly related to my practice, rather than doing a series of learning modules that really didn't apply to the type of medicine that I do.

My cynical self finds it easy to believe that the Board added all this additional material simply so they could charge me more money for board certification. It's easier to justify charging several thousand dollars for a test when you throw in a whole lot of busywork as lagniappe. And busywork is just what I found it to be. The Board tries to emphasize evidence-based medicine, and yet, there isn't a whit of evidence that 100 hours of board learning modules will improve the medical care my patients get. In fact, I can assure you it won't.

It's too many hoops to jump through. I already have to devote a large amount of my energies as a physician to maintaining compliance with the many, many, many federal rules that are now imposed upon the practice of medicine. I have to deal with insurance issues, documentation issues, and hospital demands in my routine practice. In the last few years I have seen regulations explode in every area of medicine, while the amount of time that I have to comply with them all remains fixed.

(And for you Obamahaters, don't blame this on Obamacare. These regulations have been gradually set in place over many years. They have more to do with insurance companies saving money than with the most recent flavor of health care reform.)

The American Board of Internal Medicine is supposedly composed of physicians. You would think that a group of physicians would look for the least time-consuming method to ensure physician competency, especially knowing as they should all the other bureaucratic problems we face in routine medical care.

Understand that I'm not suggesting that no regulation is needed. Only that the burden of regulation should be kept at a level that is proven to benefit patients, and not at the level the Board of Internal Medicine would like it to be in their dream world. No matter what, the number of rules I have to comply with to keep that diploma on my wall should not rest solely on the judgment of people whose job security depends on more and more regulations rather than fewer and fewer.

Not because of the HBO series, which I have never seen. I pay the cable company a king's ransom every month. There's no way I'm paying extra for a movie channel. No, what first pricketh my interest in this medieval fantasy novel was a story in the New Yorker by Laura Miller. She described a runaway bestseller in the fantasy market that had considerable literary merit.

I prefer literary fiction usually. The more hoity-toity, the more I like it. But I'm always on the lookout for the best of the best in other genres when I want a break between Cheever and Borges.

Do you recommend it, overall?

To the average male reader, yes. It's very far from chick lit, but Laura Miller likes the series, so I wouldn't say women won't like it. Just that it's not typical women's fare. This is a hardboiled, gritty, murderous war story. A realistic Lord of the Rings. The story takes place in an alternative universe that -- what are the odds -- resembles medieval England. Some people have called it LOTR for adults, but that is unfair to Tolkien. LOTR is and always has been adult material. It's just that Tolkien has been mined by so many children's authors for ideas that it is hard to approach LOTR without brining the baggage of decades of fantasy books and films with you.Thrones has the advantage of being able to look back over the last 80 years of fantasy writing and avoid the cliches. Cliche-deficient writing is usually going to be superior.

Thrones is a much more realistic LOTR. In Thrones people die, brutally, painfully. If you think Sauron and the Orcs were cruel you ain't seen nothing yet. In Thrones women are raped, children are tortured and murdered. Like the Arthurian legends that underlie most fantasy fiction, Thrones has something of a love triangle. Except one of the sides of the triangle is incestuous.

It's realistic in the sense that it is bloody and cruel, then?

Yes, but it's more than that. In Thrones one character dies from a wound infection. That happens all the time in real wars, but I've never heard of that in fantasy. More than that, there is, at least in this book (it is only the first of seven), very little magic. Much of the sorcery in this book is explained, though not all of it. The wizards seem more like shamans than real wizards. They helplessly watch people die just like everybody else, and apply salves and prescribe medications that the reader implicitly understands are useless. The only drug that seems to work is the "Milk of the Poppy" -- opium. (Sometimes real medicine is like that, too.) In this sense, Thrones is a little like Genesis rewritten by a Deist. Much of the magic is not magic at all.

But there are a few very significant exceptions. The way Martin will deal with these exceptions is the tension that drives readers from this book to its long chain of sequels.

Is there a medical angle to it, since this is a medical blog?

People get infections in this novel. And there's a dwarf that isn't a dwarf in the traditional fantasy way -- that is, a member of a race of short, super-strong people who like to dig for gold. This is a real dwarf, someone who has short stature and abnormal curvature of the spine. Possibly spina bifida, or severe scoliosis, or some other congenital medical problem that would cause dwarfism. That's what I mean when I say there's not a lot of magic in here. The only dwarf in the book is a dwarf because he has a medical problem.

