False Economy by Allan Beattie makes a lot of interesting points. For example, countries that import food are often just importing water -- it's more practical to import food than to use scarce water to grow it, even if the land is available. And pandas are pointless, while cats have identified a market niche for their services and exploited it to the fullest.

In the penultimate chapter, Beattie writes about being on a path and sticking with it no matter what. I guess we all know that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to make us type more slowly, since typewriters got jammed if people typed fast. I didn't know that it was also designed to make the work "typewriter" easy to type for salesmen who couldn't actually type but used to type that word out to demonstrate the machine.

After the mechanical reasons for the inefficient keyboard became obsolete, it still made sense for everyone to use the same keyboard as long as typists were trained. That is, there was a benefit to being able to train a typist and know that he or she would be able to use all the machines.

Now that we all have our own keyboards which cannot jam, and typists hardly even exist, there's absolutely no reason for us to use an intentionally inefficient keyboard, but we still do. For no reason.

How often do we continue in a path just because we're on that path, whether there's still a good reason for it or not?

Beattie shows how nations and economies set themselves on a path and just stay on it, regardless of the consequences. Maybe we do that as individuals sometimes, too.

I'm working right now on a series of profiles of 15 influential men for an online magazine. I was given the names and numbers of these guys, and am calling them up and writing up their stories.

As I go through this, I'm finding that all of them are Republicans.

I didn't notice this at first, because I wasn't writing about their political views, and didn't ask them. But then I had a little rash of legislators, all of whom were Republicans. Then I had a right-wing radio show host, often compared with Rush Limbaugh. And it became hard to miss. It might just as well be called 15 Influential Right-Wing Men.

Now, it's not that I mind writing about Republicans.  Nor do I have anything against these guys. I've enjoyed talking with them, and they've been interesting guys to research.

But I have a byline at this publication. What if people think that I'm the one who chose them -- this highly biased list? What if people think that I'm -- gasp -- a Republican?

One of these guys made a website of "sexy conservative chicks" featuring cheesecake photos matched up with statements about loving God and the flag and the right to bear arms.

And what does it say about the publication? I write for them regularly. I had never noticed this bias.

I've written about ethnically diverse men for them (it's always men, because they're a men's magazine), and have never noticed any censorship of the articles I've done. It doesn't come across as an extremist paper.

One of the people on my list, a gang violence expert, told me that the two biggest gangs aren't the Crips and the Bloods, but the Democrats and the Republicans. The unquestioning loyalty within them, the hostility between them -- that's the attitude that gang members have.

Something to think about.

I was surprised to learn that half of plastic surgeons surveyed reported that they had done a procedure that was a gift.

I also found a plastic surgeon who is offering holiday specials on various non-invasive skin treatments. Apparently they can tighten up your skin with pulses of light nowadays. I tried to watch the videos so I'd know what I was writing about, but they creeped me out too much.

This week on the HGP (why yes, it is a bit late...) the only cleaning is our attics, which I don't plan to do. But it's time to make sure your table linens are clean, to make your centerpiece, and to write the names of all the dishes you plan to put out onto Post-it Notes or something. Then, a week from today, you set your table and put the notes into the respective serving dishes.

This is one of those things that sounds like too much trouble, but actually saves you trouble. If you don't do this, one of the following things will happen:

• You'll forget to put out those special rolls you worked so hard to make.
• You'll have a pan full of mashed potatoes and no dish to put them in.
• People will keep asking you, "What should I put the cranberry sauce into?" while you're doing delicate things with the desserts.

You should still be doing the gradual shopping, unless you are one of those mad people who likes to do it all on the day after Thanksgiving.

Rehearsal sounded pretty good last night. I have a secret code for discounted tickets, if you plan to be in town for the performance.

