Yeah, I know, I haven’t written/posted/whinged/bitched/celebrated/mourned much of anything (”much of anything”? Nothing at all is more like it) for what? Six weeks now? Sorry. I’m wondering how everyone’s summer has progressed without me - it must be terrifying. Have you all been sitting at your computers, browser firmly entrenched at daveakins.com, repeatedly mashing the F5 key in hopes of something, anything, to brighten your progressively dimming lives?

Somehow I doubt it.

In all honesty I usually just post when I 1) find something on the web of interest, 2) go somewhere, do something, and take pictures of the place and the doing, or 3) the rare occasion arises whereby something happens in my life that for one reason or another I think is a good idea to share with everyone. And little of any of those things have taken place lately.

I’m also spending an inordinate amount of time either at the driving range or watching The Golf Channel, so much so that my dreams of scantilly clad Brazilian models and Eastern European tennis players are being replaced with slow-motion shots of Dave Pelz hitting a lob wedge off a downhill, hardpan lie over water onto a severely sloping green and then criticizing me for not being able to grasp the utter simplicity of the execution.

Anyway, I did actually run into an interesting review on Michael Moore’s new film “Sicko” and while the criticisms are unsurprising for a film that undoubtedly will prove divisive…

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that’s already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore’s heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word “sexy!” in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton’s plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)

… I will admit to being more than a little surprised at the author of this one.

Football season starts soon. I am excited. More on that soon.

Unless of course Paula Creamer kidnaps me and makes me her caddie.