Coffee Filters

My wife drinks coffee. I try every couple of years, but I get addicted quickly and start doing nothing but drink coffee. So I drink none. Yesterday she ran out of filters. Someone on the adjoining neighborhood elist wrote that they had half of box of #4 filters to give away.  So I figured, why not? I wrote and she said I could have them. She was happy she didn't have to throw them away. That's Austin for you. So I drove by and got them. She had left them on her porch.

What I didn't ask was whether they were funnel or basket filters. And, as one might expect, since there is no such thing as a free lunch, they were the wrong kind. But Linda will take them to the pottery studio... so they'll be able to live out a long life.

In the meantime, the house will probably have voted on the Health Care bill before I finish the drawing for this posting. I read today an article Milton Friedman wrote a few years ago about a chapter in the novel "The Cancer Ward" where Alexander Solzhenitsyn compares "private medical practice" with "universal, free, public health service" through the words of an elderly physician whose practice predated 1918. Health "care" now has a different meaning when the doctor works for an organization (be it an HMO or an insurance company or Medicare) rather than for the patient. Is this the world we want? As one of my colleagues used to remind us, "careful what you wish for."