Bergman on You Tube, Aspirin and 1918 Flu, Dern on Alex Jones, Youtube's Bandwidth Bill, Dan Grobstein File

Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theater now has a You Tube channel. In other Firesign news, all four of the boys were on NPR last week, plugging their LA shows in honor of Nick Danger's 40th anniversary (I saw the show in Monterey).

Kevin Sullivan was the first of several people who, knowing I wrote a book on aspirin, pointed out a NY Times article suggesting aspirin may have contributed to the 1918 flu pandemic.

Daniel Dern checks in:

If you want to hear about how bad the right-wing-nut situation has gotten, check out this article from The New Republic about Alex Jones, a nutty conspiracy theorist who has recently been embraced by the Fox News/etc right wing echo chamber

Craig Reynolds notes YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net

Dan Grobstein file

• Rachel Maddow
• The little guy (the town of Hardin MT) gets snookered by a conman and the consultants and bond underwriters and the people paid by the bonds (all apparently in cahoots with the conman) get all the money. The town gets an empty jail and the bonds are in default.
• NEW YORK REGION
| October 13, 2009
New York's Car Registration Stickers Don't Stick
By DANNY HAKIM
Millions of state-issued vehicle registration and inspection stickers are coming unglued from windshields.
• The Cable News Effect

• Health Care Reform Question
  Has anyone offered an amendment requiring employers to, somewhere on every pay stub, list how much the employer and employee contribution to their respective health care plan was for that pay period, the cumulative for the year, and how much that is up from the same time last year, over the past five years, and over the past ten years?

• Airline pilots with second jobs to make ends meet. Raids on meatpackers to catch illegal aliens. A butcher used to be a good solid middle class job.
  
  I can't tell you how many people I talk to who complain about how high taxes are. I tell them taxes aren't too high. Their salary is too low. People don't get raises. Or if they leave a job and get a different job they make less in the new job than in the first.
  
  I see a lot of middle class people skimping on medical care and not getting dental work done that they need. People I would think of as middle class.
  
  What's the world coming to?
• ROOMS: Oh, the Places We Went (and Didn't)
  
  As the Rooms series comes to an end, a look back at some of the places
  visited, and not.
• NEW YORK REGION
| October 17, 2009
The Secret New York Minute: Trains Late by Design
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Every commuter train that leaves New York City deliberately leaves a minute late, to help the harried.