Category: America

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America Stranger than Fiction

Demonyms and Goober Grabbers

In a Zoom conversation earlier today, one of us asked for the English word for “noun that refers to people who live in a certain place, such as a city, or state, or country.” That word is demonym.

In the process of looking up the word, I stumbled across the map above, which shows the demonyms for a number of midwestern U.S. states. The ones that grabbed my attention were:

  • Stubtoes (people from Montana)
  • Bugeaters (people from Nebraska)
  • Pukes (people from Missouri, and I suspect someone from outside the state came up with that one)
  • and my personal favorite, Goober Grabbers, which sounds like people who should be on some kind of registry and banned from living near schools, but actually refers to people from Arkansas. “Goober” is a slang term for peanut, and a goober grabber is someone who harvests them.
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America The Current Situation

Just in case you thought horse dewormer was going to be as silly as things got…

Tweet from “The Hill”: Brazilian viper venom shows promise as drug to combat COVID.
Tap the image to read the story.
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America

An idea the US might want to adopt

NHS mug, with the NHS logo on its inside and this written on the outside: “No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of a lack of means. — Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS, 1948””
The NHS is the UK’s National Health Service. Tap to view at full size.

…but as long as there’s this prevailing notion of “We don’t want the lazy or the wrong kind of people getting help,” that’s not going to happen.

Categories
America The Current Situation

Sign of the day

Sign on shelf at veterinary supply store: "Ivermectin will only be sold to horse owners. *MUST SHOW PIC OF YOU AND YOUR HORSE*"
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Some background info:

Categories
America The Current Situation

A reminder

Categories
America Florida

I got my “JohnnyCare” Instant Care Kit!

I’m one of the 5,000 lucky Floridians who was able to sign up for JohnnyCare, the fake health care sharing ministry created by John Oliver and the people at Last Week Tonight for this recent episode:

Health care sharing ministries are a uniquely American kind of organization where members — who share common religious or ethical beliefs — contribute to a pool of money that covers their health care costs. It sounds good in theory, but as the video above and this New York Times article show, it’s a little different in practice.

Unsurprisingly, the standards for setting up a health care sharing ministry in Florida aren’t terribly high. This is why John Oliver and Last Week Tonight were able to set use Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, the tax-exempt church that they were able to set up back in 2015, to set up a spin-off church, Our Lady of Perpetual Health, in Florida, which allowed them to create a health care sharing ministry, JohnnyCare, also in Florida.

For a mere US$1.99, I provided another member with the JohnnyCare Instant Care Kit, complete with “not one, not two, but three” band-aids. In return, another member paid the same amount to buy me this one:

It came with this packing slip:Only 5,000 JohnnyCare kits were made. As required by law, since JohnnyCare is a health care sharing ministry registered in Florida, only residents of Florida — of which I am one — were eligible to get one.

Hopefully, I won’t need those band-aids anytime soon. In the meantime, I think I’ll stick with what passes for healthcare here: Neo-feudalist employer-provided health insurance.

Categories
America The Current Situation

With great pandemic comes great responsibility

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