I just noticed that a banner ad from DentalPlans.com is appearing on this site. This is a good thing. As of a few days ago, on the advice of a dental tech., I went there and signed on with a plan called Dentemax. If I’d known about the ads, I’d have clicked through from here and gotten a (tiny) further discount.

All of the plans on the DentalPlan.com site appear to be the (so-called) ‘discount plans’. This seems to mean that they function essentially like insurance would, but do not have nearly the legal hurdles to jump over, so can be profitable with much smaller fees.

Like many insurance plans, there is a hefty up-front fee that the cardholder will have to pay, but there is also a substantial discount. Nobody uses these cards for frivolous purposes, but they easily pay for themselves. A couple of cleanings and a single filling could easily garner enough of a discount to pay for the years coverage.

I paid $104 for an individual plan on Monday. It was effective at 12:01 Tuesday morning and shaved somewhat more than $600 off work (lower partial denture and 3 extractions) that was already scheduled by 10:30 am Tuesday.

No questions.

That, for me, is your basic ‘no-brainer’.

I have friends who pay $72 a month for Delta Dental insurance and they pointed out that their $72 x 12 is roughly equivalent to the $900 that I still had to pay for this work. But they will be paying that $72 x 12 again next year, while I don’t expect to replace the partial denture that soon. If ever. And, if I do, I’ll get the $600 discount all over again.

More than that, they get their insurance through a group plan … something many of us can only look at wistfully, like marzipans through a shop window.

Dentemax (DentalPlans.com) is worth investigating. If you feel like doing me a favor, refresh the screen a few times until you see either a full banner ad for DentalPlans.com come up  below or their text ad. Then click on the ad. If you’re in pain and need the help in the morning, by all means head there without waiting another moment.

I’m not ‘selling clicks’ … my member # is 802674XXX. I ‘drink my own kool-aid.’

This is a personal blog. So, with your permission, I’d like to take a moment to get personal with you.

Click here to read on, my friend.

I suppose by now that you are hoping I will leave off the rants for a while … and in a while I intend to do so.

But not yet.

Click here to read on, my friend.

Everyone else, listen up.

I hate GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their insidious sidekick, chemical farming, with the same passion I reserve for pedophiles, politicians, abortionists and big bankers.

Click here to read on, my friend.

Just this month Forbes called Monsanto heroes.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash. I try not to use stronger words, but they would certainly apply.

I should probably post this link on my long-neglected organic gardening blog and, after I post it here, I might just do that.

But this blog gets somewhat more traffic and I think that this video, about the effects of chemical farming in India is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste that 30 minutes. Start by viewing the film for the first 26 minutes.

Click here to read on, my friend.

As a gardener, I know that my wife and I are held ransom to water. Rain, dew, pipe, irrigation, drip, flood, spray, weep … if the water doesn’t reach our garden somehow – or if there is too much of it or it is timed poorly – our plantings are doomed. If we were counting on that food for our own survival, as much of the world does, things could be bleak indeed.

In many, many places, there is a thick layer of dust and doom spread over the landscape. What water is available is often polluted beyond use, too salty, a vector for horrible diseases or too deep underground to retrieve. Global climate trends have forced people off formerly arable land squarely into the lap of aid agencies. Even if the aid agencies operated in some sort of idealized state – and they do not – living from handout to handout is hardly humankind’s proper state of existence.

Enter, stage left, the incredible synergy of water projects and micro-finance loans.

Click here to read on, my friend.

As of yesterday, I have a membership in the Redford weight & fitness room. I am just getting over a torn muscle in my lower back (still sensitive, but LOADS better, thanks for asking) caused by picking up a tool box that I was able to handle without regret this past summer. In fact, I’ve taken some tools out of it since then. It was lighter a couple weeks ago than it was last summer.

Enough is enough … I’m overweight and under strong.

Click here to read on, my friend.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227063.800-swine-flu-the-predictable-pandemic.html

Have you bought into the (lack of) news in re: swine flu yet? Lots of people have. They’re calling the people who expressed fears about its scope ‘hysterical’.

Now that a Democrat is president, we aren’t hearing about the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq like we were before, either. So what stopped … the dying or the reporting?

Click here to read on, my friend.

EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou has said a possible swine flu global epidemic, or pandemic, would not necessarily cause widespread deaths. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8027043.stm

I can’t help but be stricken by an uncanny feeling that what we are seeing now is what the Spanish Flu pandemic would have looked like if it had been as thoroughly reported in its early days as H1N1-A.

It would appear that the avian flu has made a key mutation, mixing with the swine flu virus and the human flu virus. It has used the pigs as ‘test tubes’ to develop / mutate and is using the human genomes to effect the transmission rates that were previously denied bird flu alone. Now, the ultimate death toll hinges on the outcome of a race between the mutation of the virus and the development of the vaccine.

Right now, H1N1-A is only killing a few of its human hosts. But, it was only a few months ago that it could barely infect us at all. Now that that is settled and out of the way, it needs to make just a few more changes to become reliably lethal.

When I was a smoker, I would follow a coughing spasm with some gallows humor along the line of “time to change brands”.  Eventually I quit smoking altogether. That was roughly 10 years ago.

I don’t see much distinction between second-hand smoke and second-hand television. Smoking trashes my body. I have no doubts about this.

Watching television trashes my mind.

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