At any rate, I find it fascinating that people in an alternative universe have wound infections. Is this from alternative universe bacteria? Or are we dealing with the usual staph infection? Why have bacteria in an alternative reality? Could it be that the people in the Thrones world evolved from simpler life forms and the bacteria are a remnant of those simpler forms, just as it is in this world?

What is best about it?

Plotting and character. The book is told from the point of view of almost a dozen main characters. To keep all that clear Martin titles each chapter with the name of the character who will be the point of view in that chapter. This is a wise move. If he hadn't made the point of view so painfully clear, this would be a very confusing story.

As it is, the number of points of view creates an intricate plot. And the characters, to meet the complexity of the plot lines, are complex also. I was often surprised at the reactions and interactions the characters had with one another -- this book is far from a simple good vs. evil formulation. There are heroes, and there are villains, but the two sides interact with one another in very complex ways. Characters are punished for being foolish, or haughty, or weak. An alcoholic king suffers mightily for his love of drink, his successor suffers for his brashness. A recurring theme seems to be good people who are punished for not being pragmatic. In Thrones, you suffer for having scruples.

It's hard not to like a book that is so serious about consequences, and looks so deeply into personal weakness.

What is worst about it?

There are no underlying themes. As a highbrow reader I am used to books that comment on the human condition, to use a stilted and overused phrase. Thrones is not like that. It looks at human foibles the way a soap opera does. It shrugs and says, Well, what can you do? The complexity is there to generate interest, not for philosophy. I expect for most readers that is not a problem. It's not really a problem for me, but it isn't what I prefer. I like profound. Sorry.

Anything else you don't like?

This book has a long windup. Like 500 pages long. The prologue starts with what seems like a supernatural event, and then the focus shifts to a medieval swords and knights story. The next supernatural event occurs 500 pages later. It took so long to get back to the theme in the prologue that I started to wonder if Martin had forgotten about it.

There is a parallel story that takes place in a land across the ocean from the main story. Even at the very last page it is not clear how this parallel story will intersect with the main yarn. This puts me off a bit.

On the other hand, it isn't as if the 500 page wait is boring. There are wars, marriages, murders, and intrigue. There's plenty to do and the story moves very quickly. Since even main characters are sometimes killed off, there is a sense of jeopardy not present in stories where death of the hero seems unthinkable.

Short chapters make it easy to digest the complex plot arcs.

Would this book make you read more fantasy novels?

Probably not. One of the things I glean from this book is that fantasy fans like a different book structure than I like. This book is very much like a soap opera. It is composed of many short chapters. The action moves rapidly from one character to another and leaves suspenseful situations up in the air for dozens of pages at a time. The story has a huge, long, slow arc, but there are many smaller arcs that appear and resolve along the way. Kind of like Luke and Laura.

Fantasy folks seem to prefer a story that goes on and on and has dozens of smaller stories within that emerge and resolve along the way. Think of the six-episode Star Wars series, or LOTR, or the infinite incarnations of Star Trek. The attraction is the open-endedness. We literary people prefer a tightly organized story that comes full circle and resolves in a satisfying way. Think of Pulp Fiction or To Kill a Mockingbird. A truly literary work comes to an end, often so hard that there is no real chance of a sequel. Even those with sequels have to re-invent the basis of the story so it will work again. Fantasy novels plan for sequels. If Thrones had ended in a way that had made a sequel difficult, it wouldn't have half so many fans.

It depends on what you like. Fantasy fans prefer 1001 Arabian Nights (which, come to think of it, is the true grandparent of modern fantasy). Stories go on and on, episodically, and could continue forever. Literary people prefer Hamlet, where practically everyone is dead at the end of the final scene. Hamlet II is an impossibility. I don't condemn the fantasy approach, but it isn't my preference.

In other words, you don't plan on reading any more of the series?

I think I will. I bought the first 4 books on sale for 35 bucks. The book was an effortless read. With short chapters, I could read a couple of chapters a day and make good progress. I don't think knocking out a few more will be hard. Nothing much is resolved at the end of the first book, so if I don't soldier on I won't understand very much about what what already happened. It is well-written and entertaining. Just because I am not a fantasy guy doesn't mean I can't like Thrones. I like Star Trek and LOTR without liking their genres.

