By Evan Falchuk

What I read (or wrote) this weekend:

1. CONSPIRACY! Can’t figure out why health care reform isn’t as popular as you think it should be?  Look for the mysterious forces aligning against it.  Or something like that.

2. NEUROSURGERY. Top Red Sox prospect, Ryan Westmoreland, needs serious brain surgery.  He is afflicted with the same kind of problem that struck my brother, Brad Falchuk, co-creator of Glee. I hope Westmoreland’s doctors are as skilled as those who treated my brother.

3. HEALTH CARE FOR ARTISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND WRITERS. Nancy Pelosi says,

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

She’s running out of time, but give her credit, she’s doing her best to come up with brand new rationales for whatever reform plan she’s talking about.

4.  ONLY ONE MORE WEEK? The White House says the (some) health care reform plan will be “the law of the land” by this time next week.  Whatever you think of whatever it will be, there is good news for health care bloggers:

“[O]nce it passes, we’re happy to have the 2010 elections be about the achievement of health care reform.  That’s a debate I think we’re obviously comfortable having.”

5.  DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME. Not awesome.

By Evan Falchuk

To the right of these words you see three icons – one for a service called “digg,” one for Facebook, and one for another called “reddit.”  At the bottom of the post, you can see an icon for “buzz.”

If you don’t know, I wanted to give you a quick explanation of what those are there for and how they work.

DIGG AND REDDIT. Digg and reddit are similar services.  They are ways that people can tell other people that they found something interesting and worth reading.  To use them, all you need to do is set up an account on digg and reddit. Then you can browse around and find out what are the most popular, most controversial, or newest stories or blog posts that people around are talking about.

It takes about a minute to set up you account, and you’ll be very glad you did it.  I go to both sites all the time and find loads of interesting stuff.

Many media people use these services to source stories – I often find that something I see on TV or in a newspaper as “news” is something I read about through digg or reddit many days beforehand.  That’s cool.

I have those links on each of my blog posts so you can let other people know about anything I might write that is interesting.  The number on the digg icon tells you how many people have shared the post on digg.  The number on the reddit icon is a combination of how many people posted it and how many people liked or disliked it.  If you like it you can click the “up” arrow and if you thought it sucked, you can click the “down” arrow.

So PLEASE, if you like something I wrote, click on digg or reddit and let other people know.

BUZZ. This is sort of like Google’s version of digg, although it’s more like a combination of digg and twitter.  If you have a Buzz account, you’ll share whatever you click on with your network of followers.  It’s kind of an emerging network, but it’s Google, so I feel like I have to have it on the blog or someone will come to my house at night and make me put it on there.  Just kidding.  Sort of.

FACEBOOK. If you click there, it will open a new window, and it will automatically help you post what you’ve read here to your Facebook account.  Like the digg icon, the number there tells you how many people have shared the story on Facebook using that icon.  It doesn’t count if you just copy and paste the url, but I’m fine either way!

Thank you very much to all of my readers, it’s a thrill to me to have so many of you here every day.

Please help spread the word about my blog by clicking on those icons whenever you read something you like.

Thank you again!

By Evan Falchuk

Yesterday, I was sitting on the floor about two feet away from where I am now.  I was holding our wonderful chocolate lab, Hooper, in my arms as he died.

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By Evan Falchuk

One late afternoon, some summers ago, I was at the beach.

I was with our dog, a Labrador retreiver.  He was playing fetch with a stick I was throwing into the ocean.  Every time I threw it, he darted into the ocean to find it.  Swimming through the waves, he would get the stick and carry it back proudly to shore.  He would drop it in front of me, shake off some of the water soaking his coat, and stare at me, heaving, begging me to throw it in again.

We did this for a while, and it was always the same.  He was joyous.  Eventually I had to stop, even though I loved seeing him that way.  He would have kept doing it until he drowned.

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By Evan Falchuk

Some good links from around the web:

1.  Dr. Bob Centor wants to Keep Politics Out of Medical Decision-Making.  I agree – but is the cat already out of the bag?

2.  The Happy Hospitalists links to someone selling stuffed animals shaped like the H1N1 virus.  They look like pink tribbles.

3.  Mark Boles continues to insist that in marketing – like in any line of work – you absolutely must know your customer.

4.  A colleague, who is a health care media expert, asked me if I could explain the recent poll showing a sharp rise in consumer confidence in health care in October.  Looking at the details of the poll, which seemed to give contradictory answers, I told him I couldn’t explain it either.  Dan Drezner makes a similar observation about polling on foreign policy.

5.  David Harlow at HealthBlawg talks about how ten years after the landmark report that showed 98,000 Americans dying each year from medical errors, things haven’t gotten much better.  Bonus points to David for working in a reference to the band Ten Years After.

6.  And, on a personal note, here’s an article about my mother’s work as the President of Hadassah – Madoff: One Year Later.  And here’s one about my brother, co-creator of Fox’s Glee, who signed a new deal with 20th TV.

UPDATE: Welcome, Wired readers.

For those who are here from other sources, check out Curtis Silver’s interview with my brother (and Best Doctors success story) about his show Glee. Curtis previously interviewed me for his terrific blog, Geek Dad.

By Evan Falchuk

For my birthday, my mother gave me a reprint of the front page of the New York Times from November 19, 1969.  In large print the banner headline screams: “2 ASTRONAUTS LAND ON THE MOON.”

Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed early that morning, east coast time, and spent the rest of the day and a few hours of the next on the lunar surface.  It was an exciting day.

But then it struck me.

If on this November 19, 40 years later, two astronauts were to land on the moon, the headline in the New York Times would be just as big, and scream just as loudly.

Of all the things you could tell someone in 1969 about the world of 2009, I bet there are few things thing they would find impossible to believe.  One of them would be that the astronauts of Apollo 12 were some of the last people to walk on the moon.

How did this happen?

There are lots and lots of reasons.  Vietnam, Watergate, the oil shocks and recession, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, Iraq, OJ, 9/11, Iraq again, and on and on.  There were so many things that seemed much more important than sending people to the moon.  And before you know it, it’s been almost 40 years since anyone’s been there.  In fact, it’s been 37 years since anyone has even left low earth orbit.

There’s a lesson I take from this, on my birthday.

It is the commonest of human traits to believe there will always be time.

There will always be time to take a chance and do something you’ve always dreamed of doing.  There will always be time to tell someone you love them, repair a broken relationship, end a troubled one.  There will always be time to read with your child, forgive someone for something they’ve done, make a new friend.

Just not today.  No, today I am busy, and distracted with other important things.  I’ll get to what’s really important, once I finish with this.  It won’t take long.

But time moves on.

The photographs released recently of the Apollo 12 landing site should serve as a monument.  A testament to the unfinished business of life, the unrealized dreams, and should compel us to reach for what we really long to achieve.

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
Somewhere out of a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights…