Holiday wrap up...

The day is drawing to a close. Presents have been opened. A large meal has been consumed. Everyone has gone home. The Dr. Who Christmas Special has been watched. It's pretty much over, so I'll sum up.

A meeting with extended family is often an opportunity to ply my trade in public. Some of them sort of know what I do, the type of stuff I teach about, so I often get a couple questions about pop culture stuff. This year, it was about The Fourth Kind. So, my cousin's husband asked me what I thought about it. Did I think that it was real? Well, everyone in the movie has a credit, including the people who are supposed to be in "documentary" footage. Also, I just read Whitley Strieber's Communion. A lot of that movie was lifted wholesale from that book, for instance, the owls that are serving as "masking memories."

"They said that it was based on a true story."

"Well, people do go missing in Nome, Alaska, but they disappear after they've been drinking. There's a similar movie in the works right now, Apollo 18, which will also pretend to be 'found footage'."

Now, the featured event was my first meeting with my sister's boyfriend, who I had not met. I had been warned that he was an arch-conservative and that I should not talk about... anything... with him. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I started my blog, to make sure that I had somewhere to spout off without upsetting my family.

But it was on.

I don't have great interest in the health care bill. But someone mentioned it and he suddenly appeared. And he was ready to go into it. I obliged.

He told me that Obama had told a bunch of elderly people in a speech that they should basically look into hospice, in the sense that the government would rather not pay for long-term end of life care. I asked him to find the speech for me, and handed him an iPad. He couldn't. But he was sure. He remembered seeing it. It was just a short part of the speech.

I vaguely remembered that speech. So, I went to a site that had collected all of Obama's speeches, did a subject search for "hospice" and I found the only occasions where he used the word. It happened about 4 times. Because he said that he said Obama used it in front of old people, I decided that it was probably his townhall in front of AARP. (Not a place I would think anyone would probably ever push death panels.) Guess what? Obama did not announce to a bunch of old people that he was going to kill them.

Also, I pointed out to the guy that the Obama plan was originally floated by the Republicans.

Heehee. I love evidence.

HJ