And anyway, I have lots of time. It took Martin 5 years to write the last book in the series, A Dance of Dragons, and he says he has 2 more books to go. So I am guessing if I get through the next 5 books in 10 years I should be ready to read the last book when it comes out. I'll be standing in a bookstore at midnight behind a bunch of fantasy fans in suits of armor, waiting for the final release. And I will be having fun.

-- US Rep. Eric Cantor, August 29, 2011

Setting: The Cantor family home, near Richmond, VA. Eric Cantor sits in a leather chair in his living room, a Bible in one hand, a copy of the U.S. Constitution in the other. On the table next to him is a brass lamp and and a radio playing the Best of Rush Limbaugh. Enter Cantor's teenage son.

SON: Dad, grandma is having a heart attack! I need the car keys to drive her to the hospital.

CANTOR: Now hold on, son. What's this about needing the car keys? No one needs a car. A car is a privilege. You ask politely for the car keys.

SON: Sorry, Dad. Look, grandma just had a heart attack. She is lying in the den, right over there. I want to take her to the hospital. May I have the car keys?

CANTOR: That's much better. But son, driving is a big responsibility. And you have not driven responsibly in the past.

SON: I know, Dad. I know I got a couple of tickets last summer. But look, grandma's --

CANTOR: I don't want to hear another word about grandma. We all love grandma. We all want to help grandma. But this is about personal responsibility. You haven't been responsible in the past. How can I entrust you with the family vehicle when you have been irresponsible in the past? I expect something in return.

SON: Dad, she's your mother.

CANTOR: No, she's not. She's your mother's mother. My mother died alone in a nursing home in Arizona two years ago.

SON: No, Dad, that was mom's mom. This is your mother. Remember, she came to visit last week? We call her Grandma Cantor.

CANTOR: Hmm, I didn't remember that. Well, I guess that means I might owe her a couple of Mother's Day cards. But that's besides the point. This is about you being irresponsible.

SON: Yes, sir.

CANTOR: That's more like it. Let that be a lesson to you. It's impossible to have a productive conversation with someone until that person first makes a complete admission of guilt. Then you can proceed with discussion. You remember that. Now where were we?

SON: Grandma's dying.

CANTOR: No, that's not where we were. We were talking about how irresponsible you have been in the past. And about what you are going to do about it in the future.

SON: Dad, I think she stopped breathing. If you'd just lean over and turn your head, you can see her from here.

CANTOR: I don't need to do that. I trust you. That's something I do, because I believe in the sanctity of the family. Fathers trust their sons, no matter what they have done. Even though you have behaved poorly with the car in the past, I am prepared to make a deal with you. You can have the keys now, as long as you take the bus to school every day for the next month.

SON: Dad! This has nothing to do with grandma!

CANTOR: Dang it, this has everything to do with grandma. Grandma believes in family values. She believes in personal responsibility. If you want the privilege of driving the car, you must sacrifice. We all must sacrifice. If grandma could speak right now, I know she would be in full agreement with me. I am absolutely, positively certain she would rather die than let you go on without looking at yourself in the mirror and admitting your shortcomings. This is about the future. If we can't trust one another going forward, what kind of life will our grandchildren have? Did you ever think of that?

SON: Ok, Dad, that's fine. Just please give me the keys. She's turning blue.

CANTOR: Remember, just because you're doing something right today doesn't mean you are atoning for all the wrongs you've done in the past. You can't pay past debt with good deeds in the present. That's not how God thinks. That's the problem with people in this world. They think just because they are trying to do good today, we should let them do whatever they want to do even if they haven't paid for the wrongs they committed in the past.

I'm talking to you about values. Values are more important than anything else, even life or death. The health care debate should have taught you that.

By the way son, why didn't you call 911?

SON: Don't you remember? It takes an hour for the ambulance to get here, ever since the last hurricane washed the road out. It's only a dirt road now. They can't rebuild it because of the budget cuts.

CANTOR: Oh, I had forgotten that. I use the helicopter to get to work. Mind you, I pay for that helicopter with speaker's fees. I earned it, with money from the American free market. When you start earning seven figures in speakers fees, you can have a helicopter, too. But not before.

SON: Never mind about the keys. Dad. She's dead.

CANTOR: And where are you going then? You go back in there and clean up the mess. I'll be hanged if I'm going to bail you out twice in one day.

