When I was a kid, a doctor's office was generally the doctor and a nurse that doubled as a receptionist and record keeper. Now you have the doctor, maybe a couple of nurses, a business manager, and at least one and maybe more paper pushers whose sole job is to send paper to the insurance companies.

When I go to my dentist in the Dominican Republic, she keeps patients' records in an index card box on her desk and takes the money and writes out the receipt in longhand herself. This is part of the reason why treatment is so much cheaper.

[She also has a 14-year-old message boy who takes money to the bank and goes to the bus station to pick up dentures and supplies. Her dental nurse also cleans the office and her house!!]

... patients are able to also buy private health insurance if they wish for prices very reasonable compared to US insurance prices, or indeed to pay cash for private treatment at home or overseas.

Personally as a US citizen, I find it cheaper to fly to the Dominican Republic for dental treatment than to buy it here. Also for some medical treatment and drugs, it is cheaper to pay cash there than to pay a co-payment here in the US.

It seems that we are rapidly approaching that part in the story in which the animals peer in through the window of the farm and see, to their horror, that the pigs, who had led the revolution to overthrown their human masters, have now actually turned into men themselves.

Before long it will be revealed that Obama is a Republican, and that in fact he has always been a Repuplican. Claims that Obama was once a Democrat will simply be attributed to leftist propaganda.

But this is her reasoning: she's a nurse and she's constantly surrounded by human suffering. So she watches old movies and musicals and reruns of Friends. And Daily Show.

Yes, it seems likely that people who have to deal with pain and suffering at their work are unlikely to want to watch gore and violence at home. Too much like in-service education videos!

And anyway, isn't watching violent movies kind of juvenile? Would you really want your President, Senator, physician, or airline pilot spending all their spare time watching fictional depictions of people blown to pieces, aircraft crashing etc.?

And isn't it strange that when it comes to releasing photographs of real torture, our government, which is more than happy for us to be sedated with mindless fictional violence, comes over all squeamish about publicly releasing pictures of stuff that our forces have done in our name in real life in case it makes people angry?

I never watch violent movies or TV programs more violent than South Pacific.Even Les Miserables is a bit haunting for me.

Of course, there is a supposed point in witnessing violence in that many movies depict human beings in moments of horrendous stress and danger as a way of inoculating viewers from their own anxieties. In the Christian religion by meditating on the torturous death of The Redeemer who paid for our sins, we are mystically liberated from our own anxiety (at least that is the theory).

The trouble is that there is way too much mass media violence and virtually the whole of the American population has become completely desensitized to violence through years of TV indoctrination, virtually from birth, to the extent that a large proportion of the population sees nothing wrong with torture either in movies or in real life. It's OK to torture BAD guys is the mantra of the day.

Practically you can deal with this in a couple or three ways.

1) Go to some place like Universal studios where you can see how movies are made. After this you will never taken anything you see on screen very seriously again, because you will be able to deconstruct how it is done. Of course you will now find all movies boring, but such is the knowledge of good and evil.

2) Get some exposure to real violence. If you have ever worked in a prison or emergency room or similar, you will soon realize that the "realistic" depiction of violence in the media bears no resemblance at all to real violence.

3) Don't watch this crap. Browse the Internet instead, listen to the radio, have your family members get their fix of torture in another room. Read a book. Join a church (but stay away on Good Friday to avoid scenes of violence.)

This is known as Heathcliff syndrome, in which the woman is drawn to the outsider male character from the archetypal chick-lit classic Wuthering Heights.

Of course the story ends badly.

There is probably some deep psychological reason why some women can only experience sexual arousal with this type of man. Probably something to do with their relationship with their father.

I don't really know how the LW solves the problem, but probably she needs to screw around with some men of different types until babies and domesticity overtake her and she forgets about the dark, brooding guy altogether.

Is this the only paying gig Shirley Jones can get at her age? Has the star of Carousel and Oklahoma! fallen so far that she needs to flash her 75-year-old real nice clambake for money? Did she have ALL her funds with Madoff?

I guess that the average age of Playboy magazine's readership must now be about 75, so maybe this stunt will appeal to the Florida Viagra set and stir a few flagging poles for one last hurrah.