Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Two programs could help improve Oklahoma's poor health rankings

With all the noise in Washington this week, anything that happens in state government will seem small and quiet by contrast. The last time Congress was in such a lather, and the outcome of a critical issue was in such doubt, the topic was Obamacare .

Steele, R-Shawnee, and Senate President Brian Bingman, R-Sapulpa , have appointed members to a joint committee that will study how federal health care reform might affect the state. That's a big thing. But our attention was drawn this week to a smaller thing that Steele has championed.

The state Health Department launched two programs it hopes will improve Oklahoma 's abysmal health care rankings. The agency is accepting applications for the Certified Healthy Schools and Certified Healthy Communities initiatives. Schools and municipalities that desire certification must do so by Nov. 1. About a month later, the joint committee is supposed to finish its work on Obamacare.

Certification applications will result in health department scrutiny, leading to a possible designation of a school or city as an excellent example for the rest of the state. Among the criteria are efforts to promote healthy lifestyles and discourage unhealthy ones. This is no small thing if it leads to actual improvement. And, unlike Obamacare, it won't cost taxpayers much.

Steele has a spine that reflects his surname. In his freshman year as speaker, he fended off the usual Democratic rumblings but even more so the attacks from the most conservative Republicans , whose obsession with truly small things created plenty of noise. In praising the Steele small voice, we take note that a series of small ideas can sometimes add up to a grand one.

The certification programs won't make a lot of noise. We hope they at least make a bit of difference. The joint committee will make some noise but it won't necessarily make much of a difference. One topic is how the state's lawsuit challenging Obamacare's constitutionality could affect the law's implementation. That's a chapter-and-verse prescription for noisemaking.

Let us now raise hope that Obamacare won't be as bad as feared. More to the point, let's hope the state health initiatives will bear fruit and that their champions will be remembered. As the Apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus notes, some once-famous men who were honored in their generation now have no memorial. But their righteousness has not been forgotten.

That's no small thing.

Rough Fractals: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - Todd Hanson (plus ...

A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity." Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, and snow flakes. After attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Todd Hanson joined the Onion in its second or third year (1990) and has been writing for them for 20 years. He also worked for Comedy Central and the Jon Stewart Daily Show. Todd suffers from major depression and two years ago made a failed serious suicide attempt at a hotel in Brooklyn. He recently went back to the hotel and had a conversation with his friend Marc Maron about his life, his depression and his attempted suicide. That conversation is available at Maron's web site WTF at: http://wtfpod.libsyn.com/episode-190-todd-hanson. "Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand." The press conference came as a surprise to humankind, as God rarely intervenes in earthly affairs. As a matter of longstanding policy, He has traditionally left the task of interpreting His message and divine will to clerics, rabbis, priests, imams, and Biblical scholars. Theologians and laymen alike have been given the task of pondering His ineffable mysteries, deciding for themselves what to do as a matter of faith. His decision to manifest on the material plane was motivated by the deep sense of shock, outrage, and sorrow He felt over the Sept. 11 violence carried out in His name, and over its dire potential ramifications around the globe. "I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you'd get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important," said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions.

Let us now praise famous men, three tenant families

Let us now praise famous men

Let us now praise famous men, for mixed chorus (SATB) and instruments

Let us now praise famous men, three tenant families

Let us now praise famous men