The joke is that the conservatives did what they promised. The one promise they did hold to was not to raise taxes, but the big promise they made, to reduce the debt, they left lying in the road like a dying dog. Only a tiny percentage of the spending cuts they passed will take place this year. Most of them are backloaded after the year 2014. In other words, the game of chicken they played that pushed the economy to the brink changed almost nothing this year, or next year.

Which is funny when you think about it. Conservatives swear up and down that the U.S. economy is failing because the government is in a debt crisis. Not because our schools are terrible. Not because we spend one-eighth of our GDP on health care, by far the highest rate in the world. Not because we have a tax code that favors accumulation of wealth for the rich -- excuse me, the job creators -- and not job creation. Not because we spend more money imprisoning people for drugs than any other developed nation instead of fashioning a meaningful drug policy. Not because we, an immigrant nation, insist on treating illegal immigrants as if they are radioactive, instead of what they are -- us, a few generations removed. No, it's all about the debt. Can't be anything else.

The Republican mantra is that taxes kill jobs and tax cuts create them. The corollary seems to be that debt kills jobs and balanced budgets create them. From my knowledge of economics, the two statements are not equivalent. I borrowed money to build a house and I could have sworn it created jobs. The government borrowed money to build interstate highways and the outcome seems the same. This is not to say all borrowing creates jobs, or that borrowing is preferable to paying out of pocket, but still. It is clear that the debt-budget balance equation is a touch more complicated that we are being told.

Yet, let's take the Republicans at their word. They believe every borrowed dollar devastates the economy just as surely as every drop of blood a person bleeds makes him weaker. Thus, paying down the debt will lead to certain prosperity. So why didn't they author a bill that did that? Why didn't they make massive budget cuts now, since that is what will turn the economy around?

They would say it is because the Democrats wouldn't let them. Which is absolutely true, except to the extent that it is largely false. The GOP was ready to let the U.S. default on its debt obligations because many on the far right thought default was better than borrowing a single dollar. Somebody who thinks that wouldn't sign on to a bill that didn't make any more than symbolic cuts in year one.

The real cuts in the compromise will take so long to take effect that there is plenty of time for both Democrats and Republicans to take them back before they ever take effect. No doubt that will happen. There aren't many hard and fast rules in American politics, but the one that says that, given a choice between a hard decision and an easy one, a politician will chose the easy one, seems as ironclad as any rule can be. Forget the hue and cry. The deal just made was an easy one for both sides. Easy for the Democrats because no cuts come now, and they know they can always play the you'll-kill-grandma card later when it comes time for real budget cuts down the road. Easy for the Republicans because they can claim trillions in cuts on the campaign stump knowing the pain of the cuts can always be pushed further into the future.

So once again, how does a political party that insists that debt spending is disastrous for our economy sign on to a bill that doesn't reduce debt? Maybe if they don't truly believe in their hearts what they are saying in public.

It's not a stretch to believe a politician would lie to the public. I don't also think it is very hard to believe that a politician, in difficult economic times, would hesitate at the thought out laying tens off thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of public workers. It is one thing to believe in theory that deficit spending is bad for the economy. But to tell thousands of your own constituents that you are going to fire them for the good of the country is quite another. It would take someone with supreme confidence that budget cuts will improve the economy, and fast. Next year, after all, is an election year.

The better course is to pretend to cut spending while securing the jobs of your constituents. That way you can claim to have exercised supply side economics while you in truth hedged your bets with continued government spending. And, surprise, that is exactly what happened.

The superficial interpretation of the stock market crash is that investors feel the budget deal will not improve the long term public debt problem. Baloney. The stock market has never cared about public debt before. The debt "crisis" has something like a 10 year time horizon, and Wall Street has trouble looking past next August, much less 10 years down the road. Conservatives love to talk about the debt being balanced on the backs of our children and grandchildren. The very idea that Wall Street investors give a hoot about what our grandchildren will have to pay is hilarious.

No, Wall Street is upset first because there are serious problems in Europe, and second (also secondarily) because the recent debt ceiling debate proves the U.S. government, and especially the party that is in their corner, has no clue whatsoever how it is going to get this country back on its feet. At this stage I think even a leftist plan that involved aggressive government spending to stimulate demand would make the financial markets feel better. Just as long as it is a clear plan that has the goal of growing the private sector. The means don't matter, the important part is that there is a meaningful plan.

This is why it is the Republicans who have failed us. They who insist they have the answer to long term economic growth but are afraid to really put their ideas into action when they have a chance to do so -- they, the Republicans, the cocksure, wouldn't do what they swear up and down is the only way to save America from financial ruin.