La Bella was telling a very humorous story about the black being worn in performance by one of us altos. It made me feel that perhaps I should actually buy some new performance gear, since I haven't done so in... oh, a decade. It's true that your average choir looks pretty shlumpy -- the women, that is. The men generally look fairly sharp, having either sprung for dinner jackets at some point or gone and rented a tux. The women are often  a fairly motley crew.

Not La Bella. She always looks smashing. And I stand next to her.

Late last night -- I had to work after rehearsal, because people have begun to check in with me and make sure that I am going to meet my deadlines, and I had said "I'll do it tonight without fail" -- I got another assignment, involving the idea of giving plastic surgery certificates as gifts to me.

A nice coupon in the stocking for gentleYag, which appears to be hair removal with lasers. Or a gift card for liposuction and Botox, both of which I'm told are popular with men.

I'd gone to lunch with Janalisa, who showed me a picture of a woman -- it's a long story. Anyway, she was showing me how young and cute this woman was.

"She'd not that young," I had to say, "and she'd not as cute as you."

Janalisa assured me that the woman was thirty-two.

I had spent the weekend with a really lovely young woman who was telling me how old she felt, since she'll be twenty-seven in a few months, so I had to point out that thirty-two isn't that young.

Janalisa went on to assure me that, while she cleans up good, if someone spent 24 hours with her, they'd see the horrors of what she really looks like. But I think that there's a point at which charm has to take over. Or virtue. Or something. Even with Botox and gentleYag, time marches on.

Among the assignments I'm working on (and being nudged about) is a story on 15 influential men. Not one of these guys -- speaking here for the ones whose pictures I've found online -- is cute. Yet they're influential. You can't get that by injection, right?

Still, I do have to write about how terrific cosmetic surgery is as a gift, so if you have thoughts on that subject, I'd be delighted to hear them.

We went out to the mill yesterday morning for whole grains and conversation.

The conversation was wide-ranging and lively. What's the best way to deal with students who monopolize the discussion? Should people have to be licensed to have children? What's the fairest way to grade papers? Is it possible to slow down global warming? Was the eugenics movement ever a good idea (this one included Nazism and Child Protective Services court)? Do most people hate their jobs? Why is the divorce rate slowing? If it's not possible to slow global warming, then is it possible to prepare? What's the difference between intelligence and learning, and is it possible to become smarter? Is getting married a good life goal? Just how laughable is the concept of privacy on the internet? Is a PS3 worth the price?

Having dealt with all these important questions, and eaten breakfast, we did a bit of holiday shopping. We also bought beans and cinnamon-pecan pancake mix and seven-grain cereal and flour.

We're going to see whether the mill would send one of their more picturesque boxes to New Zealand for us.

As we waited in line to pay for these things, an old gentleman came up and chatted with #1 daughter. He had no teeth, which made him hard to understand. #1 daughter and #1 son both laughed and smiled with him courteously, as though they had some notion of what he was saying. We think perhaps he was telling them how old he was.

We got up to the counter, which has a window with a grill, like a jail or something, but it's very old so it seems picturesque. The woman who wrapped up our stuff asked where we were from. People here, once we get out into the rural areas, tend to think we're from off. She had a bit of trouble getting our giant bag of foodstuffs back out to us under the grill. It had lots of brass curlicues and things.

On the way home, we discussed whether things ought to be beautiful.

I took the position that, if you're going to build a cell phone tower -- or a bridge or a grill at a window or whatever public item it might be -- then you ought to make a beautiful one. People have to look at it, after all. #1 daughter took a utilitarian position. #2 son did not, as I recall, commit himself, though he joined in with examples.

It was fun. #1 daughter left not long after, and then after a bit #1 son took off for climbing and then work, and it began to rain, and I did a bit of work but also spent some time lolling around reading.

#1 daughter and I have mostly been working. I finished up the Computer Guy's jobs, we did a crash course in Analytics for #1, we worked on the accounting a little bit, and we talked a little about the possibility of her doing some graphics stuff.

