We've only heard one side of this situation. Maybe the wife is irresponsible and heartless and the new girlfriend is the innocent bystander. Or maybe not. But, no matter how bad she is, does she deserve to be thrown into the abyss, which is cancer without health insurance?

Several other people have commented about this already, but I'll add to the chorus. If you become seriously ill, and you don't have health insurance, you are basically without options. I'm amazed at how many people think that it's easy to get health insurance, or that there are "programs" to help people in these situations. There aren't, or they're so overwhelmed, it's nearly impossible to get help. If you're lucky, you will only be bankrupted and your life destroyed. If you're unlucky, you'll die - people without health insurance are something like 10x more likely to die if they have cancer. But if you've never been in this situation, you probably have an unrealistic idea of what health care is like when you're uninsured.

Your boyfriend should make sure that his wife is really sick. If she's not, then he can go ahead with the divorce. But if she is, then I think you have to come to some kind of agreement so she can keep her insurance, at least until she has been treated. Do you want to marry the kind of man who would abandon his ex-wife and possibly sentence her to death, if she can't get medical care without insurance... so you can get married sooner?

For many years, Las Vegas was one of the few places where someone without a lot of education could get a good job with benefits. Now the economy is tanking and everyone is pointing to Vegas and saying "it's unsustainable". But what's the other option? We've shipped most of our "real" jobs overseas - not just factory work, but white collar jobs, scientific research, tech jobs, and on and on. What's left? Maybe we can't sustain an economy on cocktail waitresses and craps dealers, but those jobs were, for a little while, the best thing we had to offer for a lot of people. What's going to replace them?

Literary fiction sales may be down, but mass market sales are actually up - particularly romance, which is up 83%. I'm sure the literary fiction readers are saying "but that's not REAL literature", but people are reading - they're just not reading what the literati say they "ought" to read.

I think the networks have really hurt themselves over the last few years, by putting shows on and then quickly pulling them off if they don't perform immediately. It might make sense when you look at one show individually, but when you look at the long term result, it makes viewers wary of committing to any new show. (And most of the time, the replacement doesn't do any better than the old show.) One of the pleasures of television is watching the same characters week after week, becoming familiar and developing over time. I'm a die hard TV lover - I'd rather watch a good TV show than a movie - but I've gotten to the point that I'm reluctant to watch a new show, because I don't want to get attached and then have it snatched away. I'll wait for the DVD. Multiply me by a few million, and you see why the networks are having problems.

In a lot of ways, I'm an ideal network TV viewer. I'm not hip, I'm not edgy, and I find a lot of cable TV shows too harsh, too violent, too vulgar for my tastes. But at least on cable, you usually know that a show will at least get a full season airing before a decision is made to kill it.

I really enjoyed Life this season, and I'm crossing my fingers that NBC is in such trouble that they will keep a show with moderate ratings, even if it's not a blockbuster. At least it got a full season and a half. But will I commit to any of the new shows coming out in the next few weeks? Am I willing to take a chance on Dollhouse, when it might suffer the same fate as Firefly? Not sure yet.