How can anyone have confidence in a party that won't do what it professes to be gospel?

And no, I don't think the same can be said about the Democrats. (Obama is a special case. My opinion of him is summarized below.) The Democrats were willing to compromise from the beginning. None of them were against all cuts. They simply wanted cuts offset with revenue increases. Democrats don't profess that tax increases are the definitive answer, or that stimulus spending is the only way out of trouble. That absolutist language is solely Republican. Democrats have always been willing to attack the problem from both sides. The key is, they acknowledge that there are two sides to the problem in the first place.

Somehow, even though the Tea party is only a subsection of a party that only controls one house in Congress, it drove the entire conversation and set all the limits of debate. And despite winning every battle, it accomplished exactly nothing.

With a Congress like that, I'm afraid myself. If this is the best Congress can do, what happens when they have to tackle a real problem? Here in Jackson MS we are on pace to set the record for 100 days in a summer, with most of August to go. Climate change is the true crisis of our age, and no one dares to even speak of it.

As for Obama. There are two schools of thought about him. One says he lacked the courage to stand up to the Tea Party. The other says he is secretly a moderate, maybe even right of center, and that he wanted spending cuts and the extension of the Bush tax cuts all along.

The Obama-as-moderate argument is alluring because it gives him credit for intelligence and for having a plan after all -- just not the plan we thought he had. I can't buy it, however. No matter where Obama stands on the political spectrum, whether he is left of Eugene V. Debs or to the right of Ayn Rand, what the Tea Party did by holding the U.S. credit rating hostage to political negotiations is immoral. Blackmail is immoral no matter where you stand politically. The Republcans did the blackmailing, but the President allowed himself -- and us -- to be blackmailed.

This suggests the President is ethically challenged. My view of Obama is that in allowing debt negotations to get to that point, he was signaling that he doesn't feel strongly enough about the obligations of the U.S. government towards its debt to take a stand. He could have threatened to use the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling. The GOP was breaking the rules by refusing to raise it, so why was it unthinkable that the President would counter their queen by deploying his own queen?

Obama is supposed to be very intelligent. Any good chess player knows you can't win a match if you keep your queen parked in the corner. His refusal, not just now but repeatedly, to use all the powers he has to defend what is right suggests that he does not have a strong sense of right and wrong, at least not in this matter. Or in health care. Or in climate change. Or with torture.

I don't think I can vote for him next year.

In other words, the people who make excuses for not doing something are likely making excuses for not doing many other things. People who are truly busy are busy precisely because they are willing to take on a lot.

The older I get the more convinced I am that success in life comes not to the brightest and the most talented, but to those willing to work hardest. And the key is not simply the expenditure of energy, but the efficient expenditure of energy. That efficiency part is has eluded me my whole life.

At any rate, I have decided to make a new effort. I've found a new blog editor, MarsEdit, which seems to make creating posts a lot easier. And like most Americans, I operate under the assumption that if I have an intractable problem the solution is to buy something. America, after all, is in a country with a massive industry devoted to selling people exercise equipment to be placed, unused, in basements and garages.

One reason I abandoned posting is because I ran out of things to say. Not speaking when you don't have anything to say is a forgotten art, and there is a certain dignity in it. Millions are pouring words by the gallon into the internet, and how much of it, after all, is worth reading? I haven't read every word Shakespeare wrote. If I can't do that, it is not fair for me to expect that anyone would want to read every word I spout off. That's what personal journals are for. Only the best of my personal journal entries should end up here.

That leads to my second reason for reticence: a tendency to perfectionism. A blog could be a raw product. It could be uncensored, stream of thought. Mine isn't. I can't produce anything, not even a note to be tacked on the refrigerator, without proofing. In looking at my old posts, I did make some mistakes, and there are many sentences that I could have phrased differently and better, but even still, none of them passed into cyberspace without several levels of editing. Editing takes time. It makes daily posting far more difficult.

But I don't want to stop writing, even in an age when online posting is migrating to Facebook and rendering the blog, amazingly enough, more and more anachronistic. I wear a bow tie to work every day and am a practicing Roman Catholic, so I have no fears about anachronism.

Consider this a rededication. And if it doesn't work, it's only because I am too busy.