We've also had conversation and restaurant meals, and we even went to T.J. Maxx and picked up a couple of things for Christmas stockings.

I hadn't been in a store since before Hallowe'en, so I hadn't realized that it's Christmas in retail. I used to work in retail, so I'd have known if I had thought about it. And, obviously, I wouldn't have gone on a Saturday. It was crowded and merchandise was all over the floor. People stood stupidly in the aisles looking as though their entire brains had gotten so fixated on whether to buy the pink one or the green one that they had simply shut down and were now unable to move. It was like that even at the impulse buy section at the cash wrap.

I'm so fortunate not to work in retail any more.

#1 daughter has been giving me lots of good advice.

This morning we're going out to the grist mill to get breakfast (restaurant meals sure add up, but #2 son and I have been planning this for a couple of weeks now and we're going to do it) and our Thanksgiving baking supplies. Then #1 daughter will head back south.

I'm still here with #1 daughter. #2 son came by suddenly last night for about three minutes on his way to an ultimate frisbee match, and that's about all I have time to write!

I skipped rehearsal last night because #1 daughter came in, and she is asleep right now in this room, so I'm not going to type any more.Great to have her.

I made it to the gym yesterday, and finished my physician owned hospital paper. It was quite eye-opening, I must say. Another of those cases in which it's easy to see one side of the story till you look at the rest of the data -- like the actual text of the law.

Here are some examples of POHs:

If you visit L.A.’s Chinatown, you might see the Pacific Alliance Medical Center – and you might wonder why there’s a statue of Joan of Arc, the patron saint of France, in front of a modern hospital in Chinatown. Built in 1868 to serve the city’s French immigrants, it became a Chinatown landmark in the 20^th century. After 129 years of continuous service, the French Hospital was facing bankruptcy, and ready to close down. The move would have left the Chinatown neighborhood (a neighborhood of about a million people, many living in poverty) with no full-service hospital. In 1989, a group of forty Chinese doctors and businesspeople took a risk and raised enough money to save the hospital. Through the dedicated support of the people of the community and of the brave doctors who took that risk, PAMC is now a five star hospital.

Dunbar Memorial Hospital in Detroit was founded in 1918 by African-American doctors frustrated by the fact that so few Detroit hospitals allowed African-Americans. In the entire city, only one hospital accepted African-American patients, and that hospital had only 25 beds. African-Americans died at twice the rate of white residents of Detroit at that time, and the presence of Dunbar Memorial could spell the difference between life and death. Dunbar Memorial is now a museum.

St. Joseph’s Medical Center was Houston’s first hospital, built at the end of the 19^th century. At the turn of this century, failing financially after 122 years in business, it was put up for sale. Analysts feared that the hospital, the main source of health care for the poor of Houston, would only be of interest to buyers who wanted downtown property on the cheap, and that its days of service as a hospital were over.  St. Joseph’s was rescued by its doctors. The only downtown Houston hospital, St. Joseph’s covers everything from mental health care to cardiac surgery, and has delivered one third of all the babies born in Houston.

True, these are just a few examples, but there are only a couple hundred POHs in the country, and there are so many examples like these. Doctors have opened hospitals because they want to give good care and feel frustrated with the way the hospitals they work at are administered.

Doctor owners at POHs typically own about 3% of the hospital, and those hospitals often lose money. Sometimes they're profitable, though. The average is a 13% profit. In my field, a 25% profit is considered good. So we're not usually talking about people getting rich -- particularly since we're so often talking about surgeons. They're already rich. The difference to their incomes isn't significant, and those who've been asked have expressed how offended they are by the suggestion that they'd ignore the good of their patients for the sake of a few extra dollars.

The law itself is bizarre, too.This may be the result of its being the work of a committee.

I also taught class, wrote blogs, and went to choir and bells. Today is an all writing day, with rehearsal this evening.

Yesterday began with a nice walk. Then I had a whole day -- nearly uninterrupted -- of writing. I really enjoyed it.

