Here's your exclusive Western New York weather forecast: Great! If you're a duck.

Those of you in the southeast who want wet, or in the southwest who want cool? This is where it's been.

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Highlights of the day, other than frizzy hair from the humidity, include getting new replacement parts for WALL-E, and a new aerator for our kitchen sink, at Ed Young's Hardware. Jesus on a pogo stick, we should forget both private insurers and the public option and just put Ed Youngs in charge of health care. It's quick, personal, expert, friendly and amazingly cheap.

Eleanor already wrote about our follies with Wot We Got, which basically amounts to the world's largest Chinese fire drill when it comes to covering three relatively healthy people. Even getting a quick, personal, expert and friendly (but not cheap) CSR on the phone from Blue Cross, who even gave us her full name and direct extension, wasn't enough to actually fix the problem without us starting a circle jerk of checks between them, us and Eleanor's former employer.

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Interesting new form of censorship I ran into today. An old friend of mine on That Other Thing posted a link to an article saying, in essence, that the Mayo Clinic has come out against the currently proposed version of health care reform. That struck me odd, since the Mayo Clinic approach to health care was just cited in an extensive New Yorker piece last month as evidence of an alternative to the profit-driven broken system we now have.

So I posted a link to it. (I tried to post a summary of it as well, but darn there's that 419-character limit again.) Moments later, I got this message:

Hi Ray -- The link you attached to your comment is coming up as a dangerous link on my system, so I took it down.  I'm not doing that as a way to silence your view as I like to engage discussion, but even though I'm sure the link was fine, our server didn't like it, and that's a sign that other servers might feel the same way.

I am not for a second suggesting that my friend was the source of the censorship, but I do think something's afoot with an article from the New Yorker- about as staid a periodical as you can find- tripping peoples' malware meters.  I wonder if it's a variation on Googlebombing, where users who just don't like something's content report it as a bad website to keep people from reading it. I've run into this locally in the past, with one of the local political sites coming up with a "Get Me Out of Here!" page for my "protection." The only malware in that scenario had to do, I suspect, with the fact that the site was competing with the most notorious and vindictive pay-for-play political website in this entire region (Jenn, and especially her boss, know exactly who I mean).

Anyway, since I can ramble on all I want about it here, this is what I wanted the readers of the Mayo Clinic "press release" to look at. The full piece is here, and the part about Mayo's approach to health care was this:

( Cut for teh rather long, as if the rest of this isn't.... )

You want to drop the public option and just convert all our hospitals, medical practices and the rest of Big Medical to the Mayo model? Fine with me. But I think we'd still do better just letting Ed Youngs handle it.