1. My Gibson Challenger Guitar. Gibson doesn’t make the Challenger any more. It was a starter model, certainly not top quality, but it had excellent action and reliable pickups. It was a gift for my 16th birthday, and I learned most of what I know about music today on it. I left it behind in the trunk of my car, a place safe from the wind, but the water overtopped the car and soaked the guitar, ruining It.
2. All the papers I wrote in college. The residue of four years of college English was a formidable stack of essays about almost every aspect of English literature. Not that most of them were anything to brag about, but it was the only record I had of four years of collegiate thinking.
3. A rocking horse. Belonged to my wife, a toy she played on as a child in Africa. It was plain wooden with painted-on eyes and mane, and it had the words “Made in the U.S.S.R.” stamped under the saddle. My wife has no idea where it came from, or how her parents got it.
4. Patches of Godlight: Fr. Tim’s Favorite Quotes. This Jan Karon book is a notebook of quotes by Father Tim, fictional hero of a series of Christian novels. I have never read the series, but the book was given to me by my grandmother shortly before she died. She had marked the passages she said reminded her of me with paper clips and post-it notes. (Most of the quotes she marked were about literature and the reading life.) I had kept the book in my car, but one month before Katrina I brought it into my house. For safe keeping, I thought.
5. Swingset in the back yard. I bought a kit from Home Depot and built the thing out of pressure treated wood myself, with the help of several family members, over one weekend in 2004. My accomplishments in carpentry in this life have been few. I took more pride in that edifice than it probably deserved.
6. A New Orleans Brass Hockey jersey. Believe it or not, New Orleans used to have a hockey team. Sometime around 2002 the team announced it would be changing jersey styles, for legal reasons I will not get into. I loved the old design and disliked the new, so I bought the old-style jersey before they were gone forever. The jersey survived Katrina and I was able to dig it up from under a layer of muck in my bedroom closet, but it fell to pieces when I tried to clean it.
7. My sheet music collection. After 20 years of guitar lessons and many teachers, I had amassed a collection of handwritten sheet music for hundreds of popular songs. My teachers had transposed the music especially for the guitar. Although it is always possible to buy sheet music, the songs here included guitar riffs and special fingerings that you can never find on music store shelves.
8. My medical school notes. When I finished my last lecture in medical school, I took all my lecture notes and handouts and stacked them up. The stack measured 5 feet, 5 inches tall. In that 5 feet were pages of notes, diagrams, and photocopies that I spent the first two years of med school trying to commit to memory. I have since forgotten a good part of it. Sometimes, though, I have to fight a twitch to go back to my notes to help me remember what they tried to teach me way back when.
9. A ukelele. Bought on our first big family trip to Hawaii. The thing was almost impossible to keep in tune, but once there, had a very pleasing sound. I never really learned how to play it, though.
10. An unopened champagne bottle from our wedding. In our refrigerator, which ended up face down in the kitchen. By the time we re-opened our house, the power had been off for over a month. I wouldn’t have dared try to open the fridge, and shudder to think of what was growing in there. We were saving the bottle for our 10th anniversary, which is this year, by the way. Better that we made it to 10 than the bottle, but I wouldn’t mind having the bottle too.
11. Our baby’s crib. Two kids slept in that crib. It was one of those things couples spend more money on than necessary when they are expecting their first child, thinking they will hand it down to their children when they have children of their own. Silly things newlyweds think.
12. Photos from our San Francisco honeymoon. I have backup copies of my digital photos in so many places I could never lose the entire collection. But we went to San Francisco back when digital cameras still cost over $1000, which is another way of saying I didn’t have one. I brought a Minolta film camera with me, and all the photos and negatives are gone.
13. My white coat from medical school. It was hanging in one of the bedrooms of my house, and the pockets were stuffed with the same notes, pocket-sized reference books, and the reflex hammer I had when I took it off after my last day in medical school. I finished before the days of the smart phone, and thus, in one pocket was a first generation Palm Pilot loaded with a searchable drug program on it that bailed me out of many jams on rounds.
14. A photograph of my grandfather. It hung on the wall in the foyer of the house, and was taken when he was in his twenties, probably around 1935. It was the only picture of him I had that explained why everyone in the family old enough to know said I looked like him.

One thing you learn when you lose everything: how little you really need to get by in life. Then you get a new job, acquire more stuff than ever, and start rooting against natural disasters more than ever before.