I had a couple of exciting moments. First, there was the website I was sent to edit which turned out to be entirely stolen. Yep, the client had snitched whole paragraphs of content from a variety of competitors. Fortunately it's agency work, so I don't have to deal with the client directly, but I'm making a mental note not to trust those guys with my money.

The question is unlikely to arise, I know. Right now, I'm waiting for payments to come in so I can pay #2 son's tuition. I don't expect to need a financial advisor any time soon.

The next bit of excitement was a contact through my website from a major educational product company. I had to restrain myself from gushing about how I used to sell their stuff! That exclamation point is to show how I would have gushed, not to emphasize my restraint. I totally can fix their web site, too, and I really hope they choose me.

I did also have a call from another agency yesterday, and we got as far as "How do we proceed now?" and "You'll be hearing from me soon." And then this morning I had a request to interview from a new agency that describes itself as "a disruptive force." I think I'd quite like to work for a disruptive force.

But perhaps the most exciting bit was one of the topics I wrote about. Really, I like all the topics I was writing about. I wrote someone a very nice website yesterday, and I love the process of coming up with ways to say what they want to say that really fit their goals, and the character of their business, and their target audience. It's a great pleasure.

But I'm working right now on 2500 words about a political issue, something I don't get to do very often, and it turns out to be very interesting.

It's about physician-owned hospitals, or POHs. Some of the POHs have come about because inner-city hospitals were being torn down by cash-strapped cities, so the doctors who worked there banded together to save the hospital. You could make a movie out of that. Some have been built by doctors who were frustrated with the level of care they were able to give at corporate-owned hospitals, and making their own hospitals allowed them to provide the kind of health care they thought their patients deserved.

Some, no doubt, were built by groups of doctors who felt that they could make more money if they got not only their fees, but also some of the profits of the hospital itself. And it it this capitalist attitude that has -- perhaps -- led to a bill which is designed to run PHOs out of business.

There are two main arguments against PHOs. The first is that the level of care they provide is inadequate, that they are out to make a quick buck and therefore they push expensive procedures onto patients who don't need them, that they put profits first, etc.

Consumer Reports, an organization I trust,  just brought out a report ranking hospitals throughout the U.S. In 19 states, the top-ranked hospital is a POH. In my state, the top two are PHOs, and four of the top seven are. Since there are only about 225 PHOs in the nation, this is not the kind of result you'd expect. The PHO in our capital city, which doesn't even have a million residents, is not just #1 in the state, but is ranked in the top 5% of the nation by Health Grades, an independent organization.

And, since much of this first argument is about for-profit vs. nonprofit hospitals, it's worth noting that relatively few hospitals nowadays are nonprofits. We have some charity hospitals in our state, run by religious organizations, but most belong to corporate chains. Even many of our city hospitals are managed by corporate chains on a for-profit basis. In Sacramento, a city which looked into this question, 95% of the hospital beds belong to six corporations. So the PHOs aren't in competition with government hospitals.

That, however, is the second concern. PHOs, the story goes, will cherry-pick (or skim the cream -- pick your favorite metaphor) the healthier, wealthier patients, leaving the charity cases and the Medicare patients for the public hospitals. This is of course the same argument we've heard for years about public vs. private schools.

The Congressional Budget Office, however, was quite frank about their thinking on this. In areas with PHOs, they noticed, it was more common for people to have orthopedic and cardiac surgery. By closing down PHOs, forbidding their expansion, or limiting their ability to accept Medicare, they hope to avoid paying for such expensive treatments for Medicare patients. That is the source of the savings they're predicting: Medicare patients won't get expensive procedures.

I don't see why they didn't just say that they'll no longer pay for cardiac and orthopedic surgery (it's a long list, actually, but those were the examples in the letter) for Medicare patients. Possibly they felt that such a law might make them look heartless.

It's interesting, though.