Monthly Archives: February 2011
US v. UK Healthcare – An Anecdotal Comparison
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” ~ Aldous Huxley Living in London is supposed to be monstrously expensive for expats, and the tax burden is supposed to be a large part of that. How could it not be when it had to support such massive government projects as the socialized medicine provided by the National Health Service (NHS)? Imagine my shock when I discovered that instead of a massive increase in tax burden, the taxes for a computer programmer and a schoolteacher remained almost exactly the same percentage of income regardless of which side of the Atlantic we lived on. Given that our taxes in the UK provided our healthcare as well, if I compared our insurance costs in the US along with our taxes there against our taxes in the UK, it was actually cheaper, by quite a bit, for us to live in London than in a small town in South Carolina. I thought this strange, so I poked around a bit and found out some interesting things about the cost… Read more
Dear Zachary & Man on Wire
In 2008, British documentary filmmaker James Marsh won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival with his film Man on Wire, the chronicle of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Also released in 2008 was Dear Zachary: a Letter to a Son about His Father, conceived and created by Kurt Kuenne, as a cinematic scrapbook for the son of his recently murdered friend Andrew Bagby. Dear Zachary premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival at the same time that Man on Wire was at Sundance. Since both of these films debuted in 2008 and both play with the stereotypes and conventions of the documentary genre, and both borrow techniques from dramatic filmmaking, it is worth noting the ways in which they diverge from each other, and the accepted notions of what documentary filmmaking is. Structured as a heist film, Man on Wire is a collection of rare footage of the preparations for the walk, as well as tons of still photos of… Read more
A Little Peace of Mind
I have a secret place where I go to escape from the pressures and concerns of my life and simply be alone with myself for a few days at a time. This place is not easy to get to, the way is steep and the location remote, and honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have visited this place many times over the last two decades, in all seasons, and I have come to know its every nook and cranny, teased out a number of its secrets and spent some of the most pleasant moments of my life within its confines. I first found this spot many years ago, as a teenager looking for a quiet place secluded from even the rare human contact in the Gorge. I was trying to find a place to lick my wounds and contemplate the chaos swirling through my life after my recent emancipation. I turned off the trail at this point, and scrambled through a thicket of mountain laurel down an untracked hill a hundred and fifty feet or so. I came to a small flat area between two enormous Eastern Hemlock trees that… Read more