So yes, I think it's excellent that CSPAN-2 devotes 48 hours each weekend to books. Not lit-lite, but serious writers and serious topics. Not all of it is interesting, but I have always enjoyed stopping by at various times on my weekends off to see what is happening on Book TV. Sometimes I stop for 30 seconds. Other times my pause lasts over an hour.

I'm a fan. A book junkie fan.

But I have to say this: Book TV has two flaws, one minor, one egregious. First the minor one -- why run book programming from 8 am Saturday to 8 am Monday? Weekends start after work on Friday, and I'm ready to hear about books then. Anything after midnight on Sunday is DVR material at best. So why not consider starting book programming Friday night? Who wants to watch Congress at 9 pm on Friday? I prefer to vomit after my drinking, not before.

The second problem is more important. Why is Book TV only about non-fiction books? It seems like a slur on what is otherwise a celebration of literature that CSPAN would banish fiction from Book TV. Think about it this way. If you write a biography about William Faulkner, you can be interviewed on Book TV. If you are William Faulkner, well, tough luck.

Even if CSPAN argues that its mission is politics and society, the exclusion makes no sense. Some of the most influential political books of all time were fiction. Animal Farm, Utopia, 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Gulliver's Travels, Alice In Wonderland, The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Candide -- this only scratches the surface of works of fiction that affected political and social thought more than their non-fiction cohorts.

I'm sure the folks at CSPAN2 have a variety of reasons to explain their decision. None of which hold water. Pretending that fiction writing is not a vital part of our national life is pretending that our impressions of the civil war were formed by the history books and not by Gone With the Wind and Red Badge of Courage, or that Louis L'amour's vision of the West didn't affect our nation's attitude towards the land or national expansion for a generation. Ronald Reagan wore a cowboy had to for a reason, and I'm certain L'amour had something to do with it.

CSPAN, you're doing great with the non-fiction. But don't you think it strange that you can do a three hour interview with the literary critic Harold Bloom, but can't interview the giants of fiction he opines about? I'm sure the giants of fiction would be happy to talk. And I'd be happy to watch.

Here's Nick at an SEC press conference this week, griping about how rules violations at three SEC schools, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, threaten the sterling reputation of the Southeastern Athletic Conference. He could blame himself, or the huge financial pressures on college sports programs that exploit college athletes for millions and pay them nothing. But why do that when you can find a scapegoat, the professional sports agents who make payments to players to induce them to sign on with their agencies:

I don't think it's anything but greed that's creating it right now on behalf of the agents. The agents that do this — and I hate to say this, but how are they any better than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None. How would you feel if they did it to your child?

Pimps. You are calling sports agents pimps. If your hair wasn't so neatly coiffed, sir, I'd swear you ddn't have a mirror in your home.

At the risk of sounding like an incredibly weak Saturday Night Live bit -- Really, Nick Saban? Really? You get paid $4 million a year to coach the Alabama football team. And that doesn't include the tidy profits you get for endoresments, television specials, personal appearances, and no doubt, book deals.

What do your players get? Zero. The nearly 100 players who actually went on the field and earned that national championship get nothing for their efforts except a scholarship to Alabama. As as for that, the way you make them show up for work every day -- yes, I call it work -- is by threatening to take said scholarship away from them if they don't show, regardless of their level of academic achievement. There's priority for you. Football over education.

And judging by past graduation rates at the University of Alabama, that scholarship isn't worth much. In 2009 Alabama graduated 67%, which isn't terrible, but still doesn't impress me when you consider that these kids got 4 years of education for free, something I would have killed for, and still a significant number of them couldn't make it through.

In the four years before 2009, Alabama's graduation record has been shameful: 39%, 44%, 49%, and 55%. This is pathetic for a conference that averages over $50 million in spending on its athletic programs per year. Fifty million dollars a year and the school still fails at what is supposed to be its primary objective, graduation, one third of the time.

We all know what college football players get degrees in. Kinesiology. Sports management. General studies. I'm not trying to knock these degrees -- they are, after all, better than nothing -- but the point is that the majority of college football players who graduate at all are mostly qualified to do nothing but coach football. If those 50% were getting out with degrees in accounting or even philosophy, I wouldn't complain. But a vanishing few college players leave Alabama (or most other big college programs, for that matter) with an education that allows them to live in the non-jock world, which is about 99% of it.

Reportedly Saban is a college grad himself, having received a degree from Kent State. Perhaps at Kent State someone taught him that a pimp is somebody who profits off the selling of others.

In other words, a 4 million dollar a year college coach.